We were recently “tagged” by Enobytes in an internet meme circling the web that requires participants to list six things that most people don’t know about them, and then in turn, “tag” six more people (in our case, wine bloggers) to continue the meme. For those of you who don’t know what a meme is, think of it as chain mail without the added guilt. Invitations to participate on a theme are send to X number of people. If those people want to be a part of the meme, they will continue the “chain mail”; if not, fortunately, life moves on without condemning the the invitee to blogger hell.

But what don’t you know about us? What have we not divulged to you over the past 4 years writing on this site?

1. How did Ryan and Gabriella meet?

We met in the third week of March in 2001. At the time, I was working in a sushi bar, when a customer and friend, wheelchair bound for years, asked for my Reiki services at his home. Yes, your residency Iberian wine expert is also a Reiki Master, an alternative healing practice which is actually quite popular here in Spain. Under the pretense that my services would be paid with a bbq at his house after the session, I happily agreed to the terms and arrived a week later with an empty stomach. What I didn’t know was that the food, my payment mind you, was not being cooked by the person receiving the services, but by someone else. Halfway through the session, Ryan walked through the door with a briefcase filled …

It’s probably no surprise for many of you to learn  that I love shooting photos. From time to time Catavino has shown pictures I have shot, and ever since Gabriella came to work full time for Catavino, we have a protocol when visiting vineyards that leads to many more exposures than before. Gabriella is a great writer and listener, and with her big blue eyes, her job is to charm the wine maker and get the story, as I wander about shooting pics and snagging shots of this and that. It works well and I love doing it.

I suppose I had no choice but to like photography. As a child, my dad probably looked more like a lens to me than a face, as he was constantly taking shots. I would follow him around with a block of wood shaped like a camera that my Grandpa made me, shooting at everything and anything my dad took a picture of. My other Grandpa, and all my uncles, are still perpetual photo bugs. One of my uncles is even a professional photographer in Belize!

So while I still have a lot to learn, and a long ways to go, I love doing it, and I love the ability to use tools like Flickr to share my photos and Lightroom to develop my RAW photos. And for all you bloggers out there, I believe in the Internets; therefore, all of my pictures on Flickr are licensed with a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. What does that mean for you? It means I encourage you to use my photos on your blog, …

Today marks the start of the American Wine Blogger Conference. Joel Vincent, the unstoppable force behind the 2000+ member Open Wine Consortium, has taken it upon himself to create a 3 day Wine Blogger Conference to gather retailers, wineries, tradesman and wine bloggers alike to discuss the current issues surrounding the world of wine blogging. After having survived our own event, it’s strange how we look back at the first day of the European Wine Bloggers Conference and feel the same excitement, trepidation, joy and anxiety as we assume Joel is feeling now. There are no guarantees that an event will go smoothly, but the beauty of the AWBC is that it will be bringing together people who have already formed a relationship online, and who will now finally be able to put a face to the name. Honestly, the experience is amazing, and we can only wish Joel and all of the organizers the absolute best in making this conference everything they hope it to be.

GOOD LUCK and enjoy the ride! There really is something powerful about meeting with your virtual friends in an environment full of good food and wine. Our hats off to all the bloggers in attendance, and we can’t wait to hear all about it!

Iberian Map

Onto other news, Catavino is excited to be officially distributing the Delong Iberian Wine Map out of our small home in Terrassa, Spain. This was done to help reduce shipping costs from the USA, and for now, we’re only shipping to EU countries, though feel free to contact us if you live outside of the EU, and we’ll see …

Andrian Murcia, the author for Blame it on Rioja is a virtual friend to Catavino.net. That is to say, we have never met in person, but we have shared a lot of conversations online. His blog sponsored by the Vibrant Rioja campaign is full of good information and interesting takes on a region that only in the past year, Gabriella and I have truly come to love.

Vibrant Rioja, on the other hand, has helped to sponsor one of our trips to the region, and from what we can tell, is trying to get Rioja into the American dialogue through the sponsorship of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Personally, I think they could spend their money in more effective ways, but that’s not the point. They are doing something to help more people learn about Riojan wines, which is great!

Where their support of the region falls short is in regards to a recent campaign they’ve launched. A few months ago, we learned that Adrian had undertaken, with help from Vibrant Rioja and CIA (Culinary Institute of America), a project to record a series of videos of the land, culture and wines of Rioja. Needless to say, we were ecstatic. We wish we had the money and backing to do similar projects ourselves, but if smart people like Adrian are sharing their footage with the world, we’re content.

But after we quickly surfed over to the CIA website, digging down into their training video page, our elation quickly turned to sour grapes. I was presented with a page of videos, 22 in total, laid out in a grid with no …

If you’ve stayed with Catavino for long enough, it’s inevitable that you’ve heard us debate over the exact number of indigenous grapes in Iberia, and the fact that none of us are certain how many there are.  By some accounts there are approximately 400, and by other accounts, the number soars to over 1,000. This rather large numerical gap was one of the main reasons why we began our Iberian Grape Wiki (currently in a state of renovation), and the same reason why we’ve done very little with it. To keep track, fill in, and monitor such a bear of a database is rather daunting. So it sits, patiently waiting for some loving grape enthusiast to come by and fill in its rather vacuous empty spaces. If you just happen to be one of those happy grape folk needing a little project to aid the greater Iberian wine community, let us know, and we’ll put you to work

That said, my second project beyond our Grape Wiki is to complete my Wine Century Club application. The Wine Century Club is the brainchild of Steve Delong, the same mad genius who created the Delong Iberian Wine Map. His goal in founding this club, as I interpreted it, was to not only highlight the vast array of indigenous grapes of the world, but also to challenge each and every one of us to expand our palate beyond the international varieties of Chardonnay, Merlot, Riesling, etc. And despite the fact that Ryan had completed his application a few years ago, tasting 100 different grape varieties, it wasn’t until Dr. Debbs of Good Wines Under $20 started publishing her accounts of …

Guess what time it is? It’s the biannual ritual of talking about closures again. This is the time of the year when we state our preference for one over another - bitching and moaning about TCA taint, reduction or sticky plastic corks. Why do we do this? Well, it’s an easy topic and usually gets people riled up, while at the same time, making us feel that we are finally standing up for something.

Here at Catavino, our thinking has evolved from an off and on hate relationship with cork to more of a friend with fringe benefits. Currently, we’re on good standing, but aren’t quite ready to exchange house keys and buy matching travel luggage. We love the idea of cork, and its sustainable properties, but we still love our screwcaps for those fresh whites and young reds. Much to our chagrin, however, we’re finding more and more plastic corks here in Spain, and only one or two screwcap wines.

So let us state for the record that WE HATE plastic corks, and if there are bodegas out …

Since day one, I’ve wanted a map of the wine regions of Spain and Portugal. Seems like a simple request, and if I couldn’t have one of Iberia, at least you would think that there would be one of Spain and another of Portugal. You would think. You would also be wrong, sort of. Announcement

Interestingly, there are no good maps of the peninsula we call Iberia, or at least as it relates to wine. Wines of Spain, the bureaucratic agency in charge of promoting Spanish wine, does have an outdated map, but you can’t get a copy of it. I had a prominent tour guide friend of mine once ask to buy a few copies to give to her clients, all of which were on wine tours, and she was told it was not possible. Hence, I’m not sure why they made it. We had to steal a few copies from a regional government’s office, and while we use them occasionally, in truth, they are worthless.

That said, Portugal is no better, and I have yet to find a map that accurately sums up the many nuances in a very confusing set of regional wine laws. And considering that there is little consensus among differing governmental maps, it is clear that one concise and accurate map was desperately in need to be created.

Enter the DeLong wine company, creator of such treasures as the Wine Varietal Table. Having encountered way too many inaccurate regional wine maps around the world, Steve decided to fix the problem by making his own map. Smart guy! The best part for us is that …

It’s crunch time here at the Spanish office of the European Wine Bloggers Conference. Every day a new issue, a new question, and the realization that we forgot to do something! That combined with a now ever expanding desire from non-delegates to join the already full ranks, is leading to us working long hours and wondering how we keep Catavino alive. All that said, we are having fun and learning a lot. The best part though is that this conference looks to be shaping up nicely and will lead to some new conversations that need starting. I’m sure the US based conference 2 months later will also lead to great new opportunities too, and we hope that both prove to be models for what wine bloggers can do to change the wine world.

So today, we want to point out a few things that we have been wanting to talk about but just haven’t found time to put fingers to keys yet!

Vinus TV Records the first EWBC for Posterity

For all of you who can’t make it to Rioja for the Conference, and for all you readers out there who are just curious as to what a bunch of wine bloggers might do if put in one room together, well don’t worry, VinusTV is here to help. During the entire conference, they will be recording and interviewing participants for you to see live. They have promised to try to even have the 3 roundtables on the web by the end of the day on the 30th. So though you won’t be there, you can participate. We’ll also have many people twittering away and I want to put up a live chat room on the …

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 …

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 …