Confessions of a Wino

Since people were asking how to navigate around this site, for example to find recommendations for a decent red wine for less than a tenner, I weakly offered a “Wino’s Favourites” page to highlight what I thought was good at the time.

This has not been a raging success so I have deleted it and instead tagged all my posts with relevant monikers to make it easier to search the site.  You can do so by clicking on your preferred phrase in the tag cloud in the right hand column of the home page.

I am in La Rioja, Spain for the European Wine Bloggers Conference.  Unfortunately, and much to the amusement of the other 39 attendees, my bag is in Palermo, Italy.  Shirts, electronics, wine samples, underwear…

So Friday morning was spent in Bilbao buying up cheap clothing to see me through the weekend.  Seems someone picked my bag off the transfer bus at Stansted Airport by mistake, and managed to check it onto their flight before noticing it wasn’t their bag and despite five increasingly desperate announcements I put out over the tannoy system.

I managed to find a few grundies and t-shirts from Zara, and El Corte Inglés (the only shop that still had any summer items).  I’ll wear a nice warm leather jacket like the next guy, but it’s 30°C here and sunny.

I was quite embarrassed to be the only person not to have wine samples at the opening evening tasting.  But this was followed by a great tapas meal at El Lorenzo in Logroño.  Jamon Serrano, and mushrooms and scrambled egg being the two dishes that stood out.

This morning we went to the awesome and monied winery, Dinastía Vivanco for the conference, a tour, lunch, and tasting.  The Vivanco family has spent invested huge amounts of wonga on a veritable palace full of Rolls Royce standard wine equipment, but the level of confidence and buzz about the place gives the firm impression that things are going well and success is assured.  Certainly the quality of the wines, for a place built in 2004, are excellent.  Rafa Vivanco, the winemaking one (Santiago is the business brother) is enthusiastic, coherent and not afraid to experiment.

There is also a superb restaurant with panoramic views across Rioja, and a museum that boasts, amongst other things, the largest collection of corkscrews in a single room, anywhere in the world (over 3,000).  I’ll blog about one or two of the wines in a later post, but if you see any Dinastía Vivanco wines (widely available in UK restaurants) I encourage you to give them a try.

Tonight was spent at another great tasting, this time provided by a huge range of Portuguese and Spanish producers, followed by more tapas at La Chata (not as good as El Lorenzo but the belly pork was awesome).  Let’s just say the scales are creaking.

Tomorrow finds us visiting a couple more wineries, including one of my favourites, Riscal.  Life could be worse, bag or no bag.

The European Wine Bloggers Conference is fast approaching and I am looking forward to meeting up with a wide range of nationalities with one common aim, to drink Rioja dry discuss maturely the status and future of wine blogging in Europe.  But my travel plans are a nightmare and I’ve really messed up.

The conference is in Logroño, which is a bloody good reason to visit in its own right, being at the heart of La Rioja.  But my flight is to Bilbao, home of the world famous Guggenheim Museum, and I booked the wrong flight back, leaving me zero time to visit.  And you know how difficult/expensive it is to change a flight with QuEasyjet.

Furthermore, my flight out is from Stansted at 7:15am which means I have to leave home at 3am to get to the airport - at least the roads will be quiet!

I sense that the travel travails will be well worth the effort for what looks like a great event.

I was going to talk about this Romanian Pinot Grigio “from Transylvania”, but like a lot of PG it is rather ordinary.  For the record it tasted a bit of grilled tomato with herbs.  La Cittadella came from the Sunday Times Wine Club in a ”Crisp Refreshing Whites” mixed case for about £60.  I suppose I shouldn’t have opened a bottle of Cloudy Bay next, which did kind of eclipse this poor Dracula juice.

Meanwhile a big fangs to Rob, Gabriella and Ryan for the hard work organising the conference and I look forward to seeing everyone there.

Twas the eve of the UEFA cup final when all through the house, nothing was stirring, not even a mouse.  However, Scots and Russians littered the streets of Manchester and made a right old din too.  In fairness, Glasgow Rangers fans travel brilliantly and even though they lost the final (2-0) they remained in great spirit, and enormously friendly.

One of the advantages of writing a weblog is that on average it connects you to much more interesting people than, say, Facebook, or visiting a cup final.  Having previously conversed only in cyberspace, Rob kindly invited me to a wine tasting in Manchester.  I wasn’t about to say no to the opportunity to taste more wine, never mind meet a new face, so….erm….. I said yes.

The evening was jointly hosted by Kro2 bar, Dinastia Vivanco, Castillo de Clavijo, and Bibendum.

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…at promoting themselves, but I still seek them out as often as I can.  Especially those that share my values, humour and, above all, pure enthusiasm for food and wine.  I find the content of most such British blogs to be informative, amusing, and interesting.

My latest find could equally well have been named Confessions of a Foodo, but in fact, the author chose the equally witty title Gastroplod.  I think her stomach is in Provence and her liver in Burgundy but her head is clearly in England.

Well worth a glance.

If you are looking for more wine related weblogs, you could check out the “other good sites” list on the right of my home page.

Or you could try a new site aggregating blogs across the web http://wine.alltop.com.  Here you will find links to the latest posts from a wide range of quality blogs including most of the ones I read regularly.

The weblog world has been accused of being unreliable, even corrupt.  The key to getting the best information is to read around and not take one person’s view as gospel.  The blogosphere, in my opinion, is no more corrupt (and may be less so) than professional journalism on average.  However, it is true that we bloggers are not held to the same benchmarks as published authors in the regular press.  This is both an advantage and a disadvantage of the blogosphere.  It enables us to speak freely without fear of advertisers pulling lucrative contracts, but conversely does sometimes allow un-researched opinion to be presented as fact, so it is worth reading around for the aggregated view.

Readers who idle here more than once in a Preston Guild are sure to have experienced problems accessing the website recently.  Regular “500″ errors and database connection problems were almost exclusively caused by my (former) ISP, Streamline.net.

Streamline is cheap but, as in the wine world, you usually get what you pay for.  The quality of service from Streamline has been abysmal both in database uptime, and customer service.  You can read one of my rants, if interested, at my other blog.

So I have put my metaphorical bottle of Echo Falls in the bin and upgraded to a nice Argentinean Malbec.  Well you didn’t expect me to choose an expensive French ISP did you?  Here’s hoping that the site is more reliable from now on.

I was casually browsing around the wine blogs I usually read (see “Other good sites” on my home page) and found time to follow a few links to new sites I have not seen before.  Why not mosey around yourself and see if you like:

Winos and Foodies - Barbara is the Aussie wino and foodie returning after a stint in the land of kiwis.  Lively and fun.

Chez Pim - possibly the best travelled and restauranted lady in the blogoshpere.  Name a posh resto - she has eaten there.

Wino Sapien - Edward the doctor from Oz who you might expect to focus on wines from down under but in fact reviews wines from all over the world with an elegant writing style.

Pour More - a new blog from Carol, formerly writing at Celebrate Wine.  Only a couple of posts so far but already looking interesting.

The Wine Wanker - see through the risqué title (risqué in the UK at least) and you will find Jules, an intelligent and informed wine lover from Wellington, New Zealand.

The Chicken Out Campaign - I used to think Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was a stuck up tosser but his River Cottage TV series got me hooked, and I love his views on animal husbandry and how this relates to the food on our plate.  His latest campaign to promote free range chicken in place of the cheap supermarket (2 birds for £5 anyone?) chickens is really important.  Cruelly kept in dark sheds at a density of 17 pale and weak birds per square metre, for 39 days without ever seeing daylight, suffering massive discomfort at best, the luckiest birds get lame or diseased, and slaughtered early.  This practice has to stop and I urge you to sign up for the campaign.  The cost argument does not stack up for me - I would rather eat no chicken, than the cadavers of soulless inmates held to unjustified life imprisonment by supermarket accountants.

Seattle Wine Blog - OK I haven’t really read much of this one.  It may be great, but I really included it in memory of the Seahawks glorious victory over the Redskins last weekend and to wish Seattle best wishes for their first post-season win on the road since 1983.  Green Bay - watch out.  I predict that Seattle will win the NFC Championship but despite my huge optimism, I can’t see them beating the Patriots in the Superbowl.

I am so impressed with Wordpress - it is the platform for both my blogs.  But I may have stepped over the line in my loyal devotion, because I am the new, and proud, owner of a Wordpress T-Shirt.

I now have two real concerns about wearing it.

1. The only people who will recognise the logo will be geeks, and I will look like one myself.  Do I have to stop shaving?  Should I start wearing sandals (and socks)?  What do I do if I get approached and asked an awkward question?
2. As a Manchester City fan, the colour red (Man United) is anathema to me.  What if people think I am a Man United supporting geek?  Come on guys, can we please have a blue T-Shirt next????

Have you checked out the Wine Life Today website?

I found it recently and thought it was a great idea.  If you have ever heard of Digg, you are probably a bit techie.  Nonetheless, I’ll press on.  Digg is a news aggregation and bookmarking website that allows users to vote for (Digg) the best stories and these get promoted onto the front page so they get a better chance of being read by busy folk.  But Digg is really aimed at geeks so if you look for softer categories like wine and food for example, you will not find them.  So someone had the great idea of a Digg for wine and decided to call it Wine Life Today, only instead of Digging, you Toast the news item.

Now there are two other differences between Digg and Wine Life Today.

1.  Digg is well used and Wine Life Today is not - the most toasted post I could find only had 10 supporters.  The top Digg article had 41,619 - hmmmm.

2.  Digg has a good algorithm and WLT is totally rubbish.  It looks like any post of any age will make it onto the front page with only 4 Toasts.  Today there is a post three days old with 5 toasts that is above a three day old post with ten toasts.

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