Wine Fictions

"Decía que la comida acompana al vino y no al revés."  "She would say that food accompanies wine and not the other way round" When reaching page 394 from Aranburu's Los Vencejos  you come across this sentence which has conquered me a genuine smile.  Having felt for a couple of days like opening this Xarel.lo, I have spent quite some time deciding what to cook with it.  After having opened it for a first trying sip, my primary ideas have started to develop into something more concrete.  Its apricot dominant fruit embraced by a pleasant bitter almond which confers some freshness to it made it seducing from the first moment. There are also some notes of conference pear and white flowers. It has a rather light and delicate orange colour. This is quite a clean orange wine that can definitely conquer some more skeptical drinkers when you offer them a nature wine.  To accompany it, I have decided to cook some filled bell peppers with rice, capers, borettane and fi...

 To the people close to me it is no secret that I am a huge fan of the most efficient form of human transportation.  In fact, I can barely imagine my days without a bicycle. Sure is that the fact that I am faster to get to work with it then with public transportation or even by car. Adding to it, there is also the fact that I can almost always find a parking spot relatively easy and close to my final destination.  Of course I could keep on describing how the perception of space and time deeply changes, how the inner feeling of freedom grows to an almost perfect state of happiness but I will just state that it is something that it is as deeply connected to my identity as wine itself.  In this sense it is not surprising at all that I have found the recent Mapped videos by Madeline Puckette in both Alto Adige and Alentejo tremendously inspiring and since I have first seen it that I feel like doing something similar not only in the given regions but also in some others....

 "Can you please get me a bottle of wine from Piemonte? I have this birthday from a guy from there and a... can I pass over later on?" What, for me, is an absolutely normal phone call has, this time, driven me to some further reflection on how much certain people seem to trust my wine recommendations.  In this particularly case it was nothing too much as it was a call from a close friend, but whenever people I don't really have such a big connection to say outloud that they simply trust whatever I recommend, I do feel between flattered and puzzled.  Sure it also happens to my colleagues as there are certain customers who just want to be attended by one of us.  Somehow I find it fascinating how you manage to gain someone's trust. At least, wine wise. I do believe that a big part of the job is about this unique relationship that you can establish with customers which, in a very last interpretative point, makes them come back.  That is also the reason why you often...

Sideways has set a before and after of my relationship with wine.  It was around 2008 when I have first seen it and I still clearly remember what I have done afterwards: went to buy wine and along with two friends we have dedicated ourselves to cooking and drinking in some kind of inner euphoria that has lasted for quite some hours. From all the scenes which later became rather iconic, there is one which often invades my thoughts: the end of the discussion between both friends when Jack says to Paul that he will never find the perfect occasion to drink the perfect wines he has been collecting. As a consequence Paul ends up drinking a pretty expensive wine at some fast food restaurant. From that moment on I have made an subconscious decision to open wines that I have been reserving for special events in absolutely normal days.  And that is what I have done with this Cuvée Monsignori from Santorini. On an absolutely normal Tuesday I have invited two good friends over for dinner...

 Can wine drinking be a political statement? This is a question which has been following me for quite a while as I came across projects like Sekko Soziale (Social Secco) or Kein Wein den Faschisten (Not a Wine for Fascists). With its very clear messages against the growing right wing movements in Germany these are projects deeply identified with Hamburg and a certain political and social culture that you can experience there. Still, I have to admit that in northern Germany wine is still connected with a certain kind of elitism and exclusiveness that often excludes people from it. I sure know that this is a generalization, but it is interesting to see that there is barely any wine shop as soon as you leave the richer parts of town. And surely not independent ones. Even though there is still a predominance of older and traditional wineries, often represented by labels showing their cote of arms or chateaux in countries like France or Germany itself, there is a change going on. The ...

 There are few places where I feel much at home as the central library in Hamburg.  In its infinite chaos of people, events, places to read, work or to have a cup of coffee I feel a tremendous peace and deep sense of order in an almost Saramago 's way when he has written that " chaos is merely order to be deciphered". It is also an endless source of inspiration in what concerns what I will read next and, consequently, what I will be cooking and drinking. I know this may seem a rather wild idea connection but as I am getting older I am growing more sensitive in this very particular issue.  Through books I am becoming what Stanislaw Lem has described as a gastronaut in his The Star Diaries .  After having scrolled through Giorgio Locatelli's Siete tutti invitati I felt an urge of going back to experimenting some Italian food and I have found myself cooking some fregula with aubergine and fennel.  As soon as I have started cooking it, of course that the question...

The other day I have found myself wondering which wine I needed to buy.  Even though the answer, on a first level, seemed quite obvious to me  that I did not need any more wine as my basement is considerably full and I am drinking considerably little at home these days. Still, I thought that a white Etna wine was missing in my collection as it is something that I always like to go back to. And what about an Alvarinho from Rheinessen? That can be quite an interesting thing to try and trick close friends on a coming tasting.  This confers my wine collection an almost library feeling to it.   But unlike what happens with books, at least with mine that I have an almost existential problem about getting rid off any book that has entered the premises independently whether I have read it or not,  with wines I do end up drinking them and acquiring new ones giving the feeling of a living entity to my enoteca ( I am terribly sorry about this but the feeble translatio...

 Working with wine has multiple facettes which not all of them are positive, but the final balance is definitely a positive one. One of my favourite ones is the possibility that you are given not only to know new wines but to know the people behind them. If during wine fairs that can be a rather overwhelming experience, there are also times that I have the privilege to know the producers a bit more personally. That is exactly what happened last week, where I had the pleasure to meet Steven Schmidt and his wines.  From the seven different Rieslings that I tried (from bone dry to botrytis) this Kabinett was the one that  fulfilled me in a way that many wines have not managed before.  Allied to the typical fruity notes of peach and ripe apples, the wine has an intensive and profound smokiness which confers a rather exotic and seductive touch. Also impressive was the lively minerality which helped the wine to keep its freshness to a level that you do not feel like stop d...

 In this post I have written about the influence literature can have in what we drink.  If in Lahiri's book the references to wine appear quite often, in Misericórdia by the Portuguese Lídia Jorge there is not a single reference to wine, but the book, for me, had the taste of long well-known wines and that is exactly the reason why I have decided to open this Duas Quintas white.  A cuvée of typical white grapes from the Douro valley it presents itself with nice white peach flavours allied with some floral notes of camomile and orange blossom have matched the intense and delicate narrative built by Lídia Jorge.  I know this is a rather wild approach but I did have the feeling that the delicacy and intensity that you can find in this wine matches the feeling of eternal in the narrative that I have just read. Maybe it comes from the different fermentation processes that vary from stainless steel that confers it enough freshness to oak barrels which have given it a bit ...

 The so much expected Football European Championship has started. All around Europe people gather and celebrate the games in some kind of, for me, strange national identification. Germany, the hosting country not only of the Championship but also mine is living exceptional days. In Hamburg it is noticeable an increase on the number of police patrolling the streets (which have already avoided worst things to happen as you can check here ), the amount of people walking around in football shirts or with painted faces or the inevitable firecrackers whenever the hosting national team scores a goal. But how does it affect the wine business? This question was first asked to me by a fellow wine seller who has complained about the beer culture associated to football and the consequent decrease on wine sales. Instead of trying to answer that, I would rather prefer to ask whether is there a perfect football wine? To the customers that have came asking for wines I tended to recommend lighter, ...

 There are grapes which tend to be seen as not prestigious as others.  Müller-Thurgau is, somehow, one of them. Created by the Swiss Hermann Müller as a crossing between Riesling and Madeilene Royale, it is still associated with low quality half-dry wines which were tremendously popular in Germany during the 70s and 80s.  Even though a long time has passed since then, it is interesting to see how most customers politely deny my recommendation whenever I do it.  In fact, it is quite hard to sell it to people aged between 30 and 50 as it may recall some bad memories of wine they may have tried with their parents.  The most positive side of it is that younger generations do start having a different approach to it, specially due to its flexibility to match spicy dishes and more exotic cuisine.  And that's exactly where this Müller-Thurgau has shown a tremendous depth with elegant ripe apples, nutmeg and a slight smoky note which made it tremendously interesting...

I am compulsive. With things that I really like I am tremendously compulsive.  As soon as I finish a book, I always need a new one near by to just keep feeding my thirst for more and newer worlds. Whenever I listen about the announcement of the winner of any of the literary prizes that I do follow, I feel something growing in my chest that can only be calmed down when being in possession of a book by the author.  That is exactly what I feel about certain wines or wine styles, such as this Gemischter Satz that I have just recently tasted.  Being a wine exclusively made in the hills surrounding the Austrian capital, Vienna, it is incredibly charming to say that it is possible to drink a wine coming from such a major city. Idyllic pictures like this can easily be found or experienced. Another aspect that has also called my attention is the Gemischter Satz concept. In English it would be translated as a Field Blend. Backing to the old times where there was not such a big foc...

 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...

 In one of my previous posts I have written about the importance that labels have in our process of choosing a wine. The same is also true of our choice of not buying a wine.  It is quite interesting to see that younger customers tend to feel seduced by the labels of most of the nature wines we have ( like this one ) and the older customers to some of the traditional cote of arms such as the one from Dr. Bürklin-Wolf .  The truth is that this is, by no possible means, an indicative of a wine's quality, even though they often reveal quite a lot about its production processes or to which kind of public they want to reach.  I am also often confronted with the question of the price a wine costs. Even though the major part of the questions are about how and why is such a wine so expensive, there are also customers who openly say that they do not drink certain kind of wines as a courteous way of saying that they do not drink cheaper wines. This often comes with the covered...

 Being Portuguese I always feel tremendously attracted to cuvées as I find that they reveal a very specific kind of art in wine making which translates to an incredible extent the profile and intents of the winemaker.  I know you may be thinking: what does it have to do loving cuvées and being Portuguese? Even though Portuguese producers have been changing its patterns by producing more and more single grape wines in order to respond to the demands of the international market as well as a small part of the Portuguese, Portugal still is the country of cuvées due to its wide range of grapes.  On the other hand, Germany is a country mainly dominated by single grape wines which we can, somehow, correlate to a specific mindset and way of approaching the market. I have lost count to the amount of people who have asked me for a Pinot Gris (or the germanized Grauburgunder) without any other kind of information.  When I ask whether they want a more complex or fruitier one, I ...

 One of the things that has been going around my mind since I have started working at the wine shop is about the trust that customers lay (or not) on your abilities to identify their wine needs. It is quite interesting to make the right questions in the few seconds that the whole dialogue takes place and look for an appropriate answer within a rather short amount of time.  There are people who just blindly accept whatever you recommend them, the ones who are mistrustful and the ones who like to counterargument and get into some really nice wine discussions.  This Re Manfredi is one of the wines that I often recommend to all the ones who want a rather fruity and sweet wine without getting into  half dry ones. This is what I consider to be a wine out of the box where the sweetness of the Müller Thurgau offers an unique experience when allied to the volcanic soils of Basilicata. This makes it a perfect choice to accompany Indian or other spicy dishes. I find it really i...

 I often make myself the question on how would it be if I would now start drinking wine. Which wine would I choose first?  Would it taste any good? Would I ruin my whole experience by having an erroneous choice of a first wine? Being a Portuguese, the first choice would definitely go to a Portuguese wine, which is what had eventually happened with me. This was due to numerous reasons, being the main one the different taxing of Portuguese and foreign wines (13% vs 23%).  As I have moved to Germany I had the opportunity to get in touch with an international wine market and open my horizons to new kinds of wine.  The last one that has impressed me was this Chenin Blanc from India in what seems to be a most unlikely country to produce wine. Still, I found it quite refreshing a fairly good match for an evening at a local Indian restaurant where I have dived my senses in different kinds of pakoras and some extremely tasty samosas.  With predominant green notes and cit...

After having come across the red Barahonda  in a wine tasting with some colleagues and being considerably impressed by it, I have decided to try the white one as soon as I have seen it for sale.  The choice of grapes for this one promised from the very beginning  to be a rather pleasant and easy drinking wine due to the citrus taste of Verdejo mixed with the more flowery Sauvignon Blanc.  And so it was, resulting in a pleasant balance of soft citrus and white flowers which invade your palate from the very beginning.  One of the things that has most impressed me in it, was its persistent but fresh ending, revealing quite some seducing youth making it quite flexible in gastronomic terms or even to be enjoyed solo. This capacity of being drunk on its own reminded me of one of the most iconic American poets which has set the bases for some of the basic feelings that you may still identify in the American society nowadays, Walt Whitman. It was quite an interesting re...

One of the main advantages of living in Germany is to have a relatively easy access to wine from different regions of the world. This allows an almost infinite possibility of deepening our knowledge about not only the regions, but also about its specificity and grapes. This was the major reason that took me to buy this Tenuta del Morer. This and a pretty nice conversation with a worker from an Italian import supermarket in Bonn who has recommended it to me. As soon as the wine invaded my glass I was fascinated by its pale straw colour and by its intense perfume that seemed to fill the whole living room.  In the mouth it revealed itself different than I expected but rather fine and elegant, revealing a firm body with delicate complexity of tastes from bitter almonds to light citrus. Its ending was rather long and seducing, making it a perfect match for seafood.  Being Friulano also known as Sauvignon Vert there were a lot of aspects concerning this wine that became clear to me....