In the age of social media there appears to be a growing trend amongst wine lovers to post a photo of the wines that they have enjoyed over the Christmas holidays. I immediately thought to myself, why should I be any different? I guess it’s the time of year that you might dig around in your ‘cellar’, and dust off a couple of exceptional bottles to quaff with your special menu – wines that you generally don’t get to savour on a regular basis.

I know that I have recently preached about the virtues of albariño with turkey, so I think it only fair to point out that our Christmas lunch actually comprised a very nice sirloin of beef (with Yorkshire puddings of course), which is why we selected quite a voluptuous red wine to go with it. Roast beef is of course, far from being traditional at Christmas, but as it is not very common at all here in Spain, it therefore automatically becomes a special treat – perhaps a bit more for me than for Angela….

Cheers!

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We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our friends and customers around the world for your continued support. We send you our warmest wishes for the holiday season, and wish you a happy, healthy and (mutually) prosperous New Year.

Andrew & Angela[:es]

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our friends and customers around the world for your continued support. We send you our warmest wishes for the holiday season, and wish you a happy, healthy and (mutually) prosperous New Year.

Andrew & Angela

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Fortune Magazine is one of the World’s most important and influential magazines. Part of the Time Inc group, it is probably best known for it’s Fortune 500 listings that ranks America’s top companies (these companies account for $12.5 trillion in business revenues and employ 26.8 million people around the world).

They have also made a list of “The 20 best wines for holiday parties“, and yes, you’ve guessed it, they have included our Bodega Castro Martin in their top 20! Rubbing shoulders with some very illustrious names – Jadot, Fevre, Mondavi, Jansz & Antinori, they kindly wrote:

Bodegas Castro Martin 2013 Sobre Lías Albariño Rías Baixas ($20) Serve this palate-priming Spanish white as guests arrive: It’s all about minerality and brisk acidity, but has just enough stone and tropical fruit flavors to round it out.

Great as a holiday aperitif, or perhaps with Turkey!

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I wrote about the possibility of drinking Albariño with your holiday turkey – and now our denomination office appear to be sending the same message. Today they have changed the header on the official D.O. Facebook page. It is now resplendent with turkey…. Happy holidays to one and all!

The choice of what you drink over the holidays may depend, to some extent, on what you are eating. Having said that I should add that I am actually a great believer in the idea of drinking the wines that you really enjoy drinking, regardless of whether they are considered the perfect match for your food. Personally, I always enjoy a nice glass of Champagne, not just over the holidays, but actually at any time of year. I don’t need an excuse…

My focus today however, is more to do with winter warmers rather than just wine, and so is perhaps aimed more at our northern hemisphere drinkers, rather than those enjoying their festive turkey bathed in warm sunshine. Those lucky enough to live in the mountains, or maybe just spending their holidays in the snow, might be sipping a hot gluhwein, or my personal favourite aprés-ski tipple, jagertee (black tea, wine, rum, brandy, orange juice & spices). Two cups of jagertee and I could conquer the Hahnenkamm!

The choice of winter drinks is endless, and is not restricted to just mulled or spiced wines – many of the recipes can also be applied to cider or ales, and then don’t forget your liqueur coffees or chocolate based drinks. The list goes on, for example you might easily be offered a choice of toddies, nogs, punches, cocktails, nordic glöggs or Olde English wassail.

Final reminders: You can still drink albariño over the holidays, and……. make sure you are stocked up on Alka Seltzer (or milk thistle)!

[:en]So what will you be eating this Festive Season? Thanksgiving has come and gone, or “Turkey Day” as one of my American friends called it recently. Probably the most traditional festive lunch in the UK is still turkey, which not that long ago was considered as very much a luxury food item. Of course, these days it is much more widely available, and therefore consumers are always looking for something a bit more ‘luxurious’ to spice up this special time of year. An alternative that crops up more frequently now are the stuffed poultry variations, such as ‘turducken’ (turkey stuffed with duck and chicken). This idea, however, is not something new – in the 19th century the practice of using almost any combination of bird, stuffed one inside another, was not uncommon on the well-to-do dining tables of Europe. Anyway, as always, I digress a bit.

My point is that at this time of year we probably eat more than we should, and treat ourselves to foods and dishes that we wouldn’t normally eat during the rest of the year. For example, the British eat traditional festive desserts that can be pretty stodgy and probably quite unhealthy, consisting of heavy, almost black, treacly, steamed fruit puddings followed by equally heavy, black fruit cakes. They can feel like lead weights even before they enter the stomach!

One of my own little treats (not especially associated with the festive period), is the British pork pie. Pork pie is a traditional meat pie consisting of roughly chopped pork sealed in a hot water crust pastry, and can be eaten cold as a snack or perhaps as part of a meal. As you might imagine such ‘specialist’ food items are impossible to find in Spain, and there is no Spanish equivalent that I can eat as an alternative. The only option therefore, is to make them myself. It’s a labour of love, but in my opinion, worth the effort…. My own personal Christmas treat![:es]So what will you be eating this Festive Season? Thanksgiving has come and gone, or “Turkey Day” as one of my American friends called it recently. Probably the most traditional festive lunch in the UK is still turkey, which not that long ago was considered as very much a luxury food item. Of course, these days it is much more widely available, and therefore consumers are always looking for something a bit more ‘luxurious’ to spice up this special time of year. An alternative that crops up more frequently now are the stuffed poultry variations, such as ‘turducken’ (turkey stuffed with duck and chicken). This idea, however, is not something new – in the 19th century the practice of using almost any combination of bird, stuffed one inside another, was not uncommon on the well-to-do dining tables of Europe. Anyway, as always, I digress a bit.

My point is that at this time of year we probably eat more than we should, and treat ourselves to foods and dishes that we wouldn’t normally eat during the rest of the year. For example, the British eat traditional festive desserts that can be pretty stodgy and probably quite unhealthy, consisting of heavy, almost black, treacly, steamed fruit puddings followed by equally heavy, black fruit cakes. They can feel like lead weights even before they enter the stomach!

One of my own little treats (not especially associated with the festive period), is the British pork pie. Pork pie is a traditional meat pie consisting of roughly chopped pork sealed in a hot water crust pastry, and can be eaten cold as a snack or perhaps as part of a meal. As you might imagine such ‘specialist’ food items are impossible to find in Spain, and there is no Spanish equivalent that I can eat as an alternative. The only option therefore, is to make them myself. It’s a labour of love, but in my opinion, worth the effort…. My own personal Christmas treat!

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I think it would be fair to say that one of my very favourite pastimes is cooking (which is quite common in the wine business). I find it not only very satisfying, but also quite therapeutic and relaxing, often listening to the radio with a glass of beer in hand.

It doesn’t how much experience you have or how many books you read on the subject, there are always new techniques to learn and new equipment to buy. In my kitchen for example, I often use a Sous Vide water bath which is really great way to preserve flavour and stop food from drying out.

Until recently I was a disciple of gas hobs and electric ovens as being the best possible combination (and to an extent I still do), but I have to confess that my head has now been turned by some powerful new witchcraft known as ‘induction’. I became frustrated by the poor layout and design of my gas hob, restricting the number, size and combination of pans that I could use – it defied logic and was very irritating. After extensive deliberation and much research, I finally decided to go induction!

It’s still early days with my new Neff hob, but wow! I have to say that I am just a little blown away. Clean, fast and responsive, I have opted for a model with two large cooking areas (that can be divided into smaller segments if needed), meaning that it works rather like a professional solid top oven range, or an Aga, whereby you more or less position pans exactly where you need them.

There is only one cautionary footnote to my tale of Seasonal joy – your pans need to be suitable for induction otherwise you will simply need to replace them……

About a month ago our website suffered a ‘brute force login attack’. Now, to be perfectly honest I’m not sure how or why a hacker would want to attack a winery website, but the net result was that our site was down for about 2 hours (one Sunday morning).

The solution has been to do a significant upgrade, and to install the latest security protocols. Inevitably this has not been without its teething problems, and the system is now so secure that I’ve had one or two problems logging in myself! Recently I have been timed out, and then locked out completely when I try to log back in again! At present our WordPress based site appears to allow me about 15 minutes to make new entries before it eventually throws me out, so there is only one solution (in the short term) – I have to learn how to type faster!!

Black Friday is a comparatively new phenomenon in Europe, which is hardly surprising when you consider that we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. I am not altogether sure about the origins of Black Friday but I believe that it was created to celebrate the life of Saint PayPal, the patron saint of shopping (from the High Church of Amazon). His followers now make an annual pilgrimage, the day after Thanksgiving, to their nearest centre of worship, sometimes referred to as a “Mall”. Worshippers can be extremely fervent and have been known to become completely overwhelmed by their shopping experience – a true ethereal, frenzied, almost violent experience.

Very thoughtfully, the weak, infirm and overfed (from too much turkey) are also catered for, as it has now been made incredibly easy to ‘worship’ online.

A couple of weeks ago we had yet another significant Friday in our calendar – Friday 13^th. Now, I personally don’t suffer from friggatriskaidekaphobia, but there were a couple of coincidences that made me stop and think for a moment. We were planning to bottle of a tank of wine, and one of the dates pencilled in was Friday 13^th. Generally, I wouldn’t think twice about it, until I realised that we were planning to bottle tank 13, and that the allocated sequential Lot No. for this bottling was also to be 13…… We bottled on 11^th instead!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and so the obvious question arises, which wine should you drink with your turkey (or whilst watching the NFL)? Of course I could tell you that albariño is not bad with white meat, assuming that it is roasted in the traditional way and not served with some exotic sauce, but if I was to put my hand on my heart, I would have to admit that there could actually be better food/wine matches for turkey. Unfortunately, in our business, there are far too many producers who would swear blind that their particular wine is great with everything, including pumpkin pie, but I’m just not one of them!

It’s just a great pity (from our point of view) that today’s traditional Thanksgiving menu does not accurately reflect the menu of the very first Thanksgiving meal back in 1621. When the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest and invited the local Native Americans to eat at their table, the foods on offer were almost certainly a little different, or so the historians would have us believe. Not only would they have consumed fowl such as duck, goose, swan or perhaps even turkey, but it is also suggested that they may have eaten deer that their Wampanoag guests offered up as an additional menu item. The very first harvest was apparently quite abundant and also provided the pilgrims with onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots, peas and perhaps some corn, but being in New England, it is also quite likely that some seafood might have been consumed. Mussels, lobster, bass, clams and oysters could also have been part of the feast, but regrettably not with any albariño, that didn’t arrive until a few centuries later!