Nova Cadamatre

Harvest 2011 – Week 5 – Things REALLY get moving…

This week we’ve started seeing far more grapes than the previous week.  Our Pinot Gris and Sauvignon Blanc were joined by our first Chardonnay of the season!  Fruit quality looks really nice and acids are still staying put thanks to the more moderate day time temperatures as well as the cool nights.  The Alexander Valley ...

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The Best Bang for Your Buck!!!: Finding Value in Wine

One of the questions I was asked to answer a short time ago is how does one tell which wine brands offer the best values for my money? This is a particularly challenging question because the answer often is “it depends”. The perception of value highly depends on the end consumer…of course this means you! You, the consumer, give the wine a value, whether you realize it or not, depending on how it makes you feel when you enjoy it (or don’t enjoy it), when you talk about it with your friends, or how it makes you feel to purchase it.

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Christmas Wines at My House

Every year, I see a ton of people doing a “What to pair with your Holiday Meal” post. Therefore my blog would not be complete without a similar post to finish off its first calendar year of existence. However I’m just going to do a run down of what is being served at my house this Christmas and what I’m pairing with it. Perhaps you can glean some ideas from it.

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State of the Harvest 9-27-10

We’re about 5 weeks into our harvest here at Asti Winery in Alexander Valley however we’re just really getting into the thick of things this week. Perhaps some of you read my blog post a few months ago, June to be exact, “Meandering thoughts on the vineyards this season” (http://www.novacadamatre.com/?p=79). At the very end of this blog post I took a stab at figuring out how the season would progress. Well it turns out that one end of my prediction seems to be coming true. Everything seems to be ripening at one time.

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My speed tour of Piedmonte

The day after Verona we headed west towards Piedmonte in search of another Italian tradition…Gelato!  This was something I was very excited about since I had always heard that Italians make Gelato very differently from ice cream as we know it.  We stopped at a little town that was recommended to have some of the ...

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Vinitaly and Verona

I was recently invited on a supplier trip to go to Italy and France to visit their production sites as well as local wineries. One of the main highlights of the trip was a visit to Vinitaly, an Italian focused trade show highlighting the wines from all over Italy. I came armed with a half empty tasting journal, two notepads, and my favorite pen plus ink refills in order to capture the day in tasting notes.

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