Wine Fictions

 One of the most exciting things about working with wine is to come across its multiple facettes and how human interference on the fermentation process can produce such different and surprising results.   It has also been quite interesting to follow how knowledge has been reopening older styles of producing wine such as the one that I want to write about today. Having its origins in Georgia for over 6000 years, producing wine in clay amphorae is becoming more and more popular all around the world barely surprising the most common of wine drinkers, having become a viable option to age or even ferment wine instead of the more common oak barriques or stainless steel.  To know more about it, I recommend you this article by Vero Vino . But going to this Beaulieu.  In the mouth it is incredibly fresh with vigorous tannins that develop into some earthy notes as you let it breath.  It can be the power of suggestion, but I have felt some terracota notes on it. That ...

 When I was 16 I have experienced my first literary obsession.  During a summer job on an archeological site in Santarém, an archeology student has recommended me Franz Kafka . As soon as I have started reading the first pages of the Metamorphosis , it was clear for me that I needed to read all the other works as the doors to a completely new world  have just been opened and I felt my mind blowing with images and ideas that never occurred to me before.  With José Saramago it happened exactly the same and till his death in 2010 whatever new book came to market, I would immediately run and buy it, only feeling truly at peace when finishing it. His death has hit me as if the one of someone close.   In a much smoother way, the same has happened with Safran Foer , Sasa Stanisic , Valter Hugo Mae , V ila-Matas and Irvine Welsh among others. But the question that I would like to make now is whether it is possible to feel the same about a certain wine. During my...

 How can what we read influence what we drink? If, on the one hand, it is already proven that listening to certain kinds of music can condition or influence not only how you perceive wine but also your shopping behaviour, as this study indicates ,  can reading also play an influence on your daily wine decisions. While recently reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Roman Stories   I was often confronted with a tremendous desire to have Italian wines. This feeling has grown so much inside me, that yesterday at a tasting in the shop where I work I have ended up choosing four Italian wines out of five I have given the guests to try.  Of course there was someone who has asked me the reason of my obsession and I just simply admitted that I was on the verge of finishing Lahiri's book. For the guests who knew me there was a complicity laughter. From the others, there was a rather puzzled look at me.  Nothing that you cannot conquer with the quality of Italian wines. Even though not a...

Since I have started working directly with wine that I have been having the privilege of being in some of the premium locations around Hamburg listening to really interesting people talking about what Germans often define as "the most beautiful drink in the world". This is quite a privilege, I have to admit. I have been learning about wine in ways that I have never expected, definitely enlarging my horizons.  Still,  I have to admit that having been born in the middle of one of the biggest wine producing regions in Portugal ( the second,  according to 2020 reports ) where wine is cheaper than beer,  puts me in a position that most northern Germans envy, as wine is seen as something "normal" for me and not the result of an accurate training or learning procedure. This does not mean, in any way, that I am more skilled or qualified than any of the people I have came across lately. Most of the times it is the other way round as I tend to rely on my natural instincts ins...