What a week! We've added not one, but three new authors to the mix. Please join me in welcoming both Suzie Linville and Lisa Comento to the authors here at At Least I’m Enjoying the Ride! Both ladies have a wide range of interests not the least of which are food and wine. Lisa spends time with me one the weekends pouring wine for Fabbioli Cellars and will be talking about stuff here in the DC area. Suzie is currently residing in Scottsdale, Arizona and will be bringing news from the American Southwest.

Let’s make them feel at home!

I was kind of surprised to see that I haven’t made a post since before Christmas. Of course the holiday takes a bit of a toll on my available time. But what has been eating up all my free bandwidth is that my work at Fabbioli Cellars is starting to take me in new and exciting directions. You see,  Doug (as in Doug Fabbioli the owner of Fabbioli Cellars) is attempting to put together a school of sorts focusing on helping people start small businesses of an agricultural nature and I’m being tasked to develop some of the course material for this school.

More...

For those that are counting, the trip to Chamonix was Day Trip 3, I just forgot to include that in the title.  This really is Day Trip 4 and it was the longest journey by car that we took the entire time we were in France. However, since Chateauneuf du Pape is the heart of the Southern Rhone wine region, we felt that we owed it to ourselves to make the journey there. After all, who knows when were going to get a chance to do this again?

More...

So I had downloaded these maps from the Official Tourism Site of the Vineyards of the Rhone Valley, and I was hoping that they would lead me to the cool and groovy places to check out in the Rhone wine region. The first issue I had was not with the maps, but with something that I didn’t really think about when planning this trip, almost all the highways in France are toll roads. The roads are in beautiful shape, not a pothole to be found, but it did cost me almost 20 Euro in tolls for the hour and a half drive to the Northern Rhone.

More...

The chateau that we were staying at was approximately one and a half hours from the Rhone wine region and it was one of our major goals while were were in France to get there. However, wine is made just about everywhere in France and we figured that we should sample the local fare before heading out to the more well known places.

The region that the chateau is located in is called Savoie (pronounced sah-vwah by the locals) and upon the advice of the Equestrian Queen, we headed up to the little village of Chignin (shin- yin) in search of local wine.

More...

For those of you that haven’t been to Europe before, you should know that most flights consist of an overnight journey. You leave here some time late afternoon, say 5:58 PM, and you arrive at a destination like Geneva, Switzerland at something like 7:02 AM. And it is still dark outside. This of course meant that even in spite of copious amounts of drinking on the plane, was unable to get more than slight fits and starts of sleep. That meant that our first day in France required us to push on through with minimal sleep.

More...

I’m sure that many of you are aware that for over a year and a half I worked at Chrysalis Vineyards in Middleburg, Virginia. I am very sorry to say that my time there will be coming to an end. I will be taking several weeks off then at the beginning of November I will begin my new position at Fabbioli Cellars in Leesburg, Virginia.

More...

Look no farther than Motorhead Shiraz. Although coming from a man that gargles glass for breakfast, I’m not so certain Lemmy can taste anything anymore, never mind wine. But there it is. Motorhead Shiraz 2010, when you absolutely, positively have to have the meanest, nastiest, fruit forward, smack you in the face, wine in the room.

Motorhead release their own red wine in the UK

The Petit Verdot grape is one of the grapes that has been found to be very prolific here in Virginia. Much like the Cabernet Franc grape, it grows exceptionally well here although, much like its cousin, it also grows somewhat differently here in Virginia than it does in its native France.

You see, the Petit Verdot grape is one of the five noble red grapes from the Bordeaux region of France. For those wondering, the other four are Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Malbec. There is a sixth red grape, Carménère, which is allowed to be grown in the Bordeaux region, however to my knowledge, there is only one winery, Château Clerc Milon which is a fifth growth Bordeaux (the classification of wineries in Bordeaux is a topic for another day) currently growing it.

More...

Every day at the SWE Conference our lunch was sponsored by someone, usually a wine marketing bureau. One of the days lunches was sponsored by the Wines of South Africa. I had worked with these folks when they were pouring wine here at a DC Wine expo during the spring and I was introduced to some spectacular wines so I was pretty excited to see them at the conference. One of the wines that was available during our lunch was the Mulderbosch Cabernet Sauvignon Rosé.

This excited me for two reasons. First, during the summer, I tend to drink a fair bit of rosé wine. I find them crisp and refreshing and I thoroughly enjoy them both as a sipper and along with food. The second reason I was excited was because I had recently reviewed this wine and hadn’t had a chance to post my review here and I knew that it was a really nice wine.

More...