The seasons are changing and so are many peoples wine choices. What do you notice you switch too as the temperature lowers, and the dinners become more robust? For many, sadly white wine gets sidelined due to the temperature, preferring to save those crisp whites for warm summer picnics.

About a month ago, we received three bottles of Ribeiro wines, all of which seemed very intriguing. Sadly cold weather, lots of work, and a killer sore throat pushed off our tasting. But last night, with our trip to India approaching in a few day’s time, we took the plunge and decided that in light of a week long adventure in spicy food, we should at least pop open some bottles that should potentially go incredibly well with this type of fair. Enter 3 wines from the producer: Coto de Gomariz

Taken from the P.R. Grisley site:
Located in the Ribeiro region in Galicia, Coto de Gomariz is made up of several vineyards covering a total of about fifty acres in the districts of Gomariz, Vieite, Esposende and Beade.

In 1979 the Figueiral estate was recovered and became the first of the properties to be included in the Coto de Gomariz vineyard terrain. This marked the first step towards restoration of the native Ribeiro varieties, including Albarino, Treixadura, Loureira and Godello varieties.

Coto de Gomariz wines are the result of a unique combination of an Atlantic climate, low levels of rainfall, long hours of sunshine and sharp contrasts between daytime and nighttime temperatures, as well as an unusual granitic soil.
While all three wines stood out as …

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, …

Where do I begin this rambling and nonsensical post, filled with random bits of information that don’t really deserve a full post onto themselves, but that still need to be said? Well, where else than our “Iberian Links Around the Web”! Similar to your kitchen junk drawer, this post is filled with interesting bits of information that you may not ever need, but may come in use when you least expect it.

The Sixth….Taste

Granted, although we don’t have Haley Joel Osment scaring us with his momentary episodes of seeing dead people, we can be equally freaked out the next time your buddy turns to you after drinking a glass of wine and says, “I’m not really getting a bitter flavor here, but maybe more of a calcium-y taste”. According to Science Daily, beyond sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami (similar to savory), humans also have a sixth taste receptor for foods that taste, well, like calcium - a flavor bordering between sour and bitter. It explains why foods that are generally high in calcium such as bok choy, kale and collards, generally come off as bitter if not cooked in a few sticks of butter so that the calcium can bind to the fat cells; whereby, preventing you from tasting it. In relation to wine, it just may explain why some wines are described as more minerally/calcium-y, and can therefore, be monitored in order to obtain a better taste profile. Can you pick out the sixth calcium-y taste in a wine?

Hey, That’s What We Needed! Another Roadblock to Enjoying Sherry!

Chef Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck Restaurant in London, and scientist Professor Don Mottram of Reading …

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 …

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 …