Live life with fine Spanish wines

Over the past few months I keep coming across a white wine called Naia in the newspapers, in wine magazines and online. One of my daughters is called Naia and, as it was her birthday recently, I thought I would investigate this wine a little further.

My daughter is called Naia because, as we live in the Basque country, we thought a Basque name would be nice and it’s one of the easier Basque names to pronounce for our non-Basque relatives and friends. (It rhymes with “tie a” as in “Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree”!). My husband and I feel that it has a nice ring to it and its meaning is “desired” or “wanted”. Or, at least that’s what I thought until I started to look at online dictionaries and see that it may actually mean “wave”. I’ve asked a few Basque-speaking friends and they all agree that it does, in fact, have the first meaning. Either way, we like it. (more…)

As you probably already know ExcelWines.com is run by three women, myself included in that crowd, and that is probably why ( I mean, being a woman running a wine biz) I have become a little bit obsessed with - Why are 90% of our customers men, where are the women – question. We quite often get comments (from our male customers) such as – my wife tried it and she liked it so she wants me to buy it or even - my wife liked it so I decided to buy the wine again…etc. So we KNOW the girls drink (at least some of the wines that men try to collect..).

So I decided to put it all out for you to help us to turn around the numbers.

I started with putting the question out at the Open Wine Consortium and Twitter. Unfortunately the response was very mild so I decided to investigate a bit further. (more…)

If you don’t live in Spain, you may be surprised to hear that the so-called Spanish Omelettes served in all major hotels as a breakfast item is not a dish eaten in Spanish homes or restaurants at all. The real Spanish Omelette (called Tortilla Española or Tortilla de Patatas in Spanish) is made mainly from potatoes and eggs. It looks like a quiche or a pie.

I didn’t bother to learn how to make a Potato Omelette for the longest time. It is available in almost every single bar in Spain. Its popularity and availability is equivalent to a hamburger in the US. Most Spanish will tell you a Potato Omelette is very easy to make but I never believed them. I have seen it made a few times, and it looked like quite a bit of work to me. Now that I live in Malta, I get an occasional craving for a Potato Omelette, so after experimenting with making it for a few times, I finally made a decent looking but great tasting one the other day. It was not very difficult, but cooking the potatoes took quite a bit of time. (more…)

As far back as I can remember people in bars in this part of Spain have been ordering “un claro de Navarra”. I always assumed this was what we would call a rosé in English. But then I discovered that a claro is not the same as a rosado. And to add to the confusion you also often hear a request for a “clarete”.

Rosé wine has never been hugely popular in Spain but then it hasn’t lost popularity either. It has always been drunk mostly as an aperitivo and usually by older people. Now that rosé wine seems to be losing its image as an unsophisticated and somewhat inferior wine, I thought I would investigate the differences between rosado, claro and clarete. (more…)

I have a terrible confession to make: I have never had a North American wine!

I have tried wines from all over the world, both old world and new world, from Spain, France, New Zealand, Chile, Bulgaria, you name it…. I’ve even had Chinese wine. But I’ve never, ever tried a bottle from the U.S.

I think I’ve been living in Spain for too long. It’s so hard here to find anything other than Spanish wines that we rarely drink anything else. You can, of course, go to wine shops which will have a handful of foreign wines, mostly French, a couple of Argentinean / Chilean wines and maybe a New Zealand or Australian bottle or two and that’s about it. If the wine shop owner is really adventurous there just might even be a solitary South African bottle somewhere in the shop. In addition to the lack of selection, there’s the problem of price: these wines won’t be cheap. (more…)

MAPA, the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fishing and Food has announced Ribera del Arlanza and Tierra Del Vino de Zamora as Spanish wine appellations. The two regions are now official wine D.O. (denomination of origin).

Being in the Wine biz I, of course, immediately after having read this ran to my map of Spanish appellations to try to figure out where these two regions are situated. The D.O. Ribera Del Arlanza is situated some 40km south of Burgos city. The main grape variety (95%) is …tempranillo (tinta del pais), not so surprising. Then the second most planted grape is Garnacha (2%). There is a little bit of Mencia, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Albillo for their rosé wines. For the white wines they use Viura, but very little white wine is produced. (more…)

An expat couple in Madrid recently contacted us about the possibility of putting their Wedding List on our site. Obviously, we are absolutely delighted to participate in such a special occasion and are really enjoying working on how to set up the Wedding List and what to include in it. (more…)