days of wine and marco

Welcome to my guest blogger Marco!  He's going to be doing a monthly wine blog of sort - just a quick write-up of what we drank over the month good and bad.  He's my resident Winey McWinerson....

Hey there folks! Welcome to “Days of Wine and Marco”, my first foray into writing something people may actually stumble across and read. This will be a monthly addition to “Cowgirl You Got That Something” by my lovely wife Tara.  This first post is a bit of an intro of how I got into wine and what I’ll be looking at for the most part in the coming months.  

I remember spending a weekend every fall when I was a kid with family helping my grandfather and uncles make wine in his garage or basement.  there’s nothing quite like of  having 600-800 pounds of grapes to do with as you please.  Unfortunately he liked to leave all the stems in and didn’t let the juice soak with the skins long enough to get any real body.  I didn’t love his wine, but it did plant the first seeds of interest in me and I still have his wine press and grape crusher.   A few years back I made a few batches myself for a few years in the fall when the grapes come up from california.  I got some good results...some really good results, then some bad results!   I put the equipment away for a time when I could have better temperature control, and may be getting the itch again for fall of 2009.  

Since the time I started making wine, I started buying wine.  I started trying more, and reading more as well.  A friend and I would make monthly trips to the liquor store for our Bottom-of-the-Barrel run.  This is where we’d buy the cheapest bottles in the store in search of that hidden gem.  We found the odd thing for $7 or $8 that could’ve easily sold for $10 or $12.  We found some really bad ones too, forgettable...however I’ll never forget that Louis IV that made me double over in pain as if someone had roundhouse kicked me in the gut!  

Anyways, once I started getting more adventurous with different grapes as well as price scale my whole world opened up.  I still remember my first Teroldego, now one of my favourites.

I am a little biased to the italian wines, the reason for this is that I find there’s still a lot of value out there in the italian wines, and there is still a lot of different, not so-well -known things to try.  My favourites are Sagrantino from Umbria, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano from Tuscany and as previously mentioned Teroldego from Trentino.  I’ll likely get into these wines in detail on a future post.

You will find that I won’t speak much of  Merlot and Cab Sauvignons. The reason for this is that there are plenty around, plenty of great ones!  And they will always be there for the times when I want to come back to them.  But I truly love to try the oddball and lesser known grapes of the  old world wine producing companies. My wine shopping binges tend to hover among Italy; France; Spain sections  I’ve also been buying Argentina and of course I have to support Canada, but I’ve mainly been buying Canadian wines from Ontario.   That being said, I do welcome any comments, suggestions and wine recommendations as well.  If something is recommended to me to try, and I can get it here for a reasonable price, I’ll will try it.

So a quick note on tasting, I don’t usually sit around sipping wine saying “hmm I’m tasting wild cherries; earth from the prairies, saddle leather and barnyard with an old man in coveralls standing in the middle of it!”  I just like wine.  I’ll have to make some comments on the flavors so I’ll try to keep it simple.

After all, It’s all a learning experience.