Nova Cadamatre

Harvest 2011: How California became Italy

This year has had it all.  We started with heavy frost on the Central Coast, rain during bloom and spring hail.  The craziness continued with a long temperate summer which was punctuated by few heat spikes (if you can call mid 90s a heat spike out here).  Growers fought Powdery Mildew and numerous invasive insect ...

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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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Harvest 2011 – Week 4 – Grapes, Pigs, and Fun Varieties at Asti Winery

Week 4 has come to a rather quiet close as we only processed a few hundred tons this week atAsti.  It’s a drop in the bucket for what is to come this season.  We were led by Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris from the Lodi area which both had perfect Brix, crisp acids, and really ...

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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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