Live life with fine Spanish wines

In Vizcaya, Spain, people eat a lot of fish and they all seem to know a lot about fish (at least they all have strict opinions about it) and when I say fish I mean all sorts of fish, they all seem to have a recipe for any fish you mention.

In Sweden we also eat a lot of fish but our staple fish is salmon, and cod (nowadays of course the cod is not so easy accessible due to overfishing. This basically leaves us with the salmon). I used to buy ready-made filets from the fish counter at the supermarket; you never saw the heads or the tails.

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This time last year, I would not have even considered writing a wine blog but thanks to the increasing number of customers at Excel Wines, and the persuasive powers of my colleagues Anna and Sandy, that since last April we have been doing exactly that. We still feel like novices and we realise that we have a long way to go before our blog is the polished and professional site that we woud like is to be.

Hence, I will be attending the first ever European Wine Bloggers Conference to be held in La Rioja at the end of August. It is being organised by Gabriella and Ryan Opaz of Catavino.net and Robert MacIntosh of The Wine Conversation. I hope to meet other wine bloggers, share experiences and, above all, learn, learn, learn all I possibly can.
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Now that the summer is here I like to enjoy a glass or two of rosé wine. Personally I like them when they’re not too meek and mild but with a bit more character. This summer I’ve been enjoying Tombu Rosé 2007 by Dominio DosTares. But no matter where I am the reaction when I pop open a bottle of rosé is quite often the same; there seems to be a notion that a man drinking rosé wine is a bit, well, suspicious. Usually my friends and family are very liberal-minded but when it comes to pink wine a lot of them seem to be stuck with values from a bygone era.

In all honesty, not all people around me are as dismissive of the stuff. One of my best friends, John, is quite a manly guy and he doesn’t frown upon rosé wine. I have been using this as proof; if a good ole boy from Madison, Indiana likes rosé it has to be OK for any man to drink it. (more…)

Last weekend we went to the Pyrenees and were unfortunate enough to get some poor weather. Friday was a scorching, hot day but the wind picked up in the evening and it rained hard overnight. The next morning it was overcast and pretty cool but at least it wasn’t raining. We went out at about 9:30 in the morning and came back to the house at about 11 o’clock.

It started raining again at lunchtime and we didn’t venture out again until it stopped at about 5 pm. As soon as we stepped out the door, we were hit by the cold air. The temperature had dropped dramatically over the previous hours and it was now positively COLD.

Then we noticed that one of the mountains that can be seen from our house, the Peña Collarada, had a dusting of snow at the peak! On the 12th of July!! This is sunny Spain – how can it snow in July? No doubt there have been other years when it has snowed in July and possibly even August but we couldn’t believe it. We had brought our swimming gear with us expecting to go to the pool and nobody had more than a light jacket. (more…)

I had lunch with my wife Anna and her Excelwines.com colleague Ane-Miren the other day. It was quite an astute affair; some tortillas and pintxos from the bar around the corner from the somewhat-less-than-larger-than-life Excelwines office. The reason I was there was that they had just received some new Priorat wines and they asked me to pass by and share my thoughts about the wine with them.

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Since basically all the Priorats I have drunk so far have been fabulous wines I was more than happy to help them out with this task. This time the wines were not from any bodegas that I have heard about before but since I never really tasted a bad Priorat I looked forward to a nice lunch. For comparison they had also opened 2 Priorats already in their range; Martinet Bru 2005 and Pasanau Finca la Planeta 2003.

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It is difficult to get any decent Spanish wine in the restaurants here in Malta. We ordered a bottle of Sicilian wine the other day with our meal, to my big surprise, it came with a glass cork. There has been a lot of much discussions on screw cap on different blogs and forums on screw cap, for example, hop over to, openwineconsortium.org forum lately, you will see how the topic sparked a lot of interesting and informative discussions from many different points of view on the thread. But glass cork? This was the first time I have seen a glass cork in real life.

After a bit of digging on the Internet, I found that these glass corks are made by CSI Closure Systems International, (more…)