Cape Town, South Africa is stunningly beautiful. It sits perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in the southern portion of South Africa. Cape Town is located at the northern end of a peninsula which terminates at Cape Point. Sweeping beaches stretch along the Atlantic and are interrupted by a rocky shoreline. The ocean is blue-green and wild along the Atlantic.
Week two of our #WineStudio exploration of Willamette Valley Chardonnay brought with it three delightful wines. We continue to be impressed with the quality of Oregon’s Willamette Valley Chardonnay.
Today is International Tempranillo Day. An entire day dedicated to the enjoyment of Tempranillo wine. If you’ve never enjoyed the variety, it’s a good time to do so. If you’re already a fan of the variety, it’s the perfect time to enjoy your favorite Tempranillo or maybe find a new favorite. Here are five delicious choices from Lodi for your #TempranilloDay celebration.
This month’s topic, Creative Thanksgiving Pairings, was a bit of a challenge. I resisted doing anything with turkey, because Thanksgiving is coming up and I’m saving my turkey overload for then. So, we decided to focus on dessert. Sounded good to us, hope you think so too!
We will be spending Tuesday evenings in November getting the lowdown on Willamette Valley Chardonnay with #WineStudio, an online Twitter-based wine education program. The discussions, organized by Protocol Wine Studio, begin at 6 pm Pacific time. You can join the conversation by following the hashtag #WineStudio. We will post a summary each week to keep you up to date.
The birch tree in our backyard has turned bright yellow, and its leaves are dropping rapidly, creating a brilliant carpet. The weather is cooling and my taste is turning once again to red wine. I do love fall.
Just ahead of the change of seasons, we recently received two red wines as tasting samples from our twitter friend Mark Aselstine (@wineclubguy). Yes, as you might guess from Mark’s twitter handle he has established a wine club, along with brother-in-law Matt Krause. It’s cleverly called Uncorked Ventures. But it’s more than just a wine club.
Mosi-oa-Tunya is the traditional name for Victoria Falls, which straddles the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia. It translates to “the smoke that thunders.” The tremendous volume of water plummeting over the falls produces not only a loud roar (the thunder) but a large cloud of spray which from a distance looks like billowing smoke.
I fell in love with Madeira over 15 years ago. First the wine, then the island. My wine exploration began with a bottle of Rainwater Madeira recommended to me by a local wineshop owner. Rainwater is a lighter style of Madeira and he suggested it would be a good wine to introduce me to the flavors of Madeira. He was right. I fell in love with the island of Madeira when we traveled there in 2002. We recently attended a tasting of Madeira wine which brought back many memories of our trip to the island.
The fourth safari destination on our Overseas Adventure Travel Ultimate Africa safari was Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. At this point in our trip we had spent nine nights in three tented camps in Botswana and Zambia. We had only three nights left in Hwange National Park before we headed back to the city (Victoria Falls and then on to Cape Town.) I tried not to think about the fact that our safari was coming to an end, but tried to remain in the moment and enjoy everything Hwange had to offer. And no, we were not tired of watching and photographing the animals!
The theme for the October Wine Pairing Weekend (#winePW) is Fall Fruits and Wine Pairings. Fall fruits…hmm that title made me think of dessert initially. But, then I got to thinking about what a fall fruit is. I pretty quickly determined that squash is a fruit, and not a vegetable as I had assumed, so that opened-up the possibility of cooking a savory dish instead of a dessert. Since butternut squash is my favorite fall squash, I set about finding a recipe using butternut squash.
We enjoy wine, food and travel. Pull That Cork is a chronicle of our wine adventures, the food and wine pairings we create and our travels which are increasingly organized around wine.
