Audacity, thy name is Cocina de Vanguardia. I have never dined at the Spanish temples of “vanguard cuisine,” but I’ve long been curious as to how well this untraditional food, fomented as much in the lab as in the kitchen, pairs with wine. My opportunity to find out arrived last Thursday at a tapas blowout at Guastavino’s, followed by a benefit dinner for the James Beard Foundation. The guests of honor were the chefs of the chefs of three top Spanish vanguard restaurants: El Buli, Restaurante Arzak, and Restaurante Martin Berasategui. The tapas were prepared by other Spanish chefs of the vanguard.

I loved “Oil Soba ‘In Situ,'”an intense Japanese broth into which chef Paco Roncero squeezed a ribbon of creamycolored soba butter. But I’d not have guessed the dish would have been winefriendly until its salty richness was cut with the fresh, pear-inflected Castillo de Monjardin Chardonnay 2005 from a high-elevation vineyard in Navarra.

The red wine poured with the tapas was the Bodegas Faustino I Gran Riserva 1996, an old-fashioned Rioja. Decades ago, when I was new to wine, I regularly bought a humbler version of Faustino for about $3 a bottle.The Gran Reserva’s black, frosted glass bottle seems much cooler than the Mateus ceramic crock that my friends then doted on. Smelling woody from long barrel aging, the staid Gran Reserva percolated with delicate yet persistent dried cherry and smoke flavors. I worried that the wine would be too rear-guard to mix with Cocina de Vanguardia, but it didn’t back off from Alberto Chicote’s “frothy almond and coconut soup with ikura and fried baby squid.”

I walked from Guastavino’s to Nicole’s, the sparely designed café in the basement of the Nicole Farhi boutique on East 60th Street. Peter Gago, the head winemaker of Penfolds — the bedrock of Australian winedom — was to be interviewed by the New York novelist and wine writer Jay McInerney. Before the program began, Mr. Gago handed me a glass of his top-of-the-line chardonnay, Bin 144 Yattarna 2003. “Yattarna is an indigenous word meaning ‘little by little,’ which is how we’ve been developing this wine over the years,” he said.”I don’t even know what region, let alone what vineyard, the batches are from. The bottles are not unwrapped until we’ve made our choices.Bin 144 actually represents the number of blending trials that have gone into the Yattarna’s development.”

For anyone lulled into assuming that Australia’s chardonnays are irremediably fleshy and tropical-fruited, Yattarna is revelatory. It is tightly focused, humming at its core with minerality. Give this 2003 Yattarna at least another five years for it open out to full glory. In fact, it might easily be mistaken for a Puligny-Montrachet from the other side of the world, just as Monjardin from Navarra could easily be mistaken for an Australian chardonnay. It’s become a topsy-turvy wine world out there.

With seemingly endless new releases pouring out of Australia, it’s easy to neglect old standards like Penfolds, and I was reminded of how impressive the best of them can be.The brand was once for the budget minded: Mr. Gago served a 30-year-old Koonunga Hill Selected Bin Claret that he said was priced upon release at $1 a bottle. Not meant for long aging, it should have been over the hill. But this blend of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz was like silk in the mouth.

“Australia is the driest continent, so we don’t have a problem ripening our grapes,”he said.The problem is that extreme ripeness can lead to untamed opulence in Australian wines that can outlast its welcome over the course of a meal. Better to choose a ripe yet linear wine, like Penfold’s Kalimna Bin 28 Cabernet-Shiraz 2002 ($28). Ditto for the St. Henri Shiraz 2002 ($38.95). Going against the usual practice of aging premium red wines in small, new oak barrels, the shiraz remains in very large and old oak vats.That puts mixed berry fruit in the forefront of St. Henri and keeps the wine pleasingly agile yet textured.

Before last week, I had tasted Australia’s most honored wine, Penfolds Grange, only once. That was around 1980, and I still remember the impact of its dark amplitude. No wine I’d ever tasted had such broad shoulders of flavor. Unlike St. Henri, Grange is fermented and aged in new oak barrels. And, unlike nearly every other great wine, it is sourced not from a single vineyard, but from each vintage’s best batches, no matter the source. Toward the end of the evening at Nicole’s, a few bottles of Grange 2001 ($240) were opened. One sip of that wine took me back to my long-ago first sip. Same dark amplitude, same broad shoulders.Your choice of a great wine and mine may differ. But we can certainly agree that no wine can be great unless it remains front and center in memory — never mind how many years go by.