by Keith Wallace
Northern Italy Wine PairingsItaly is the country of multiplicity and it’s hard to make generalizations. This is especially true when considering the food & wine pairings of the northern regions. From the borders by the Alps to the northern coastal areas on Ligurian and Adriatic seas, indeed, elevation, climate and landscapes can change radically, and can therefore determine a wide variety of different products.By and large, we can identify four iconic kinds of wine from Northern Italy.From west to east, with some interesting deviation, they are: Full bodied, long-living red wines Charmat-Martinotti method sparkling wine Mineral and elegant white winesPiedmont red winesBarolo is the name of a small hamlet by the small town of Alba in the (not so small, to the Italian parameter...
by Dean Morretta
From MD to BU… that is the path of Kerith Overstreet, owner winemaker of Bruliam Wines.All delicious bottles from this California producer displays the Bruliam Wines logo, a riff on the Periodic Table of Elements. The center of the logo bears “Bu”, an amalgam of Kerith’s three children, and a nod to her past career in medical science as an MD. Their motto: “Wine is elemental”.We met Kerith Overstreet during her trip to New York last week and learned of her path from medicine to wine, while tasting one of the most elegant Sonoma Pinot Noir’s we’ve experienced. Kerith, a California native, has a some New York in her background. She graduated from Cornell University in 1994, and then returned to California and her husband, Brian Overstreet.Together, they shared a love for ...
by Dean Morretta
They got the saying wrong. Behind every good woman is another good woman. Today’s story of Emmolo Wines is really a tale of two women: Cheryl Emmolo and her daughter Jenny Wagner. One can only wonder if Cheryl, when launching Emmolo Wines in 1994, imagined that roughly twenty years later she’d hand the reins over to her daughter. Now, Jenny's winemaking expresses her individuality while continuing her mother’s work.Jenny’s wine roots start long before mom Cheryl. Her great-grandfather Salvatore Emmolo immigrated from Italy to the Napa Valley and founded a grapevine rootstock nursery in 1923. The nursery became a leading supplier to the Valley’s winemakers for decades, and grew phylloxera resistant vines, the resistant vines that continue to protect the industry from repeat...
by Dean Morretta
It’s time to start previewing the tasting wines for the upcoming Go-Getter Girls & Grapes on May 17th! Go-Getter Girls & Grapes is a women's professional networking and wine tasting evening, featuring global wines made by female winemakers and owners. Tickets are $15 and are still available for the next event at http://www.elizabethmillerwine.com/gogettergirlsgrapes.Wine #1 is from the Lady of Morellino herself: Fattoria Le Pupille Morellino di Scansano Reserva DOCG 2012. Who is The Lady of Morellino? Elisabetta Geppetti, owner and head of Fattoria Le Pupille in Tuscany for almost three decades. Elisabetta’s entrepreneurial ability and tenaciousness has made her estate the anchor of the region in an otherwise male dominated industry.In marriage, Elisabetta became part of the famil...
by Dean Morretta
Listening to Greg Gove’s life in wine is like driving down the North Fork Wine Trail. We met for breakfast on a very rainy morning at the charming Love Lane Kitchen in Mattituck. I was excited to meet this veteran North Fork winemaker, whose new label Race Wines had been selling so well at Vintology. The conversation led us from winery to winery, and into the real science of making wine on Long Island.“19 grams of sugar gets you a sparkling wine. 35 grams of sugar gets you a court date,” said Mr. Gove, humorously discussing a new sparkling wine he has in the works. Our conversation was filled with both his humor and clarity in explaining complex winemaking principles, a talent that likely came from studying chemistry in college. He went Cortland and Columbia Universities, and l...
by Dean Morretta
Bravery is not absent in Valentina Buoso. When she took over as winemaker at Pascal Jolivet in the Loire Valley in 2013, she was filling the shoes of a predecessor with 22 years at the renowned domaine. Her 2015 Sancerre Rosé, which we’ll taste at the upcoming Go-Getter Girls & Grapes, is proof that she’s not only filled those shoes, but she’s running in them.Ms. Buoso and I recently discussed her winemaking background in a transatlantic email conversation. She grew up in northeastern Italy, in a small village between Venice and Verona. Though she was surrounded by wine production, in the area best known for Prosecco and Valpolicella, it wasn’t until the age of 16 that she became interested through a tasting course at school."My tasting professor at that time introduced me to ...
by Dean Morretta
Sometimes industry makes the man, sometimes the man makes the industry. Every now and again, the man and the industry grow together. Such is the case for Richard Olsen-Harbich, veteran winemaker and author of AVAs, whose career has established and refined the Long Island wine region. I recently met with Olsen-Harbich in his winery office at Bedell Cellars in Cutchogue to discuss the story of Long Island wine.A Big Red StartOlsen-Harbich’s resume spans some of Long Islands most famous wineries and wineries long since closed. Before that first bottle, however, he was an agronomy student at The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. Its prestigious viticulture and enology program was not yet established and Olsen-Harbich puzzled pieced together a study of wine,...
by Alvin Starkman
The southern Mexico state of Oaxaca is currently known for its production of mezcal, the iconic agave based Mexican spirit. For decades it has also been known tourism, because of its beaches, craft villages, pre-Hispanic ruins, cuisine and colonial architecture Oaxaca had three hotels ranked in the tripadvisor.com 2016 Travelers Choice Awards in the category of top 25 bargain hotels in the country. However, for a state which relies almost entirely on tourism for its very existence, Oaxaca badly trailing in other categories does not bode well. And but for the beach resort towns of Mazunte and Huatulco, the state would have been almost shut out entirely. Tulum, by contrast, has come out of nowhere to rank first of the top 25 world destinations on the rise. Can mezcal turn Oaxaca’s to...
by Catherine E. Fallis Master Sommelier-planet Grape
I love former West End actor Oz Clarke’s description of New Zealand’s brash, pungent Sauvignon Blanc, an iconic style created by Cloudy Bay winemaker Kevin Judd. He calls it a“cloudburst, thrilling, shocking, lime zest, capsicum, love me or leave me” style of Sauvignon Blanc.Kevin Judd, who produced the winery’s first 25 vintages and who now has his own winery, Greywacke, had no idea this blend of green and tropical flavors would take the world by storm. He had the idea of blending in the green, tart early picked wine his crew loved so much to with fruit picked just ripe as well as some that was overripe and tropical.Now some winemakers are dialing back on these opulent flavors, both the thiols, tropical passion fruit and pineapple, and methoxypyrazines, Sauvignon Blancs’s sign...
by Dean Morretta
Take my wine, I’ll survive. Take my olive oil, I’ll get by. Take them both… I don’t even want to go on.Fortunately, there was no shortage of either at Tarry Market last weekend in an olive oil class with Nicholas Coleman, Chief Oleologist at Eataly. Oleologist? Think Master Sommelier of olive oil. In fact, I related most of what I learned during the class about olive oil to wine, discovering some serious parallels between the two essential delicacies.Coleman stated the main contrast: wine must be made, while olive oil is simply waiting in the olive to come out. Otherwise, you could easily have substituted ‘wine’ for ‘olive oil’ in the class conversation and had it all still make perfect sense.Olive oil and wine are agricultural buddies, today and in history. Both origi...
