As I sit staring at the computer today after 12 hours of constant chat on how global warming is effecting both the earth and the our wines, I’m still reeling with questions and concerns. Granted, I never expected to walk out of the II International Conference on Climate and Wine with all of my questions answered, but I was hoping to leave with a sense of hope and direction. Sadly, I’m just not feeling it.

Our day started with a rather frenetic start, as I failed horrifically in my duty to set the alarm for 6am. Instead, we woke up at 8:00am, completely freaking out, because we were expected to arrive at the conference an hour and a half later, which is not big deal if it didn’t take you that exact same amount of time to travel to your destination. However, by the grace of the Blogger God, we magically arrived at the Hesperia Hotel in Barcelona on the dot with our cameraman, Richard, waiting with a smile and cup of coffee. Albeit a nerve-wracking start, we eventually settled ourselves into our seats with among 350 other people from 36 countries, and began the conference.

To give you a little background, the first International Conference on Climate and Wine two years ago was both considered a major success and a major failure, mainly due to the fact that only 76 people registered for the event. Hence, Pancho Campo, the founder of the conference, lost a considerable amount of money putting the entire conference together with such a low turnout. Yet, he’s is not the type of guy to give up easily, preferring to proceed with a second conference to be scheduled two years later in hopes …

Before the II International Conference on Climate and Wine begins tomorrow, we were fortunate enough to steal a few moments away with Pancho Campo, the founder of this conference and the pioneer behind research on the impact of climate change in the wine industry. Pancho also happens to be the president and founder of The Wine Academy of Spain, an official instructor for the WSET, and an Official Sherry Educator (one of our favorite of his titles!). And as if you aren’t feeling lazy enough sitting on your chair sipping on a glass of Tempranillo, Pancho is also the founder of the Barcelona Wine Festival and Madwine. Whew! I haven’t even gotten into his professional tennis career and stint as a medical student, but I’ll leave that for him.

What Pancho is, is a man of action, of innovation, of vision, and beyond all else, of purpose. When a seed has been planted in his mind as a goal to be obtained, regardless of how far fetched it may be to a layman, he’ll achieve it. And part of the reason why I think he is so successful in his efforts, is his charisma, which you will see shortly in our interview.

What we hope you’ll take away from this interview is not only Pancho’s reasoning behind the conference, but his succinct and clear message that action must be taken now if we want to continue enjoying the wines we love today, tomorrow. Enjoy the interview!

PS: Slight sync problem with sound, but that’s what you get for a late night edit and no sleep!

This article is not only written for those of you who feel a little skittish around foreign terms like crianza and gran reserva, but also for those self-proclaimed wine experts who think they’ve got the Spanish nomenclature of aging down flat. In Iberia, terminology is defined by each Denominacion de Origen (see definition below). Therefore, what crianza may mean to one region cannot immediately transferred to another region. So what I’d like to do is provide you with a dummy’s guide to the terminology you’ll find specifically on a Rioja wine label, as well as some general Spanish wine terminology you can practice during your next trip to the wine shop.

ON THE FRONT OF THE BOTTLE
Although, information on the label will differ from producer to producer, you can generally expect to find the following on the front of a Rioja bottle:

1. The name of the producer.
2. When the bodega was originally founded.
3. The location where the wine was elaborated.
4. The year the wine was made.
5. The amount of time the wine spent in the bodega, indicated by the terms joven, crianza, semi-crianza, reserva, gran reserva.
6. Denominacion de Origen Calificada (DOCa), a term further explained below
7. Although infrequently listed, you may run into the type of grapes used to make the wine.

QUALITY CLASSIFICATIONS

Throughout Spain, wines can be classified into three distinct categories: 1) vino de mesa - table wine, 2) vino de la tierra - regional wine, and 3) vino de calidad - quality wine. Rioja is unique in that you will only find wines rated as vino de calidad, or quality wines.

Within the quality wine classification, wines are further divided into Denominaciones de Origen (DO) or Denominaciones de Origen Calificada (DOCa). DO defines specific wine growing areas such as La Mancha, …

Please bear with us as we’re making a little detour from Spanish and Portuguese wine to bring you another Wine Blog Wednesday entry. Spittoon is hosting WBW #42 with the eccentric caveat that all entries must describe an Italian red wine in exactly, seven words. Now although Italy is not Rioja (our featured region of the month), nor is it located in Iberia, there are several similarities to justify our entry: it’s been said that Rioja’s etymology stems from the color red in Spanish, Rioja is famous for their red wines, both Italy and Iberia begin with an ‘I’, and both countries are famous for their cured hams! Need I say more?!

Now keep in mind, finding foreign wines (wines sourced outside of Spain) even from our closest neighbors is like finding a needle in a haystack. For whatever reason, Spain likes to keep itself surrounded by its own grape juice, principally those from Rioja. Therefore, to participate in this month’s WBW our choices were to either make the two hour roundtrip hike into Barcelona, or walk two blocks up the street to our local supermarket, praying we’d find something red from Italy. Thankfully we did find two lambruscos; although we’re completely clueless as to why they stocked two cheap Italian wines among the shelves dedicated solely to Spanish wine. Weighing our two choices, we settled upon the more expensive CIV&CIV Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro for a whopping 1.85 Euro. You don’t even have to like the wine for this price. For those of you not familiar with Lambrusco, it is named after both a grape and a wine originating from the four zones in Emilia-Romagna and one in Lombardy, especially around the central provinces of Modena, Parma, …

According to Dictionary.com a Wiki is defined as:
A collaborative website whose content can be edited by anyone who has access to it.
Catavino.net’s definition of the Iberian Wine Wiki is as such:

A repository for our research into the grape varietals and regions of Spain and Portugal.

The main difference between both definitions is the lack of the word “collaborative” in ours. Currently we are choosing to keep this new Iberian Wine Wiki as a Catavino project, using the indexing behavior of Dokuwiki software to help us layout the information. We also want information to be accessible to anyone who wants to look at it. Now, we’re obviously no island unto ourselves, and we are very interested in people helping us to expand our Wiki, but for now, people with an interest must be approved and then invited to join. So please, if you’re interested and want to help out, do send us a note.

This idea originally stemmed from an issue we had a few weeks ago while writing up a summary of Spanish and Portuguese wines for a few external wine sites. As we were researching the exact number of grapes for each country, we came up with vastly different numbers. This wouldn’t matter much if there was only a small difference in numbers, but we’re talking differences for example of one site stating 300 and another stating 600 indigenous grapes in Portugal. As much as we are sympathetic that these varietals can be difficult to track down, categorize and sort out, to know which is a new varietal versus an alias, we feel this is basic information that we should attempt to put together in some coherent way. Consequently, we thought that …