The evolving wine business required the people who made the plonk and the farmers who sold their grapes to the people who made the plonk to fundamentally rethink what they were doing. They would have to adopt modern techniques of viticulture and winemaking to survive.

They would have to give more thought to quality and less to quantity. They would no longer have a monopoly on the local market. They would have to appeal to wine drinkers around the world.

Those changes, as the business types like to say, had a tremendous upside: a marked expansion of the market, with the possibility of undreamed-of profits and fame.

But it had a downside, too, because it came with the crucial but difficult decision that winemakers and restaurateurs face around the world: Do we give the people what they think they want? Or do we give them something that we like and can make well?

In other words, do winemakers try to capitalize on what’s already popular and middle-of-the-road, or do they offer something distinctive and original, with a basis in local history?

The answers to these questions are playing out daily in Campania and Sicily, Languedoc and the Jura, and almost everywhere in Spain and Portugal. It is the privilege and pleasure of the wine panel to look in periodically on these developing regions, to gauge how the evolution is going. But it’s not always easy to come up with a definitive answer.

Such is the case with Navarre, a historic region in northern Spain, just south of the city of Pamplona and a little northeast of Rioja.

Rioja has long overshadowed its neighbor. For years Navarre was known mostly for its rosados, or rosés, and after the French phylloxera crisis of the 19th century a fair amount of Navarre wine was sold in France until its vineyards had been replanted. By then, phylloxera had struck Navarre, too.

In the last 20 years, growth in Navarre has been swift, propelled by improved research and technology. Its wines, now primarily red, have been gaining a reputation for quality.

The panel tasted 25 Navarre reds from vintages ranging from 1999 to 2005 and priced from $6 to $45. For the tasting Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Roger Kugler, general manager of Suba, a Spanish restaurant on the Lower East Side, and Rafael Mateo, managing partner of Ostia, a new tapas lounge in Greenwich Village.

The tasting revealed a region in transition but without a clear destination. Unlike other reborn regions, Navarre lacks both industry leaders to set examples — like the Mastroberardinos of Campania in southern Italy and the Palacios family of Bierzo in Spain — and distinctive indigenous grapes to carve out identities.

Bierzo has its exotic mencía grape, and Campania its aglianico. But Navarre’s production was built on garnacha, or grenache as it is known in French. Garnacha can be wonderful in the right circumstances, as in Priorat and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but less interesting if yields are not controlled and the soils and climate are not right.

In Navarre growers have greatly increased plantings of tempranillo, the leading grape of Rioja, and have added considerable amounts of cabernet sauvignon and merlot, as well as a little graciano, a spicy, unusual grape found occasionally in Rioja and Navarre. Often the grapes are blended together, not just tempranillo and garnacha, as in Rioja, but cabernet and merlot as well.

We found many enjoyable wines that we would not hesitate to drink. While some wines tasted of hot weather — baked fruit — the good ones balanced the fruit with acidity and so were lively and would be particularly good with grilled meats.

Most were good values, with 7 of our Top 10 wines under $20. But few of these wines were distinctive. Generic would not be too strong a word.

Mr. Mateo called most of the bottles “mass-production wines” and expressed disappointment that our selection did not include some of the earthier, funkier bottles that he has in his restaurant. It was not for lack of trying. We bought what we could find in retail shops and on the Internet.

Sometimes the results of modern blending are promising, as in the case of our No. 2 wine, the 2000 Viña Sardasol reserve from Virgen Blanca, which is 50 percent tempranillo, 30 percent cabernet and 20 percent merlot.

Artazu, by the way, is one of many new wineries to spring up in the last year. It was established in 2000 by Artadi, a Rioja producer.

This wine had a lot of jammy fruit, but also enough acidity to give it shape, which kept it lively and refreshing. We gave it the same score as our No. 1 wine, the 2002 Santa Cruz de Artazu, but the Artazu, made solely from garnacha, had an earthy elegance that gave it the edge.

Our No. 3 wine, the 2000 crianza from Javier Asensio, is made up of 50 percent cabernet, 30 percent merlot and 20 percent tempranillo. It had a surprising juiciness that reminded me of a barbera. The 2001 Arteaga crianza, our best value, was deliciously spicy and fruity, and only $13.50.

I want to single out two other wines. According to its label the 2003 Azul from Guelbenzu, a refreshing, aromatic bottle, is from Ribera del Queiles rather than Navarre. It was actually made in Navarre, but for bureaucratic reasons carries the name of a small neighboring appellation.

The 2001 Viñedo No. 9 from Señorio de Sarría is a juicy wine made from cabernet sauvignon. After the tasting Mr. Mateo said he greatly preferred another Señorio de Sarría wine, Viñedo No. 7, made from graciano. It certainly is a more distinctive wine.

Despite the various combinations of grapes, we didn’t find a lot of variety in the wines we had on hand. The profile was narrow, the range small.

For now, at least, the bottom line on Navarre reds is good value, good wines for a barbecue, but little excitement.

March 21, 2007
Taking Wine Seriously Is a Prerequisite
By FRANK BRUNI

IS Varietal an important restaurant, worthy of your rapt attention and utmost respect? Can’t you tell?

Behold its colors — or lack of them. It’s a minimalist wonderland of white and more white, as if only a canvas this pristine could do justice to the kitchen’s brushstrokes.

Learn its elevated argot. What servers promote at the start of dinner isn’t just Champagne. It’s “grower Champagne,” identified that way on a special matte card, which conveys the odd impression that sparkling wine is a crop, like soybeans. The phrase in fact refers to small producers making wines from their own grapes, and if you read the text accompanying the selection of a half dozen glasses, you’ll learn that.

You won’t get a cheat sheet for the dessert menu, a province of aggressive experimentation and eccentric, highfalutin name tags. (“Celery root abstract,” anyone?)

A dessert called “wolfberry” has, among its listed ingredients, ketjap manis, a syrupy Indonesian condiment with salty as well as sweet notes. A dessert called “chocolate gel” includes mastic, the resin of the mastic tree, an evergreen related to the pistachio tree.

Varietal isn’t just a restaurant. It’s an epicurean Advanced Placement exam, with a dollop of Oscar acceptance speech. In a bottom corner of the menu is a list of nearly a dozen farms, preceded by the declaration that the restaurant “would like to thank the following local suppliers.” And, of course, the Academy.

At its best Varietal is also a realm of alluring, rewarding surprises where the committed culinary adventurer can find dishes that aren’t just slightly altered carbon copies of what’s on plates everywhere else.

I’d bet a lot of money that tuna tartare will never gain a foothold here. I’d bet my life that a molten chocolate cake will never get within 100 feet of Jordan Kahn, the young, gonzo pastry chef, recipient of the kind of intense attention that anyone pressing Campari, rooibos and beets into the service of a “meditation in purple” predictably attracts.

But like some other restaurants in the grip of a self-consciousness this profound, Varietal can become so entranced with the unusual ingredients it’s deploying, the unconventional ideas it’s hatching and the uncommon pose it’s striking that it seems not to pause and ponder the off-kilter or underwhelming results.

The lineup of deployers and hatchers is a serious one. Although Mr. Kahn is just 23, he has already worked at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley and Alinea in Chicago. The restaurant’s executive chef, Ed Witt, has worked at Daniel and, most recently, Il Buco.

They’ve been united at Varietal by its owner, Greggory J. Hockenberry, who not only brings a passion for wine to the picture but also makes that passion the focal point, as the name of the restaurant and that special card of “grower Champagne” make clear.

There are plenty of other clues. Upside-down wineglasses hang from the center of the sleek dining room’s ceiling, where a few photographs of glistening grapes adorn mostly blank walls. Scores of wines are available by the glass, and three-wine tasting flights permit comparisons of Spanish reds or chardonnays from different countries.

A large lounge in front and a long bar nearby provide comfortable perches for tasting expeditions, which can be complemented with small plates — fingerling potatoes with paddlefish caviar; lamb terrine with lotus crisps — from a special menu. And those expeditions are facilitated by servers who know the inventory and how to talk about it.

But while drinking at Varietal is a delight, eating is a more complicated proposition — exciting if you hit the best dishes, exasperating if you don’t.

One of my favorite appetizers was a sort of venison carpaccio with a hot blast of Sichuan peppercorns and a cool, tangy sheep’s milk yogurt that served as an ideal counterpoint. Another was a dual treatment of sea scallops, some uncooked and studded with pomegranate seeds, some coated with cumin, seared and placed on top of a pumpkin purée.

While submitting seafood to contrasting preparations isn’t all that common around town, plumbing the multiple personalities of pork is. In this regard Varietal played the conformist, presenting roasted loin with braised belly, albeit with a nonconformist twist. Tobacco was used in the braising, imparting a quality for which the adjective smoky is not only inevitable but apt.

I liked that pork dish. And I loved a grilled beef tenderloin that appeared on a six-course tasting menu, reasonably priced at $75. Although tenderloin isn’t the most flavorful cut, it didn’t need to be, because it had been marinated in soy sauce and seasoned with sesame oil, minced Thai chili peppers and diced pear. A lot of heat, a little sweetness, a nutty overlay — this dish had it all.

Mr. Witt is fond of rounding out a dish with an extra, unexpected element or two, like the white chocolate and parsnip purée that accompanied another beef entree. But some dishes don’t wind up tasting as interesting as they sound.

For one appetizer, he bathed prawns in a chamomile consommé with more alliteration than appeal. Another appetizer rode invention to an unsavory destination. What happens when you combine beets, agrumato oil (a mingling of lemon and olive) and mullet bottarga? If the results at Varietal were any indication, you get a flavor that brings to mind laundry detergent.

At times it seemed that Varietal’s kitchen lavished so much attention on the swishes just inside the perimeter of a plate that it neglected the main player in the center. While I was tickled by a phalanx of candied walnuts alongside a roasted fillet of wild striped bass, I would have traded it for a more carefully cooked, moister piece of fish.

And then there are those desserts, which don’t so much eschew convention as pummel and shatter it — literally, and often pointlessly. None of Mr. Kahn’s creations resemble, say, a tidy layered cake or a round little tart. Some of them look like what would happen if you took a mallet to a tidy layered cake or a round little tart and let the shards and crumbs scatter where they may. Jackson Pollock would have been pleased.

Mr. Kahn makes ice cream infused with toasted cherry wood chips. He pairs an eggplant purée, which includes fish sauce and Thai chili, with grape-flavored chips of what look like glass. He makes mushroom caramels. The caramel registers right away, but the mushroom flavor sticks around much longer.

It will definitely get your attention. Your affection is another matter.

Varietal

*

138 West 25th Street; (212) 633-1800.

ATMOSPHERE A front lounge and back dining room united by a sleek, white, minimalist look.

SOUND LEVEL Moderate.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Raw and cumin-seared scallops; venison with Sichuan peppercorns and yogurt; roasted pork loin with braised belly; beef tenderloin with sesame oil; wolfberry dessert.

WINE LIST A serious, imaginative and varied selection, with many affordably priced bottles; scores of wines by the glass, priced less economically; and three-wine tasting flights served with name tags attached to each glass.

PRICE RANGE Appetizers, $12 to $18. Entrees, $24 to $36. Desserts, $12 to $14. Six-course tasting menu, $75. Four-course dessert tasting, $35.

HOURS Dinner from 5:30 to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday; small plates in lounge from 5 to 11 p.m. Sunday, beginning April 1.

RESERVATIONS For prime dinner times, call at least two weeks in advance.

CREDIT CARDS All major cards.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance, restaurant and accessible restroom all on street level.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN:

(None) Poor to satisfactory

* Good

** Very good

*** Excellent

**** Extraordinary

Ratings reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.