When we redesigned Catavino, we felt a need to expand our conversation, while allowing for a more diverse array of topics. One of our choices was to create a tourism category. We love helping to promote travel to Spain and Portugal, but in all fairness, almost everything we cover contains an element of tourism. If we write about a restaurant, it would to go under ‘food’ and ‘toursim’. Wines often talk about include elements of the winery and its availability to host tourists. Culture is almost always about an event that tourists should attend, or a social norm tourists should consider during their visit. Thus we realized, having the extra category does us little good and takes up space for what we want to call “explore“.

When we started this blog, we thought we would stick to one subject, Spanish and Portuguese wine. As anyone who lives in Iberia knows, this is far from one topic. No Portuguese or Spanish wine lover would ever group these two in the same category. Likewise, we feel that while “Iberian wine” is a nice idea we do write about these more as separate topics than one unified subject. That said, we love to “explore” the world, and so while the rest of the site is dedicated to Iberia, explore is going to be dedicated to all those things that might not fit in.

Gabriella and I love to explore, stumble, discover and pave paths that are rarely trekked. And at times, we feel like we don’t share all that we want to. For example, this past week, we visited London for the first time. And as all good adventures do, we tasted everything in sight, finding that it rarely had anything to do with Spain or Portugal. Our desire to contrast our Spanish home with other cultures and flavors led us to discover wines from Italy, Australia, Argentina, and beyond. Not to mention all the fun foods, great beers, and cultural sites, that have little if nothing to do with Spain or Portugal. All of which we want to share with you.

Now we can! Explore will most likely contain travels outside of Iberia that are not related to Iberian wine. An occasional beer tasting, some riffs on social media, business, and definitely food. I’m sure Gabriella might mention a few tidbits on yoga, running or her occasional entangling with knitting, and we’ll both talk a bit about our experience setting up a Spanish business, you never know though, the name is explore, and therefore could take us anywhere. We’re not afraid.

As a small benefit, we’ve decided to help some of you out who find that you want to read specific content on Catavino.net. From today forward, if you visit the category archive page for any of our topics, you will find an RSS icon to click so that you can subscribe just to that category. So if you like our food coverage, but not our culture coverage, just subscribe to the one you like. If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say RSS, or “feed” first go watch this: RSS in Plain English.

Enjoy the new features!

Cheers,

Ryan Opaz