Joanna Simon on the fascinating history of spaghetti con la bottarga di muggine—and the best wines to pair with the Italian dish.
Candid as ever, the great diarist Samuel Pepys begins his entry of June 6, 1661: “My head hath aked all night and all this morning with my last night’s debauch.” The entry for the previous day reveals that the evening ended outside on the roof leads at home with his friend and fellow politician Sir W. Penn (Admiral Sir William Penn, father of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania) “talking and singing and drinking great draughts of Clarret and eating botargo and bread and butter til 12 at night, it being moonshine. And so to bed – very near fuddled.”
No need to split hairs over whether he was “near” or rather closer to being completely fuddled, the problem for me is his choice of wine, claret, with bottarga, salt-cured, pressed, air-dried fish roe with an intensely umami, saline flavour—the fish world’s answer to Parmigiano Reggiano.
Clearly, in 17th century London Pepys didn’t have even a tiny fraction of the variety of wines we have now and, clearly, everyone should always drink what gives them pleasure (taking care as necessary not to inflict it on unwilling others), but red Bordeaux is something I could never get behind, even if, as is likely, it was a paler, thinner, sharper red wine than it is today. (That said, less than two years later Pepys notes, April 10, 1663, that he “drank a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan [Haut-Brion] which hath a good and most perticular taste that I never met with.”)
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Sardinia’s gold
We don’t know whether the bottarga Pepys and Penn ate was made from grey mullet (muggine) or bluefin tuna (tonno), but bottarga di muggine, which is more delicate and refined, but still intense in flavor, has always been the most traded and, at least today, most prized. If it was grey mullet, we can’t know for sure that it came from Sardinia, but the Italian island, where it is often referred to as “Sardinia’s gold,” is the preeminent producing region, although, so far, efforts to secure EU recognition in the form of PDO or IGP status, especially for the Cabras lagoon on the west coast, have been unsuccessful. Indeed, it is Greece that has the only Protected Designation of Origin for bottarga, granted 30 years ago for its grey mullet bottarga Avgotaracho Messolonghiou from Messolonghi.
One thing we do know is that bottarga goes back a very long way, although quite how far is, perhaps appropriately, a grey area. Grey mullet was unquestionably one of the most important fish of Ancient Egypt, but claims that there is a 10th century BC Egyptian-tomb wall painting specifically showing bottarga being prepared appears to be a myth. There are, though, wall paintings showing fish being caught, cured, gutted and dried, for example in the Tomb of Puyemre (TT39), 1473–1458 BC (The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Collection of Facsimiles of Egyptian Wall Paintings can be downloaded free; take a look at page 80), and it’s far more likely that every possible part of the fish was used than that the roes were simply discarded. Mullet-roe remains and bones have also been found in settlement excavations.
The Phoenicians, the great seafarers and master traders of the Mediterranean, brought the bottarga technique to Sardinia and spread it through the Mediterranean, including coastal Carthage (Tunisia) and Provence (where it’s called poutargue). In time it reached the length of the Silk Road to the Far East. Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all have their own versions of bottarga.
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The only thing that has really changed in the process over the millennia is the drying, which is the final stage after the roe pouch has first been carefully extracted to avoid piercing the membrane, washed, massaged to eliminate any air, cured in sea salt (the time varies, but very roughly one to three weeks), washed again and pressed. Originally, the pressed roes were dried in the sun. By the 15th century in Italy, Martino da Como (the culinary guru of the time, also known as Martino de Rossi and Maestro Martino) describes smoking the roes to dry them (Liber de Arte Coquinaria, 1465). Today, they are dried, like grapes for Amarone, in dedicated, well-ventilated rooms, laid out and turned occasionally on wooden trays, or, less often, hung from the ceiling.
We also know something of the etymology. Bottarga or botargo (butàriga in Sardinian) is believed to be derived from the Arab word butarkhah, which in turn came from the Byzantine Greek oiotárikhon “‘egg pickle”), first mentioned by the 11th-century scholar and physician Simeon Seth whose pithy advice was to avoid it totally. The first mention of it in Italian, as botarghe, is in the late 15th century in a manuscript based on the first printed cookbook, Bartolomeo Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine (1474), in which it appears in Latin as ova tarycha.
Samuel Pepys ate his botargo with bread and butter and it is still enjoyed like that in Sardinia, but the most emblematic and only marginally more complex way of presenting it is as spaghetti con la bottarga di muggine, This can be as simple as spaghetti tossed with extra virgin olive oil and freshly grated or shaved bottarga, or, and I recommend this, the olive oil can be warmed gently with crushed garlic, red pepper flakes, and lemon zest. Bottarga should never be heated and it’s easier to remove the fine papery membrane and to grate, shave or slice it if it is chilled. (I strongly advise against buying ready-grated bottarga; it has the same relationship to the original as ready-grated Parmesan to a block.)
The best wines to pair with spaghetti con la bottarga di muggine
If not red Bordeaux, which wine? The starting point, facile as it sounds, is crisp, dry white. Bottarga needs a wine with acidity to cut the salty, umami intensity. Noticeable oak doesn’t suit it, nor does tannin, which rules out most reds (I would go for Etna Rosso if you want a red). Buttery richness and overt fruitiness don’t work either, whatever the colour of the wine, but citrus-leaning fruit and associated acidity are complementary, as are white wines in which marked acidity is matched by a degree of oiliness—the oiliness standing foursquare with the bottarga’s dense, umami richness. Minerality also works in a wine’s favour, all of which takes us to, among other grape varieties, Vermentino— conveniently Sardinia’s signature white variety.
Simple Vermentino di Sardegna is perfectly possible, but it tends to be out-flavored and outclassed, so it is worth going for a DOCG Vermentina di Gallura, especially a superiore, which will be made from lower yields: to name just one, Selle e Mosca Monteoro. Vermentino from other coastal regions, such as Liguria and Tuscany, are also options, as are the mineral, acid-retaining whites from Campania, notably Greco di Tufo and Fiano di Avellino. I would be happy with either one from Feudo di San Gregorio.
Before leaving Sardinia, I should mention a Sardinian wine that has been recommended to me by a Sardinian as a pairing: Vernaccia di Oristano, a wine aged under flor in an oxidative style. I haven’t been able to try it—it’s rare—but I pass it on as it sounds interesting and I like Manzanilla Sherry as an alternative kind of pairing with bottarga di muggine when eaten in very thin slices with a drizzle of oil and a squeeze of lemon as an appetizer.
Returning to dry whites, another that has the requisite acidity, minerality, and intensity is Santorini Assyrtiko, especially wines with the grip and complexity of Assyrtiko by Gaia and Gaia Thalassitis. Assyrtiko from mainland Greece isn’t usually as successful, the bottarga emphasising its floral notes and softer side.
After what I have said about crisp, dry whites and acidity, another wine that might seem a bit of an outlier, like Manzanilla, is Provence rosé, but those designed for gastronomy and for ageing, not Provence’s mass of poolside rosés. Obvious examples are the three estate wines of Château d’Esclans (Château d’Esclans itself, Les Clans, and Garrus), preferably with a few years’ age, and Château Galoupet, all of which I can vouch for.
Finally, there are orange wines, which have the feeling of substance on the palate to match bottarga, but which need to be chosen with care to avoid grippy tannins and aromatic styles.
