Today is the United Nation’s International Yoga Day! Have you seen this video of how to drink wine while doing yoga? It’s a fun one!
I started doing yoga when I was in college at UC Santa Cruz, but I didn’t get into it until I had a serious rock climbing accident where I fell 15′ onto my back and my chiropractor was my yoga teacher. Later, when I moved back to Ventura, my teachers kept asking me to sub; one of the first classes i subbed was a Patagonia where I had two students: Yvon and Malinda Chouinard! When I learned one of my favorite Yoga Journal writers, Erich Schiffmann, was doing a 40 hour teacher training in Santa Barbara, I figured it was time to take the plunge. A few years later, I followed that up with Iyengar teacher training with Bryan Legere who I studied with for 15 years. These days, I mostly have my own practice, attend classes, and do the occasional subbing.
As a yoga practitioner I definitely DO NOT recommend doing yoga while drinking or after drinking! Do yoga then drink wine!
— Gwendolyn Alley, Art and Wine Predator (@ArtPredator) June 21, 2016
During your yoga practice today, you should definitely do a few sun salutations (because solstice!) and in recognition that, like the sun, you ROSE off the ground for those sun salutes, the obvious wine to choose is ROSE! For International Yoga Day, you might want to try Continue reading →
— Gwendolyn Alley, Art and Wine Predator (@ArtPredator) June 8, 2016
Rose is a very good daytime wine. It goes well with picnic food, or what you want to eat at a concert at the bowl: it’s like a symphony wine. The colors are varied but always so beautiful and inviting. And best? Dry rose wines pair so well with food from humous to ham, from salami to sausage.
And that’s why I had Marshall cook us up a ham to pair with our rose because, like rose, ham is a meat that you can eat all day –from breakfast steaks and scrambles to brunch to lunch and dinner grilled cheese, ham sandwiches, and more.
Many years ago, I had a sample rose from Planet Bordeaux and as we had prepared a ham, I gave it a try. The ham was cooked on the grill, smoked with special wood, and covered in cloves as well as other flavors in the rich glaze. It was a match made in heaven and now whenever we have ham, my go to wine is dry rose.
Rose also pairs well with a number of sides making it a versatile choice for holiday meals.
Because we had a number of different rose wines from around the world to sample, and it was a #winestudio Tuesday focused on rose, and #WinePW or Wine Pairing Weekend coming up with a focus on Rose, and we had a friend from far away visiting on her birthday
AND the second Saturday of June, IS NATIONAL ROSE DAY
so we thought it would be fun to do something special so we opened up 5 and did a blind tasting to see if we could guess what country and what grape the rose was made from, and to compare notes. We loved the difference in colors,. That was the first playfully fun thing that we noticed when looking at the glasses as you can see below.
Recently, for nine weeks, Que Syrah Sue and I learned all about Albarino from Rias Baixas in Galicia just north of Portugal in the western and northernmost reaches of Spain during an online weekly educational program using the hashtag #WineStudio as discussed in “April Fools for Albarino.”
As you can see from the list below, we tasted more than a case of Rias Baixas Albarino. In this blog post, I am going to share a few highlights from each night to pique your curiosity.
We really went all out on what wines to pair with these Rias Baixas Albarino! In general, foods that pair well with Sauvignon blanc pair well with Albarino.
While most of the wines we tasted over the nine weeks were 100% Albarino, a few were Albarino blends. As they all came from the same region, Rias Baixas, the tasting was organized by various themes, listed with the wines below. On many of the evenings, not everyone received all of the same wines being discussed, and that made it a bit more chaotic than usual. We definitely prefer it when we are all tasting the same wines at the same time and in the same order to have a better conversation about the wine.
Overall it was an amazing experience and we came away with a love for Albarino from Rias Baixas, Spain!
— Gwendolyn Alley, Art and Wine Predator (@ArtPredator) April 12, 2016
There were so many wines in this two month period that at one point I used sticky notes to keep track of which wine to drink when! Above are the first group of wines we tasted in April and below the second group of wines that we tasted in May.
For all of you ABCers (Anything But Chardonnay people) stay tuned because I have posts coming up about Spanish Albarino, Italian Grillo, and a few other very interesting white wines! And I hope you’ll consider your stance and at least try one of the very special mineral, terroir driven Santa Barbara Chardonnays that are coming out of the region.
— Gwendolyn Alley, Art and Wine Predator (@ArtPredator) May 22, 2016
But today is a day to celebrate Chardonnay!
Last week, I attended a Santa Barbara County Chardonnay seminar moderated by Elaine Chukan Brown where we were led through a tasting and discussion of Santa Barbara County Chardonnay, followed by a walk around tasting with many of the winemakers.
I took some notes plus a series of tweets which I share below, and then this week Sue and I tasted three more Chardonnay from the area, two that you should be able to find easily in your local grocery store, one under $15 and the other around $30. (I also attended a Bordeaux varieties seminar as well as attended a walk around tasting of Rhone varietals so subscribe for more about Santa Barbara County wine!) Continue reading →
— Gwendolyn Alley, Art and Wine Predator (@ArtPredator) May 24, 2016
Time to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Judgement of Paris!
And post #500 on Wine Predator! My first posts were in 2008 where I talked about the first Wine Bloggers Conference held in Santa Rosa, CA. Any day now, I will reach 90,000 page views.
And it’s been quite a climb to write 500 posts which average close to 1,000 words (we’re talking 500,000 words, yes?) hence the choice of Tercero’s 2010 “The Climb” to mark the occasion! (Read about other Tercero reds here and Tercero whites here).
I started blogging about wine not long after I started blogging in November 2007 with Art Predator. Like the Ojai/Ventura area newspaper column that proceeded it, Art Predator is an eclectic mix of that which engages the whole soul: art, music, poetry, food, wine, nature, and more in 1750 posts and nearly 625,000 page views.
Soon I realized that I should start a blog devoted to wine, food, and adventure, so I did and Wine Predator was born.
But my interest in wine starts well before that, and in fact, it leads back to the Judgement of Paris. And no, I don’t mean the painting!
According to Wine Folly, International Sauvignon Blanc Day is today, Sunday, April 24 so Que Syrah Sue and I opened three Sauvignon Blanc wines from two continents: two inexpensive ones from South America, Decopas from Argentina (around $10) and Globerati from Chile (under $10), and a more expensive one from North America, Provenance from Napa (around $30), and notes on the wines follow.
Many wineries around the globe are celebrating this versatile, food friendly, spring time favorite today.
But then again, maybe International #SauvBlancDay on Friday, May 6, 2016? According to St Supery, Friday May 6 marks the seventh annual International Sauvignon Blanc Day.
wine predator.............. gwendolyn alley 