Wine tasting notes from trips we have taken.
One of the first things we do when planning a trip to another city, even if it is a location we travel to frequently, is search for new restaurants. Eating good food and drinking good wine is important to us, especially when we travel and cannot cook for ourselves or reach into our own wine cellar. If we find a […]
We visit Scottsdale for the desert. We find the desert beautiful, even during the summer when it is at its hottest and driest. A short 20 to 30-minute drive will take you to a surprising number of desert trails where you will be away from the traffic of a large city, though it is often visible off in the distance, […]
What do wine bloggers do on a day off? Taste wine, of course. It’s a bit like a busman’s holiday — not that we’re complaining! Last Friday we took a slight detour through the southern end of Napa Valley on our way to a evening get-together with friends. For some time we have been wanting to stop and taste the […]
Ongava Game Reserve sits just south of Etosha National Park in northwest Namibia. The private reserve covers more than 74,000 acres that include rolling hills and mopane bush. As we drove from the airstrip to camp the landscape looked familiar, but not to anything we had seen in Namibia. Rather the rolling hills, dusty earth and rustling mopane bush reminded […]
As our small aircraft approached the airstrip near Damaraland Camp I was struck by the similarity of the landscape to the American desert Southwest. The wide, flat table-top mountains have those familiar, exposed, horizontal layers of colored rock. But, unlike the American southwest, the rusty red earth is dotted with green euphorbia, white ash bushes and the occasional, lone shepherd’s […]
The Namib Desert stretches for 1,200 miles along the coast of Africa beginning in southern Angola, continuing along the length of Namibia and into South Africa. Confined by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and by the central plateau in Namibia to the east, it is not much more than 100 miles wide. The Namib Desert is the oldest in the […]
That first gin and tonic, sipped in the rooftop bar of the Hilton Windhoek Hotel tasted better than any in recent memory. It wasn’t because the gin was handcrafted in small batches, rather, it was because after 35 hours of travel we had reached our destination. Namibia. We were lured back to Africa by the expansive beauty of the Namib […]
I am always drawn to a wine with an interesting backstory. And while every wine has a story my personal bias is going to take me in the direction of family winemaking and organic or biodynamic viticultural practices. Or in the direction of a winemaker resurrecting a forgotten style of wine. Winemaking in Old World wine regions using indigenous varieties will catch my eye […]
Although we didn’t know it at the time of our winery tour, Gulfi is an Arab word that translates to a pleasurable place. Gulfi Winery takes its name from the nearby town of Chiaramonte Gulfi which was established in the 6th century B.C. by Greeks who left Syracuse. Akrillay was the original name of the settlement, but its name has […]
The Scilio family has been making wine at the foot of Mt. Etna since 1815, the same date that is carved on the date-stone near the current entrance to the family home.
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.