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You are here: Home / Archives for winery

Best Wine Tours of 2011

March 21, 2011 By Guest Blogger

The best thing about a wine tour is that you get to taste some of the finest “grape juice” in the world, straight from where it is made. You could be a novice in wine tasting or an oenophile, a wine tour can be stimulating and instructive besides being a joyous journey.  Here are some of the best wine tours around the world.Vineyard in Argentina

India

Nashik has the highest grape productivity in the world. This grape growing town is close to Mumbai in the Western India. A company called Groove Temple Entertainment conducts a two day tour to some six wineries in the region. The Bespoke Nashik Wine Trail Experience takes you to some wineries with astounding sceneries of the rolling grape fields and the hills as a background. One of the wineries also holds a festival called Sula Fest in the month of January every year where wine, dance and food rule the roost. Wine makers from Australia, France and South Africa come and live in this Indian town for months for the grapes.

New Zealand

Villa Maria Estate is the largest privately owned company in Auckland, New Zealand. The trip to this historic winery is known as Maungakiekie / Villa Marie Estate Winemakers Picnic, which takes place between 9 a.m. to 12 noon. Previously known as the Cornwall Park owned by the late Sir John Logan Campbell, this estate was an ancient Maori Pa site for more than 500 years. The private guided tour actually takes you through the wine making process in the winery and you get to taste 8 award winning wines with some antipasto and breads. This winery and vineyard is located in the rim of an ancient volcano.

Thailand

Wine Tours Thailand conducts tours to wineries near Bangkok city. These are either one-day or two-day tours and include visits to the vineyards, wine restaurants, lunch with a glass of wine, visit to national parks, Buddha temples, night safari and elephant rides through the jungles and river.IMGP3004

Europe & North America

Arblaster & Clarke Wine Tours are gentle and classic tours of  major vineyards in Europe and other wine countries. Lynette Arblaster and Tim Clarke are passionate about wine and have been specializing in wine tours for the past 25 years. They have a few surprises planned for this year’s tour plus their usual Champagne weekends are on the cards. They have 18 wine countries on their 2011 list including some wine regions of the New World.

Their April Bordeaux Wine & City Weekend coincides with “En Primeur” trade tasting. Top London wine buyers and some famous wine journalists will taste for the first time vintage 2010 clarets, and you could be a part of this premium tour.

Their Great Chateaux & Winery visits ensure private wine tastings and invitations to some wine cellars and visits to chateaux including the famous Bordeaux chateau. All their tours are led by famous names in the wine industry – either wine writers or connoisseurs and friends of the wine makers. Arblaster & Clarke wine tours are truly a rich and heady experience.

The Napa Valley Wine Train is a tour through the wineries in Napa Valley. Their wine education dinners inform you about the pairing of food and wine – which wine goes best with which food. You get to learn about the history of the wine in hand, its characteristics, the individual flavor, where and how it is made.

Traveler’s Tip: You can buy the wines straight from the wineries without paying extra taxes; a unique facility among wineries all over the world.

Author: Elias Cortez is a freelance writer and the editor of Top Net Book Picks, a website which provides detailed reviews and information for net books. You can learn more about him and the best net book to own at his website.

Thanks to Elias for today’s guest post. If you are interested in guest posting with IShouldLogOff, email us at info [at] ishouldlogoff.com. Thanks!

Filed Under: Beer & Wine, Pastimes Tagged With: drinks, tours, wine tours, winery

Desert Fun

August 25, 2009 By Danny

After our flight over the Nazca lines we headed to Ica, just a couple of hours up the coast from Nazca. After a quick lunch we hopped in a cab and went straight to our first Peruvian wine tour. We had hoped to do a proper tour hitting at least 3 wineries but given that we were traveling by taxi, and quite content by the end of our first, we left that total at just one.

Peruvian wineries have something to them that no other winery we’d ever been to can boast…a pisco distillery. Pisco is, more or less, the “liquor” of Peru (and I believe a couple of other South American countries we’ve yet to get to as well) and is the base for Peru’s famous drink, the pisco sour. Having already sampled several pisco sours the chance to go to a vineyard/winery/distillery was quite inviting.

Since we arrived by taxi, we arrived alone. This wasn’t a problem. A guide was there waiting and he took us on our own private tour. First we saw grapevines (no grapes right now, missed that by a few months) and then we walked further up the path (which was basically a grape-seed gravel) to the big grape smashing swimming pool (I should mention at this point that I might not have all the technical terms down perfectly) where the grapes are squeezed out by barefoot party goers during the grape harvest. Then the they are pressed (by a machine appropriately called the ‘press’). Since there were no grapes for us to stomp or press, Jill felt the need to place me under the press…I’m still not sure what she intended.

This is where the wine and Pisco process divide. After the press we moved to where the pisco and the wine (both just grape juice at this point) are fermented. Here in Peru rather than talking about the benefits of oak versus steel barrels we checked out the traditional ceramic casks used in the Pisco process and compared them to the cement casks primarily used today. The wine of course is still fermented in wooden casks, but considering Pisco is the main attraction the guide left the wine process behind and just told us about Pisco.

Next up is the distillery where 1600L of fermented grape juice is poured into a giant ceramic barrel. Under the barrel was a big pit where a giant wood fire could be stoked, ultimately boiling the grape juice inside. As the 1600L are boiled the juice is turned to steam, leaving behind most of its mass to be reused as fertilizer. As the juice boils, the vapors escape the barrel through a pipe at the top which pipes the gas under a pool to condense before being poured out as pisco.

Pisco it turns out comes out of the distillation process as a man. The first 10L or so of Pisco that flow from the pipes are the head, which is too high in alcohol content to be consumed, but is perfect for sterilizing equipment. The next 400L is the body and id only portion of the original 1600L that will be consumed. The final 60L or so are the tail, which like the head is not consumed.

An consume we did. We tried the Torontel, made from aromatic grapes, the Quebranta, made from non-aromatic grapes, and the Acholado, the mix of the first two from which pisco sour is made. We also tried a version mixed with milk which is basically a version of Bailey’s made with pisco as well as several of their wines. By the time we were done we were quite pleased with tasting and then he pulled out some chocolates. Needless to say there was no need of continuing to another vineyard.

Next up was a trip to the Huacachina oasis just outside of Ica’s city limits. This is the main gringo hangout of the area on account of the oasis itself (which was a brown lake, dirty and completely uninviting) and the rather impressive sand dunes. Within one hour of our arrival we’d changed into shorts and rented a pair of sandboards (cost $3 each rather than the $12 dune buggy/sandboarding tour) and were hiking up and boarding down dunes until the sun set over the desert. Luckily the soft sand was more forgiving the volcanic rock we boarded down the last time.  Can´t say we made much improvement though!

Filed Under: Beer & Wine, Peru, South America Tagged With: desert, sandboarding, winery

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