Are You Looking for the Perfect Pizza and Wine Pairing* Introduction OK…so you may be wondering why Pizza doesn’t have as simple a set of food and wine pairing rules as other foods. Blame our American habit of throwing anything that we can find in a kitchen onto a pizza. Classic Italian pizzas are easy because there are usually less ingredients which means less variations. Americans will toss almost anything onto a pizza or flatbread…BBQ…no problem…pineapple…why not…Jalapenos…of course.  A typical pizzeria will often have 20 or more ingredients on a “build your own pizza” menu. Hold my ..read more

The Stunning Piazza Navona At Night Rome…if it’s not on your bucket list, it should be. Of course, we were hitting it at the end of our trip which meant we had been travelling for the better part of three weeks out of just a couple of carry-ons, and walking 15 to 20 thousand steps per day on uneven cobblestone streets. Couple that with drinking aperitifs before dinner, Italian wine with almost every meal and of course enjoying the hell out of most meals, so we were getting pretty tired. Frankly, we were both ready to call it a day but then we got to Rome, the Eternal City. Rome is full of so ..read more

Wine Tasting in Mexico’s Valle de Guadalupe There are some destinations that just seem to hang out on your bucket list for years. Mexico’s Valle de Guadalupe was one of those destinations for me. It’s almost unknown in wine circles so let’s provide a little context. Valley de Guadalupe is in Baja California, roughly two hours south east of San Diego, an easy drive from San Diego airport and about 30 minutes inland from Ensenada (Valley of Guadalupe for the gueros in the audience…if you don’t know what guero is, google it). I first heard about it five or six years ago, while on business in Gu ..read more

  We’re back after a lengthy absence which we’ll get into at some future date and we finally have had time to start exploring new wineries again. The first on our list was Wargin Wines in Santa Cruz County. Wargin Wines Tasting Room in the Quaint Village of Soquel Their main tasting room is in Wastonville but they also have a small one in the quaint town of Soquel. This was the one that we visited. We first met Mikael Wargin when he was the vineyard manager at Burrell School winery, about 20 minutes up Soquel-San Jose road. We’ve crossed paths a few times over the last ten years or so a ..read more

Cathedral In Orvieto The next morning we drove to Orvieto, a small hill town in Umbria that had been recommended by a number of people. It sits up on a volcanic hill that has been inhabited for at least three thousand years. It retains all of its medieval character due to an unusual agreement between the German and English armies in World War II. The Germans proposed declaring it a “free city” meaning every one leaves without fighting. Each army moved 20 kilometers away and commenced the battle, leaving Orvieto unscathed. Our small B&B was near the eastern entrance of the city with a sup ..read more

If you have stumbled upon this post and are interested in checking out the first two, follow this link to learn more about Finger Lakes wineries. The Sun Emerging from the Clouds in the Finger Lakes Our last day wine tasting dawned cloudy and cool, and we were pretty disappointed that we really hadn’t had ideal weather for seeing the sought-after Fall colors but there were still two highly anticipated wineries to sample, so life was still pretty good. The first, Weis Vineyards, we had learned about from trying their wines at the Graft Wine Bar several nights before. They were excellent then ..read more

An Ominous Sky Over Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes Wine Region If you are interested in reading about our journey from the start, check out part 1 of our tasting trip in the Finger Lakes. After dealing with the obligatory covid tests for getting into Canada, we finally had a full day to wine taste and see a few sites.  Unfortunately, the ground was still saturated, and the sky looked threatenting so hiking was a “no go” even though it has stopped raining for a while. Terence, from Lakewood, our first excursion from the day before, strongly recommended Herman J Weimer Vineyards on the w ..read more

As you can tell, we are finally back to wine blogging and have a lot to catch up. With Covid going through its ebbs and flows, we’ve finally had a chance to get out and visit a few places and we’ve also been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on the site which we will be rolling out in 2022 so stay tuned. Now…back to the actual wine blog… Several years ago, a friend sent us a few bottles of Riesling from the Finger Lakes area in upstate New York. Stunning View from Standing Stone Winery in the Finger Lakes We had really begun to appreciate some of the European Rieslings, but our local exp ..read more

El Corcho Rosa: the Valle Girl Vino Tasting Room The next morning we all started out surprisingly refreshed considering the late night street tacos followed by a considerable amount of tequila.   Some evenings are filled with bad decisions.  Late night tacos in Mexico however, are never a bad decision!  One of our party-members had done some research and realized that a restaurant with an international reputation for excellent breakfasts was located in the heart of Valley de Guadalupe, La Cocina de Doña Estela.  It was awarded the “Best Breakfast in the World” by Foo ..read more

Steak with the Best Chimichurri Covid Sucks! I think that is something on which we can all agree. It took a collective crap on the Holiday season, changing everyone’s plans to some degree or another but that doesn’t mean that you have to let it ruin everything. Assuming you are stuck at home with just one other wine drinker, we’ve offered up some wine and food pairings for a whole meal that will work for just a single bottle of wine. What’s that you say?  Who only drinks a single bottle for a meal? Well more power to you, if you are a goal oriented drinker, and if that is the case, chec ..read more