Today, we have an announcement. This Thursday, if the planets align and Twitter stays live for more then 10 minutes,  we’ll be tasting wines with the prestigious wine importer, Eric Solomon of European Cellars and the new online wine retailer Binendswine.com. When I started in wine, 10 years ago, Eric’s wines were some of the first inspirations that brushed my young immature palate. Wines like Hecula from Yecla, motivated me to learn about unknown regions and wines. Hence, I was super excited when Craig Drollet of Bin Ends Wine invited Gabriella and I to help host a tasting with Eric on the micro blogging platform of Twitter. On the 17th of July, around 7pm eastern, you can sign into Twitter and taste with us, as we discuss the following wines:

Pazo de Monterrey Monterrei 2006

Pazo de Senorans Albarino 2007

Rafael Palacios Louro do Bolo Godello 2006

Burgans Bierzo “Cuatros Pasos” 2005

Bodegas Mustiguillo “Mestizajes” 2005

Castano Yecla “Solanera” 2005

Now, for those of you who are scratching your head with confusion, allow me to explain Twitter. Twitter is a tool that allows you to have conversations that are 140 characters in length with a global audience. Sound silly? It is a little silly, and it’s become one of the most important social media tools in a wine bloggers/lovers arsenal. Hard to explain, and it will take you about a week of using it to understand, but once you do it, you may find you like it. If anyone else has a quasi decent explanation, please leave it in the comments section below. That said, head over to Twitter.com and sign up. Use your real name, or something recognizable, and then search for Catavino and GabriellaOpaz, and we’ll make you our friends. Trust us, we’ll explain more later…Now back to the tasting.

If you want to buy any of the wines, you can do so from Binsendwine.com, but we are not affiliated or endorse them in any way. On the other hand I will say my contact there is Craig Drollet, who seems like a pretty nice guy! That said they do have a special price on the wines for the tasting, and you can order from them.

As a promoters of Iberian wine, we are clearly excited to be a part of a very innovative and unique wine event that pushes the envelope, similar to when Eric first brought in the great Monastrells from Jumilla and Yecla, Spain. These regions were, and to some extent still are, the back water of Spanish wine, but they are also hidden treasures that are worthy of exploration. Thus, it makes sense that Eric would be involved with this new type of wine event, once again trying something new.

As for Catavino, we’re just excited to see our name associated with a personal hero of the wine world. And although we’ve tasted the majority of the wines, they are all interesting and worthwhile to taste again. I know that most of them are widely distributed in the US, so if you can find them, please do grab a couple to pop open on Thursday with us. We’ll see where this all goes together!

Cheers,

Ryan Opaz

BTW Just talked to Craig and I didn’t know but these guys only started a few weeks ago! Glad to see people like Craig trying new things. Also we have some questions out for Eric and the minute he responds we’ll get them up here on Catavino.