Katarina's Blog

Well of course you can, but it will not taste that great. Not if we are talking about hard boiled eggs and especially not with red wine. Now that Easter is here I am reminded how hard it is to pair eggs with wine. Eggs have so much savory umami flavor and also contain a lot of sulfur which creates an almost metallic taste in your mouth when paired with wine. But there are some tricks to change the flavor experience that I would like to share.

Tasting wine straight from the barrel is an interesting exercise. As a winemaker you do it often to see how your wine is progressing. Once a year, in March, we participate in the Barrel Weekend arranged by Wine Road and it is really fun to engage in conversation about the wine and its journey in the barrel and in the bottle with our visitors. The discussion ranges from taste and various barrels impact as well as time, which is an essential ingredient when getting to those sought after flavors in a mature wine.

Bellet is the name of a small “Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée” i.e. viticultural area in Provence, just north of Nice and the planted area is only 60 hectares (150 acres). We recently spent a day winetasting, talking to local winemakers and learning about new (for us) grape varietals with historic roots in the area. And I found a Rosé wine from Domaine de Toasc that I liked a lot.

Last weekend I visited Munskänkarna in Östersund, Sweden (yes the dots are supposed to be there, nothing wrong with your screen) to hold a tasting seminar at a wine fair with over 1,000 visitors. I was blown away by the knowledgeable group which is part of a 23,000 members strong Swedish non-profit association. The members go through rigorous classes in winetasting to distinguish between wines from all over the world. They do it for the fun and love of wine - they are not sommeliers or professionals, but beat many professionals with their professionalism. What a cool organization!