Tomorrow is RSS Awareness Day! But do you know what RSS stands for? Do you use RSS to make your online life easier? Do you realize that if you surf online and do not know what RSS is, you’re missing a considerable amount on the web?

Today, Catavino is taking a break from wine to bring you a short intro on the merits of RSS. If you are reading this in your “feed reader” you may want to scroll onto another story and/or tag this one to email from your reader who is less in the know. For those of you who don’t know what I just said or what I was talking about, you are probably not reading this in your feed reader, and you probably are starting to get annoyed with us.

OBJECTIVE OF RSS AWARENESS DAY

As taken from the RSS Awareness Website: What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits, and that number is growing slowly over time. By creating the RSS Awareness Day and celebrating it every year we should be able to get the general public exposed to this format, hopefully increasing the usage of RSS feeds and related applications among Internet users.

RSS dates back to 1995 when Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group created something called the Meta Content Framework (MCF). I can’t pretend to tell you what this means, but I can say this was the launching point for several other evolutions in RSS technology which included people …

Over the past six months, I’ve been spending the majority of my Friday nights with a “new” friend of mine who is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. Tall, active and practical in mind, she values a night nibbling on a macrobiotic dinner followed by a short yoga session, well above a dinner spent at an exceptional five star restaurant with a wine list larger than the entire series of Tolkien novels combined. So when Friday night rolls around, and she asked me the big question, “what should we have for dinner?”, I get excited! Considering that I live with a man who wants on his tombstone “I lived by ham, and I died by ham”, I absolutely adore an evening where I can allow my internal vegetarian out of the bag to bask in fresh produce, tofu, tempeh and whatever else may constitute a new macrobiotic creation. It’s a night to purge my system of the gastly meat byproducts hardline vegetarians plug their noses at and an opportunity to simply sit and enjoy the company of a lovely friend.

Yet one cannot fully cleanse their body without a glass of wine, can they?! I need those fabulous red tannins to slowly ease their way into my blood system to protect my heart and cleanse the arteries Thankfully, M. agrees with me and has made sure to always provide me with the honors of opening a bottle of wine the minute I walk into the door. The quality of the wine, however, can range from divine to questionable. Considering that her husband only drinks watered down beer with a large dash of lemon Fanta (called a Clara in Spain), while she generally drinks tea, …

I love beer. I really do. I remember my first Rolling Rock in Taos, New Mexico, after the last ski run of my senior year Spring Break. Cool crisp and my very first. I didn’t really drink in High School, as I was “straight edge” and too cool to get wasted. But after I turned 18, I said, “That’s enough! Time to drink.” From that first Rolling Rock, up until about the year 2000, beer for me was a cool, wet beverage that gave me a nice buzz. Beer was the party beverage, while wine was the sophisticated drink. I studied wine, while I studied the bottom of beer bottles. Nothing new here, as most of you can relate, or at least a few of you.

However, around 2000-2001, I discovered beer in its true form, a beverage with historic roots, complicated ingredients and myriad flavors. It’s also when I discovered the beer site www.ratebeer.com. I still have over 500 beer ratings stored over there. You see what happened when I discovered Rate Beer was an awakening that few wine lovers will ever fully grasp. Beer and wine have more in common than most would expect. 99% of wine should be drunk tomorrow, and so should 99% of beer, but the best wines and best beers both age and transform into drinks that are worth the wait.

If I still lived in the US, Catavino, apart from being named something else, would be a beverage blog. Plain and simple. I love complex and beautiful flavors, and for me, …

The warm spring rays are now browning your ghostly winter skin; the orange light streams in through your windows well into the early evening; the air is heavy with aromas of fresh cut grass and blooming white lilies, all signaling the perfect time to finally indulge yourself with a bottle of white wine. The big question, however, is which one?

Having come off of two months dedicated to La Rioja, and five long months of winter weather, we opened our refrigerator to a dozen bottles of white, rose and cavas, all beckoning our palates. Yet, behind the small jars of capers, deep in the way back of the refrigerator, past the Norwegian caviar, sat one bottle of Herdade Grande Colheita Seleccionada 2006. We had actually received this wine from the winemaker last summer during our unexpected whirlwind Portuguese wine tasting in Lisbon. So it was fun for us to pull this wine out from the depths of the refrigerator, enjoying some wonderful memories from our stay.

The winery itself is located approximately 5 miles from Vidigueira in the Alentejo. Owning 350 hectares of land, only 60 hectares are under vine, while the remaining 80 hectares are devoted to arboreal culture, 40 to olive groves and the rest to cow pastures. Soils are comprised of primarily red schist, varying in texture from porous to smooth and compact of which both red and white varietals are grown. Native red grapes grown are Arganoes, Trincadeira, Alfrocheiro, Tinta Grossa, Tinta Caiada, Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Alicante Bouchet, among none native red varietals such as Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon. As for white, they grow Antao vaz, Arinto, Roupeiro, Rabo de Ovelha, Perrum, Monteudo and Fernao Pires.

The Herdade Grande Colheita Seleccionada 2006 is made from two common …

How To articles are nice. How to save money. How to drive a car. How to make a million dollars in one week (maybe we should say 2 million at this point). How To articles can help, and can also waste, a fair amount of your time. How to be happy the rest of your life, inherently, is impossible, but we’ll still buy the book only to be left with another dust collector in our office study. So why am I offering a how to? Well, why not? The “How to drive more traffic to your site” reference tool, which told me that “how to” articles are great viral tools, and we all want more traffic, right? So, I’m going to offer a “how to” that you don’t have to buy! It’s totally free! The subject: How to enjoy a Spanish wine! Even if you’ve never tried it, don’t like it, or are indifferent to it, you may find something here that is of use to you. Beyond that, you now have something to share with your friends who will inevitably beg you to, “teach me something about wine“. This way, you can just point them to this article and wash your hands of the responsibility. So without further adieu:

How To Enjoy Spanish Wine

1) Buy two different bottles of Spanish wine. What kind you ask? Preferably the one you’ve never tried. I say this because if you need to learn how to enjoy Spanish wine, you probably haven’t had one yet that you’ve liked. So pick one out that you’re unfamiliar with, that looks a little different, or simply has a label that peaks your interest. …