gratitude card by mb hanrahan
“Pay attention. Find the blessing. It’s passing. Everything is a gift, and nothing lasts,” writes Erin Geesaman Rabke. While it feels like a dark shadow looms overhead, as Thanksgiving Day in the US draws to a close, many of us are full to the brim with food and wine and good times with friends and family. Continue reading
Celebrating 30 Years of Carménère’s Rediscovery at Chile’s Viña Carmen
Celebrating 30 Years of Carménère’s Rediscovery at Chile’s Viña Carmen
Honrado Winery in Alentejo Portugal
On the weekend of São Martinho Day, traditional Portuguese musicians sang as we descended into the cellar at Honrado located in Vila de Frades “the Capital of Vinho de Talha” in the county of Vidigueira, Beja District, Alentejo, Portugal. With a small crowd, we waited for the main event: the tapping of the Talhas. Pronounced talhas, the large clay pots almost magically turn grapes into wine in the brief months following that year’s harvest. It’s a sacred ceremony, a moment of truth — is the wine good?– and a festive time for friends and family to gather.
Tapping a Talha at Honrado
We’d already attended several parties, tastings, and the huge World Amphora Day event at Rocim which includes seminars and wines from around the world. So at Honrado we weren’t seeing our first talha tapped by any means. But each time it’s special, and worthy of watching. We saw young and old, women and children, all participating in this timeless ritual where the wine is first sipped as we slipped our small glass drinking jars under the slowly flowing tap to taste for ourselves the fruits of this year’s labor.
We’d seen and tasted fresh tapped wine from talha at several venues over the weekend, but out of all the places I visited during my 10 day stay in Portugal last fall, it was this cellar that had the biggest impact, and is the story I tell the most. Continue reading
Italian wines for Thanksgiving
At most of our typical US Thanksgiving dinners, there’s a buffet full of food. You fill your plate to the brim with scallop potatoes, salad, sweet potatoes, turkey, stuffing, prime rib, ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, maybe a few more cocktail shrimp from the appetizer period during the football games. And then which wine to open and pour in your glass?
Which ONE wine will you pour in your ONE glass?
How do you find one wine that will go with everything? This is a seemingly impossible task, Continue reading
Uruguayan White Wines
If you know anything about Uruguayan wines, you know about their tannat, because there is something special happening there with that grape: the terroir simply tames it and elevates it. But white wines? Yes! When Europeans settled along the coast of Uruguay, they planted the grapes they knew from home. From Galicia in Spain, they brought Albarino, from Germany they brought Riesling, and from France they brought Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier. Regardless of the grape, you’ll find, like we did, that the white wines of Uruguay reflect their proximity to the sea by expressing salinity, minerality, and a distinct character.
I live in North America on the coast where the sun and the moon sets on the Pacific Ocean and it is rarely humid. Uruguay is in South America where the sun and moon rise in the Atlantic Ocean, and it is often humid. But both coastal regions unite in a few important ways: Continue reading
Anniversary
On the night of the time change 17 years ago, my life changed when I started blogging in that extra hour over on Art Predator, an online version of a newspaper column I had in Ventura County for several years in the late 1990s.
with Antonella Manuli in Lombardy Italy after speaking at the Wine Media Conference 2022; I visited her winery in Tuscany in June 2023 and again in May 2024
This morning when I went online to prepare for tonight’s tasting with Sue Hill (four amphora wines: three wines from Georgia and one from Portugal as well as preparing for a ZOOM at noon about Uruguayan wines), I was greeted with this message:
“Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com!
You registered on WordPress.com 17 years ago.
Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging.”
And oh, what a flight it has been! Over the years I’ve traveled and written about wine at Burning Man, Italy, Portugal, France, Canada, Egypt, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and more!
US Team 2019
With Sue Hill, we won a blind tasting competition and a trip to compete in France in 2019, and in 2022, I won a major wine writing award!
wine predator.............. gwendolyn alley 