From time to time, we like to stop for a moment and check in with our readers. Lately, our readership has been soaring, in addition to a boatload of new RSS subscribers, which of course, makes our hearts warm and fuzzy. We hope that you’ve been enjoying what we’ve been creating. And fortunately, we’ve had a great time providing you with new information. However, we’re a little curious. With all of our talking, we haven’t taken a moment to listen to you.

So humor us. Tell us what you’ve been reaching for to quench your thirst for vino? Any Spanish wine treats or Portuguese wine delicacies? Is there something you’ve tried that was terrible? Amazing? Unexpected? Maybe you have a question or a request for a story that we’ve failed to cover. The Opai clan what to know.

Hey all you RSS subscribers, can you take 5 minutes and come visit us, say hi, and let us know that you’re human and not a robot? With all these new faces, it’s nice for us to know what makes you tick, what you drink, and what made you want to peruse our site!

For our part, we promise to respond, and maybe even take up one of your article ideas as fodder for a future posting here. Catavino will be back soon. In fact, we promise to finally get out this Rioja report we keep talking about. You’ll understand the sweat pouring down our brows right now when you see what we’ve done. Hee hee, but we promise, you won’t be disappointed.

Hey, why not add …

I love cookbooks, but I hate to follow recipes. I know I’m not alone, however. For me, a recipe is a suggestion, while a cookbook is an inspiration - a thought that makes many of my friends cringe. For them, recreating the traditional techniques and nuances of a historic dish is the goal; whereas, for me, I want to improve it! Vane, yes, but I also know that I’d rather eat a traditional dish in its home country with someone whose been making it for decades.

I begin with this introduction because “Cook España, Drink España”, by John Radford and Mario Sandoval, appeals to the adventurer in me. Mario Sandoval, a rising star in Spanish cuisine, partners up with John Radford, arguably, one of the most knowledgeable Spanish wine authorities on Spanish wine, to make a cookbook that covers the vast diversity of Spanish wine and cuisine.

If you enjoy beautiful pictures in your cookbooks, by all means, pick this up. Displaying fantastic photography, coupled with a nice, simple layout, make this a book a joy to sit back and peruse at your leisure. All 17 political regions are comprehensively covered, beginning with a short explanation on both the food and wine culture. This introduction is followed by 3-4 recipes and then a short recap of the wines, or in many cases, sidras, drunk in said region. A …

If it wasn’t for the title of this post, I trust that you’d most likely look at the word “patxaran” and wonder if it wasn’t the name of a pharmaceutical drug or a race of aliens on Star Trek. Sounding the letters out one by one, you suddenly find your tongue confused, unable to maneuver its way to the front of your teeth, then quickly, to the back of your throat in one seamless movement. But rest assured that the phonetics of this word are actually quite simple once you get the hang of the notorious Euskara (native language of Navarra) “tx” sound, pronounced like our “ch”. Hence, Patxaran is phonetically spelled like Pacharán, which is also how it is brilliantly written in Spanish - love the logic of this language!

It wasn’t until our trip to Rioja, and our following visit to Alimentaria, when I truly understood what Patxaran was. Mind you, throughout Rioja, so few people were able to share the history of liquor, shrugging their shoulders in silent ignorance, “It’s a family made drink that people occasionally consumed in their house,” we were told, but we wanted to know more.

What I learned was that Patxaran in Euskara means sloe berry or baso aran (wild plum), a name you might accurately associate with sloe gin. A small dark berry with red juice, a sloe berry comes from a blackthorn bush and is a relative of the plum, while Patxaran is a sloe-flavoured liqueur most commonly drunk in Navarra, the Basque Country and La Rioja.

Historically, Patxaran was used in the middle ages as a remedy for digestive orders. Containing Vitamin C, as well as being a tonic and an astringent, it was thought to strengthen the stomach; …

This is just a just a quick collection of newsworthy facts and figures to send you into the weekend feeling full of fortuitous factoids.

Catavino’s La Rioja Newsletter
After two quasi full months of tasting only La Rioja wine, while conveniently forgetting that one week dedicated to Portuguese wine, we will be finished by the end of this weekend. What this means is that by next Wednesday we will be releasing the first ever Catavino buying guide in conjunction to a rather unique and ingenious newsletter. “Um, excuse me, aren’t those the same thing,” you may be asking. And the answer is, no! Realizing that absolutely no one wants to download 50+ pages of articles and tasting notes devoted to La Rioja. They would, however, appreciate the information in a less clunky manner. Keeping this in mind, we put our heads together and created a new, user-friendly newsletter that can be referenced over and over again, coupled with a great buying guide you can take with you to the store! Hence, if you haven’t signed up yet, please subscribe now so you don’t miss out on this fun new feature!!

We’ve been Roasted at Wine-ing 2.0
For those of you not in on the big secret, there is a new website dedicated to humbling the wine trade. Written in the same style as The Onion, Wine-ing 2.0 uses satirical humor to poke fun at everyone and anyone even remotely related to the wine world. With such articles as New California Wine- 2×4 Set to Launch in the US, Gary Vaynerchuck Takes Down Twitter with Happiness and Weak Dollar, New Six-Tier Distribution to Do In Dr. Debs, it is impossible to not be addicted to this site…well…that …

I’ll be the first to admit that I can only take so much wine while on a business trip. After awhile, my eyes glaze over and I feel an intense craving to either down a gin and tonic, or at the very least, stay as far as humanly possible from a fermentation tank. And god forbid if I actually start dreaming about wine, like having the winemaker lecturing me on whether one should place a single row of grapes in a bin during harvest or two. Then, there is that one nightmare where I’m chained to a long wooden table adhering labels to each bottle as a raspy female voice sounds over a speaker, “You now have 981,872 labels remaining…you now have 981,871 labels remaining… Yeah, that’s when you know that you’ve visited one too many wineries in a day!

However, over the years, I have realized that it is not so much wine that I tire of, but it’s the way in which I am enjoying it. Sitting in a tasting room with a notebook in hand and my glasses propped low on my nose, a potentially remarkable wine loses its magic. It becomes something sterile and empty, one of the millions. Something I analyze and critique with the winemaker anxiously sitting in front of me wondering if I am giving his liquid child an “A” for stellar quality or an “F” for pure plonk. And when scheduling three wineries a day, this process can get tedious rather quickly.

Hence, on our last trip to Rioja, we decided to start incorporating new ways in which we could enjoy Spanish wine, rather than solely in restaurants, cafes or …