Who doesn’t love fondue? What a fun way to gather with friends on a cold wintry night– gabbing and dipping bread, potatoes, meat, and vegetables into warm gooey rich cheese?? Finger food and small bites in general lend themselves to these gatherings. And what better wine to pair with this celebratory moment than a sparkling wine? This holiday season, “Clink Different” with a sparkling wine from GERMANY! While German sparkling wine might not be on your Bingo card for 2024, it should be! Like Champagne from France and sparkling wines from around the world, bubbles from Germany are often made from Pinot Noir. This Brut style is dry and that goes well with food– and celebratory moments.
Celebrating Cabernet Franc Day with 3 Sustainable Wine from the Loire Paired with a fall harvest menu of Stuffed Squash and Smoked Ham
Are you a fan of fragrant, elegant Cabernet Franc? You know, the grape that is the parent of Cabernet Sauvignon and Carmenere? While most people enjoy it as a grape blended with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot whether they know it or not, it is most well known on its own in the Loire, France where my writing partner Sue Hill and I found ourselves during harvest in 2019 on our way to the World Wine Tasting Championship at Chateau Chambord.
Chateau Yvonne winemaker Mattui Vallee and his dad during the 2019 harvest — SO CUTE!
While Sue is a huge fan of wines with a lot of the turpene or chemicals that give Cabernet Franc its distinct “green” notes of bell pepper, green bean, and jalapeño, I am not — unless those green notes are balanced with fruit and lovely tannins like we found in the biodynamic wineries we visited in the Loire: Continue reading →
“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
Until thirty years ago on Nov. 24, 1994, everyone thought that Merlot from Chile was a little odd. Good, yes. Tasty, yes. But very different than merlot grown elsewhere. The leaves of this “Chilean Merlot” turned bright crimson after harvest in a completely different way than merlot grown other places, and the way the leaves looked all year was just different too. The fruit of this “Chilean Merlot” tasted much more “green” and so did the resulting wine– less fruity and lots more herbal notes from the pyrazines aka the chemical compound in wines that give them notes of green peppers, jalapeños, bell peppers, green beans, basil, bay leaves. Was it just that the terroir in Chile produced such a distinct version of merlot?
Turns out, this merlot from Chile wasn’t actually strange at all– it was a case of mistaken identity! For 150 years, it was actually Carménère, a grape basically considered extinct in its native Bordeaux, France, and rediscovered by French ampelographer Jean-Michel Boursiquotin Chile’s Maipo Valley where it had been growing for 150 years as merlot.
Celebrating 30 Years of Carménère’s Rediscovery at Chile’s Viña Carmen
While I’ve known this fascinating story for a few years (scroll down for some of our stories and pairings),and I imagine in the 1980s I drank Merlot from Chile thinking it was Merlot when two was actually Carmenere, this year there’s a twist:
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 →
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 →
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 →
wine predator.............. gwendolyn alley 