Posts belonging to Category Portugal

Argentina! Italy! Canada? Portugal and Spain?!

Knowing how to travel is simple. A great getaway is built on two pillars: castle and wine regions. If you want to save money yet still get the feeling of  what it is like to visit a wine region you can attend a well planned tasting. The local primo wine shop – Woodland Hills Wine Company – is really good at putting on tastings.

The November 15 2017 Las Joyas wine tasting featured seven winemakers from Spain and Portugal. Pause a moment. Imagine you are a winemaker from a little beach town in northern Portugal. You and your wife decide a national tour could be fun! You join a mini barnstorm tour and see the USA while chatting up strangers about the wine you make. Not a bad idea for a Fall activity. Like driving across country in a VW van with dogs and strangers.

Once WHWC decided it would become a tour stop they had to find a hosting restaurant. The Peasant Bistro is conveniently located two blocks from WHWC. The little food plates were ideal for the tintos and blancas…crab cakes, meatballs in red sauce, and other stuff I forgot already. All delicious without distracting from the wines. And the wines were good.

A Few Winemakers We Kept Pretty Good Notes About. Alberto Orte is the winemaker for La Antigua which produces ~2,200 cases annually. He is also a partner for Ole Imports which represents many of the wines at the tasting. In California production this small is almost a hobby. We bought the 2008 Clasico made from 40 to 80 year old vines. Head cut gnarly stumps. 60% Garnacha (tBoW’s favorite Spanish red grape. Tempranillo is fruity and fussy. Vines grown in limestone at 700 meters which is high for Rioja. Aged in neutral oak. No new oak and we could taste that. Organic and natural.

Leirana Finca Genoveva is in Galicia which is furthest west on the coast. Rodri and Ari are winemaking love birds. They showed three white wines: two albarinos, and one made from Meano Sanxenxo. One of the pleasures of wine travel and tasting is getting to try something unusual like wine made from the Meano Sanxenxo grape. Not sure I would learn anymore from being there than Albarino is not just that. Ari showed me fotos of the eight foot tall vines! The cordons start around seven feet. Their total production is…drum roll please…300 cases! Organic, natural wines aged in old oak – neutral. Thank goodness these two are sufficiently impoverished to not be able to afford new oak. We hate new oak.
There were more wines including those from the Azores [above foto of vines growing below volcanic Mt Pico]. All in all a lovely getaway from LA. Good job Daniel. Here’s an audio treat that goes with Alabarino from In Deep.

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Tahoe is to Alpine lakes like Barolo is to great red wines. Peerless. The whole damn fam assembled on the beach for 9 days. Nearly all the Young ‘Uns too; studying analogies for LSATs, living with parents hoping for a job in San Francisco, working their way through JUCOs on their way to a UC, finishing high school, and on and on and on. Good opportunity to pull corks. (more…)

As summer’s unofficial coming out party, Memorial Day weekend has lots going for it: BBQs, wine dinners, paella spectaculars with pan fried sardines …and plenty of wine loving pals. A few pages ahead on the calendar is the Topanga Art Tour and the Playboy Jazz Fest. Officially, Memorial Day is all about the red white and blue and our fighting forces. For the tBoW tasting team it is mostly about reds and whites while listening to Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn. With a salute to our veterans we report on the wines put forth by the brave tasters who fight for wines under $20 every day in the bargain bins and floor boxes of liquor and wine stores where the real gems can be found…on sale! As IGTY so aptly explains the struggle …

The IGTY Manifesto: I have to budget for 6 bottles of wine a week. At 4.3 weeks in a month that comes to ~25 bottles and at $20 per, that is a lot more than I am willing to pay. My monthly wine budget is $400 and that means hunting down wines that cost ~$16.

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With our lives governed by precious petrol we had little choice but to turn to wine as an alternative fuel source over Labor Day. The Large provided the first tasting session on a perfectly sunny SoCal day. After checking out the SW swell at Salt Creek we retired for a serious and amusing tasting dubbed Le Ruse Rouge de Mooj. The crew assembled for the avalanche of U20 wines laced with commentary heavy in fake Frénch acceñts. Let’s get to it. Many of the wines are still available.

Chris primed the tasters with a nice selection of Rosés that showcased the range of varietals and regions making up this prototypical summer beverage. (more…)

We know it’s the thick of summer when cognitive haze from the PM seems indistinguishable from the typical cloudy overcast in the AM. Looking back is easier than being there if we glide like Roller Girl does in the outstanding Burt Reynolds comeback film [ed. tBoW has Le Large cinematic hangover, do scrutinize the trailer above and Heather Graham’s debut couch scene below]. Summer IS presently in full stride and we are not always able to describe all the wines we are sampling. Here are some of what has been left on the bar with a cork in it next to the detritus of night work. Quite a haul, too, with some really nice wines from Paso, Provence and Israel just to tease your curiosity. And there will be even more next week with the Field Mouse in town. (more…)