‘Twas the night before Conference, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a computer mouse;

The nametags were hung by their lanyards with care,
In hopes they’d be worn when they bloggers arrived there;

Each and every wine geek were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of black-cherries and licorice danced in their sweet heads;

While I sat panicking over every tiny detail,
Ryan smiled proudly regarding the conference’s grand scale;…

Yeah, not going to happen! Our creative juices are completely dehydrated. The conference is now on cruise control, and barring any strange twists, we should be enjoying a fine Participant tasting on Friday night. Still a bit nervous? Of course! Seeing that this is our conference, or rather, this is the first international wine bloggers conference ever, we just hope all the wine bloggers behave themselves!

So for now a few pointers too things we think you should look at.

Another winery sent to the sidebar

This time it’s Port wine, and damn fine port wine at that, Quevedo. A few months ago, we started working with this small winery and we’re proud of the results. Located in the Douro Valley, right next to some of the most historic wineries in the region, this is a young winery with old roots. We’re holding back a bit on the details, because they’ve done a superb job telling their story at this point. So, please check them out and say hello from us!

Thank you Sponsors

We don’t do advertising on Catavino, but we did need sponsors to help us put together the EWBC conference. Therefore, we’d like to offer a …

Whoo hooo! We did it! We’ve finally released our best newsletter to date, or so we humbly believe. Having started this adventure last November with a full report on Port wines, followed by a second newsletter on Spanish Cava wines, we are ecstatic to announce our third newsletter on La Rioja wines. After 3 weeks of 16 hour work days, we are proud to give you….drum roll please….!

We created a website dedicated to the wines and food of La Rioja, along with many other fun treats, including: an interactive map of Rioja, marking our experiences throughout our seven day trip; a full album of La Rioja photographs displaying everything from the smallest winery we experienced at Bodegas Arranz-Argote to the most ingenious barrel hoisting device at Bodegas LAN; a complete archive of every article we’ve written at Catavino.net on Rioja; an explanation on Rioja cuisine; how to read a Rioja label; and to top it all off, 30+ winery profiles and 200+ tasting notes! We hope you enjoy it!!

Here are some things you should know about this project:

1. We will continue to update our La Rioja report each and every time we taste a Rioja wine. No matter if it is tomorrow, or in three years (assuming Catavino will survive that long ;-)), this archive will build upon itself to create a lattice work of interconnected tasting notes, winery profiles, articles and photos.

2. You are a integral part of our Rioja report’s success. We ask you to please add your comments under any and all Rioja wines, …

Now that our Rioja is coming to a close, with only a few remaining articles in queue to be published, it’s time to give you the skinny on whether or not it’s worth your time to pick up the all knowing Spanish wine expert, John Radford’s, book on La Rioja. Published in 2004 by Mitchell Beazley, now Octopus Publishing, this a great book for anyone with deep passion for Rioja wine or who simply enjoy a good reference book for their library.

Having already read several of Mitchell Beazley’s books, we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. Would it be a bone dry read that could be used a sedative before bed, or would it actually be engaging, adding a little depth and spice to a rich cultural tradition? To be honest, it was a bit of both. The majority of the book is used as a directly of over 400 wineries in La Rioja, containing everything from the name of the winemaker to how many hectoliters are produced annually. However, as a result of John’s wit and curiosity, you’ve also got a great story on John’s visit to the wineries, an in depth looks at the history of the region, as well as several cultural tidbits of information that give you more than simply a directory.

Over the past two months, I’ve used this book to aid in my research on the etymology of Rioja, the different classifications of Rioja wine and general information about specific wineries that we couldn’t visit but tasted their wines, such as :Martinez Laorden, La …

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; …

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 …