In August, during the 2008 European Wine Blogger’s Conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Tom Perry - someone I can now call a good friend. Tom is an American expat who has worked and lived in Spain for over 30 years and is incredibly well- versed on the Spanish wine economy, not to mention an incredibly interesting guy who will capture your attention for hours on end.

Not surprisingly, Tom is also heavily involved with the Great Wine Capitals project. From their website:
The Global Network of Great Wine Capitals,which embraces Melbourne, Bordeaux, San Francisco - Napa Valley, Porto, Cape Town, Bilbao-Rioja, Florence and Mendoza, works to encourage international winery tourism, as well as economic, academic and cultural exchanges between these famous capitals of wine.
To tell you the truth, I don’t have much experience with the Great Wine Capitals, and have only run into it a few times. Bit from what I can tell, it is a project that helps the capitals themselves to embrace enotourism.

According to Tom, my sense of the project was accurate in that the project is geared towards supporting wine capitals to better assist travelers. Additionally, there is a new website currently being constructed that will offer various tools for wine travelers. After Tom participated in the EWBC, he is convinced that social media and blogging should also become a part of the strategy for future incarnations of the Great Wine Capitals website. We can only hope that he succeeds in convincing the group as a whole.

Today, Catavino offers you a short interview conducted by email with Tom. Please take …

Ok, jetlag is done, culture shock is mitigated, and my life is starting to get back to its crazy usual self. I’ve inoculated my system with some fresh Iberian wines and assorted tapas. So what happened in Minnesota you may ask? Well a lot. One wedding, one 60th birthday party and at least 4 wine filled dinners. So rather than give you a play by play, I’ll bullet point some of the highlights and ask you a few questions, or rather, state some observations from the visit.

Jason Kallsen, the man behind the World Class Wines Blog, invited me to talk about blogging and Iberian wine on the second night I was in town! Thankfully, it was a great success. Held at the cafe across the street (space purposes) from SoloVino in St.Paul, we talked about wine, blogging and the intersection of the two. Take away thoughts? Well, I was shocked by how few of the “wine geeks” in attendance actually read blogs. While about half had read a blog, very few actually frequented them. If anyone who attended has anything to say about this, please chime in!

I tasted wines twice with old buddies/wine geeks. First night, I tried two Pinot Noirs, one of which was a Bergstrom 2002 PN that was beautiful, seductive, and well worth it. The other, as a result of my desire to carry over wines that were unique and different, was a Kosta Brown RRV 2005 that was undrinkable, or at the least, not a wine that I would ever purposefully go out and buy. Hot, thick, clunky, this was a wine that was better distilled than consumed. Oh, and at 14.7% alcohol?! Give …

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, …

Thanks to our friend Richard at a Passionate Foodie, I was pointed to an article that made me laugh, and then cry, and then realize that I had been duped by some clever Link Baiting. The article is titled, Spain’s Wines Fall Short of their Potential and is written by David Falchek.

“I have no doubt that Spain has made strides in quality. I’ll keep checking back with Spain, hoping to uncover a winner…Until then, I’ll reach for Spanish sherry and stick with table wines from California, France, Chile and Australia.”

Let’s start with his ending quote, because it’s fantastic to see sherry highlighted as a great Spanish wine! As you all know, we’re absolutely in love with sherry, but David isolates this style as the only worthwhile Spanish wine, while good table wines can only be found in California, France, Chile, and Australia, but not Spain. Remember this, as I’ll come back to it later.

First off, he begins his article stating that Spain is a hot and an up and coming wine region. Yeah! He got that right! We an emerging wine country, and our quality is unbelievable, but wait until you hear his next statement:
That’s because Spain, long a wine-producing country, has been changing. Spain has more vineyards than any country in the world, yet is a B-lister when it comes to quality.

Many of the county’s 3 million acres of vineyards are old, unproductive and not very efficient. The industry is being modernized and recreated. Spain has the potential to make a more profound mark on the wine world than Australia had in the 1990s or Chile in this decade.

I have yet to taste the results….

Spain is very much two different wine industries: the old, low-production, shaky quality industry and the cutting-edge next generation that replanted …

This month, we’re focusing on Cava with the intent of exploring a style of sparkling wine that often takes a backseat to Champagne during the holiday season. To me this fact is understandable, and for me personally, this isn’t indicative of something negative for Spain wine mainly because I’ve always loved the underdog. As a kid, I often found that when my local sports team was doing well I drifted off and paid less attention. Maybe, I’m just a fan of drama, or merely a masochist. But for me, the upward struggle from nothing, or the fight against an established norm, has always been appealing. Ask my parents. They’ll attest to my non-conformity, and probably, will go on to tell you stories I rather not admit to. Therefore, I have an affinity for Cava, as it is the soft spoken little guy. Even here in Spain, people often mention Cava as something that plays second fiddle to Champagne, and surprisingly enough, during the holidays with an abundance of value and quality right at their finger tips, many Spaniards still turn to their neighbor’s bubbles before pouring a Cava from their own country (this does not extend to any other substance in the Spanish culture mind you).

All month, we’ll be talking about Cava in one way or another, so I don’t need to talk any more about Cava’s history or quality of value, but I do want to mention its uniqueness and what this means to me in the context of the wine world as a whole. It seems everywhere you turn today, people are decrying “Parker” wines, oak monsters, over extraction, manipulation, and “sameness” in wines. I can’t open my Google reader containing over 50 wine blog feeds and …