Live life with fine Spanish wines

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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I remember when just hearing the phrase ”Rhone wine” would get me salivating. The reds would perhaps get me going more than the whites but I used to love the white ones as well. Those were in the day when France to some extent still was synonymous with QUALITY wine. Slowly but surely, however, France’s grip on me, and many others, loosened and I started to enjoy the Rhone Viogniers (basically the only white Rhone wine I used to go for) more and more infrequently.

The last really memorable occasion was probably six or seven years ago when a friend, after a couple of drinks at a dinner party, casually opened a Chateau Grillet and generously poured it into any glass that happened to be close by. It was unfortunately not chilled enough but was still a beautiful wine, probably around 4-5 years old, and all that you would expect from a wine with such a famous name. (more…)

This is not going to be the most profound blog i wrote but a friend sent me through this the other day and it gave me a good laugh, hope it has the same effect on you. Enjoy your weekend!

To my friends who enjoy a glass of wine.. And those who don’t…As Ben Franklin said: In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria.

In a number of carefully controlled trials, scientists have demonstrated that if we drink 1 liter of water each day, at the end of the year we would have absorbed more than 1 kilo of Escherichia coli, (E.. Coli) Bacteria found in feces. In other words, we are consuming 1 kilo of Poop. (more…)

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…)

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…)