Gabriella and Ryan would like to welcome all of you who read the recently published article in the Star Tribune, our hometown paper from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bill Ward, the Star Tribune’s wine and food writer, was kind enough to meet with Ryan, while sending some additional questions to Gabriella, in order to profile our entertaining and unexpected journey.

Having just read the article, we feel that Bill did a great job overall, and despite some left out content and a few errors (such as the word el enchufe being misspelled as el enfouche), we’re ecstatic to have all of you join us from the Twin Cities. That said, we’d like to personally introduce ourselves and direct you to some of our favorite links, sites, and stories! Oh, and for those of you who only caught the article in the paper, continue on to Bill Ward’s blog to read some quotes from our lunch!

So welcome, one and all, and we hope that a few of you stick around and continue to follow us. If you know what RSS is, you can subscribe to Catavino here, and if you want to just sign up for our monthly newsletter (completely independent content) you can do so in the side bar to the right of this post.

About Catavino – General links to info about who we are

• People – Who we are, and the various guest contributors we have pitch in from time to time.
• The Story of Catavino (more or less) – A short recap of why and how we started blogging.
• Ratings Policy – As Bill mentioned, we don’t like rating wines. Hence, here is a description of our ratings policy as it stands right now

Favorite Stories – A few of our favorites!

• Ryan’s story of a very memorable dinner in La Rioja
• Gabriella’s retelling of Spanish Bureaucracy
• Wine Gadget Meme – We’ll go first
• The Fear of Sherry

Friends of Catavino, and Sites/Things you Might Want to See

• Winecast – Time Elliot, a fellow Minnesotan and wine blogger
• Tinto y Blanco - Dave Worthington is based in Australia, but only reviews Iberian wines.
• OWC – If your a wine geek, this is the place to learn about and talk about the Wine Biz!
• Adegga – Need a place to store your notes? Check out this start-up from Portugal.
• Snooth – Hands down one of the best ways to find out what wines are available in your area!
• Ablegrape – Wine only search engine! It’s all about wine, wine, wine, wine….
• Domaine547 – Buy our wine pack at Domaine547, a wine retailer who does things different.
• For the Love of Port – Roy Hersh is not only a friend, but also a Port wine addict! If you love this noble beverage, make sure to stop by his site!
• World Class Wines – Minnesota based importer, distributor and now blogger! Great job guys, and let’s hope we inspire more people to jump on the blogging bandwagon!

Videos – Some very Amateur, and Some Rather Professional, Videos. Take a Peek at Our Appalling Acting!

• Danny the Catalan Chef
• An Interview with Bruno Prats
• Oz Clarke on Iberian Wine
• Do you Think Wineries Should Focus on Adaptation, Rather than Prevention? Interview with Richard Smart and Miguel Torres
• YouTube – Assorted attempts at videos, all done by us, some better than others. Many a happy dance can be found here!

Wine Education

Wine education is near and dear to our hearts, especially when they involve Spanish and Portuguese wines. Therefore, we’ve compiled a small list of foundational articles, which have become integral in explaining the basics of Iberian wine.

• Interpreting the Spanish Wine Label
• Interpreting the Portuguese Wine Label
• Top Five Mistakes in Serving Sherry
• Wanted: Tawny Port
• Wanted: Ruby Port Wine
• The Odd Couple – Late Bottle Vintage and Colheita Port Wines
• Tempranillo: A Noble Wine Grape
• Sherry 101 – Basics of this Noble Wine!
• What Should I Know about Cava Wine?
• Portuguese Sparkling Wines

Catavino’s Many Side Projects

• European Wine Blogger Conference: Together with Robert McIntosh from the Wine Conversation, we will be hosting the first international wine blog conference in La Rioja Spain on August 29th. The conference is devoted to not only help wine bloggers enhance what we already do, but also as a means to expand our network across languages and cultures.
• WineBlogger.Info: Created as means to unite wine bloggers around the world by creating a comprehensive list of every wine blog ever created, Wineblogger.info has now turned into a resource for wine bloggers looking for information on strategy, technology, content creation and overall blogging techniques.
• Wine Blog Writing Workshop: One of the main critiques of wine blogs is that they lack scholastic training in journalism. Albeit a highly controversial claim, we decided to face the issue head-on by creating a online workshop dedicated to one objective: to improve wine writing through peer reviews.
• Regional Reports: Occasionally, we are able to schedule enough time, and drum up enough financial support, to study a topic in depth. So far, our grand adventures have led us to dedicate a month to Portuguese Table Wines, another month to Port wines and Cava (Spain’s sparkling wine), and finally two months to the wines of La Rioja.
• Lingus TV: Lingus TV is a Spanish based website designed to teach people Spanish through videos. Gabriella is copywriter for the Lingus TV blog, sharing stories of both our struggles with the language, as well as our everyday experience as expatriates in Spain.

Social Media Links – For those who know

• Facebook: Gabriella / Ryan
• Twitter: Gabriella / Ryan
• Open Wine Consortium: Gabriella / Ryan
• Flickr – Check out Ryan’s ever expanding attempt at photographing the Iberian Peninsula and beyond

Our Bread and Butter

Catavino Internet Marketing: We help wineries to use social media to better connect with their customers. This is what allows us to live in Iberia, and we are proud to be working with several great wineries in order to do it!

Contact

Finally, we would love to hear from all of you. Old friends, ex-work mates, job offers, solicitations (well not for viagra. We get enough of those in our spam folders), here’s what you do.

• Email us: Gabriella or Ryan
• Skype: catavino or gabriellaopaz
• Click here for a nice form where you can send us a note

So to wrap it all up, we hope you enjoyed a look around our site and that you might have even learned something! We’ll keep writing, and we hope that some of you come back again and say hi from time to time!

Cheers,

Ryan and Gabriella Opaz