This weekend, we built a wine rack. When we first moved to Terrassa almost 3 years ago, we were regularly lacking in wine as a result of less income, less samples and less travel. Consequently, we never had a formal wine rack. But when you change any one of these factors, you end up with a lot more wine. Now imagine if you changed all three like we have?! We not only needed to figure out where to store it all, but also how to inventory it. I still have most of my cellar in Cellartracker, though I quit putting in my tasting notes. I like Snooth and Adegga as well, but they both need better cellar management for me to move to them exclusively. Since this past weekend we created the wine rack, maybe next weekend we’ll inventory the wine. Let’s see what happens.

As for building the wine rack, it actually turned out to be much easier than we expected. Odd note though: untreated, uncut, plain wood costs more than planed, beveled whole sheets of wood here in Terrassa. So instead of needing to sand and polish it, we simply bought nice sheets of solid, shelving wood and then cut it to fit. Yet, we still need another. So later today, I’m off to buy some more wood for wine rack number two!

Enough about housing. Next Monday, we’re off to judge wine blogs! It feels a bit odd to mention, after we realized at the EWBC that judging a wine blog is quite subjective once you get past the aggregators and plagiarizers. Once into the meat of the blogging world, where the hard work and effort is being …

Gabriella and Ryan would like to welcome all of you who read the recently published article in the Star Tribune, our hometown paper from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bill Ward, the Star Tribune’s wine and food writer, was kind enough to meet with Ryan, while sending some additional questions to Gabriella, in order to profile our entertaining and unexpected journey.

Having just read the article, we feel that Bill did a great job overall, and despite some left out content and a few errors (such as the word el enchufe being misspelled as el enfouche), we’re ecstatic to have all of you join us from the Twin Cities. That said, we’d like to personally introduce ourselves and direct you to some of our favorite links, sites, and stories! Oh, and for those of you who only caught the article in the paper, continue on to Bill Ward’s blog to read some quotes from our lunch!

So welcome, one and all, and we hope that a few of you stick around and continue to follow us. If you know what RSS is, you can subscribe to Catavino here, and if you want to just sign up for our monthly newsletter (completely independent content) you can do so in the side bar to the right of this post.

About Catavino - General links to info about who we are

People - Who we are, and the various guest contributors we have pitch in from time to time.
The Story of Catavino (more or less) - A short recap of why and how we started blogging.
Ratings Policy - As Bill mentioned, we …

You can’t do it all at once. Life is a series of small steps. And if you believe that any project that kicks off today will have success tomorrow, well, be prepared for disappointment. This is my mantra to every client we take on, “Start your blog today, work on it, and eventually, if you invest enough of yourself, people will reward you by paying attention.” Clearly, our friends at Adegga, a Portuguese startup, are firm believers in this philosophy.

Bootstrapping is when you start a business without venture capital, or a heavy investment, building instead, from good old elbow grease and a bit of self sacrifice. You look for help where you can find it, and you trade services with others who are in a similar position. Catavino is an exercise in bootstrapping, and we are proud to call ourselves friends with the Adegga team - united disciples of this philosophy. Over the past few months, Andre Ribeirinho, Andre Cid and Emídio Santos, have paved the way in exemplifying how a little vision and lot of persistence can eventually lead to success.

So what is Adegga? Well at its core, its a social tasting note site. In Adegga, you can leave notes on wines, manage your personal wine cellar, and participate in a community that is growing daily. Granted, we know there are plenty of social tasting note sites out there, and trying to keep track of them all is an exercise in futility. That said, this post will not attempt to answer the question on which one is best, but rather why Adegga is useful.

In truth, we at Catavino use three different tasting note sites for 3 separate reasons: Cellartracker, …