Live life with fine Spanish wines

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…)

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…)

We regularly have clients asking us what the difference is between a Denominación de Origen / Denomination of Origin (D.O.) and a Denominación de Origin Calificada / Qualified Denomination of Origin (D.O.Ca.). The short answer is that the D.O.Ca. is a higher category for the truly great wine-making areas. There are currently two D.O.s within this category: Rioja and Priorat. (more…)