The Wine Rocket Experience

 Hi Everybody! Last week I headed to Alto Adige with Eno Club, a wine shop in Milan, to visit Girlan and the Kaltern cooperative winery.  Alto Adige has many cooperatives and almost all fo them focus on high quality wines, opposed to the rest of coops in Italy which focus on high volume, moslty inexpensive wines; of course there are exceptions. Girlan Kellerei is in Cornaiano, it works the grapes of 200 growers with 220 hectares overall making 1.3 million bottles a year. Their main focuses are Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir and Vernatsch. To incentivize quality they pay quite a lot of the grapes (up to 2.5 Euros per Kilogram!) and the winemaker also visits every vineyard, offering counsel and advising the growers to reach the perfect level of ripeness and technical characteristics needed to make each wine. The winery has grown quite a lot since its inception in 1923, the expansion has been built around the old underground cellar dating to the 16th century...

 Hi Everybody, this is a bit of a self-conscious (and self-pitying) moment. As you know I am enrolled in the WSET Level 4 Diploma in Wines; when I started I knew it was going to be tough, but boy was I underestimating this! As you've read in my second post I have already been to Austria for the first part of the Diploma and I have already sat my D1 Exam (for which I still have not recieved my results...). Right now I am preparing for the D3 Exam -Still Wines of the World that I will sit the 26th and 27th of October, I know it sounds like a long way to go but trust me, the sheer quantity of knowledge you have to memorize is disheartening. Let me walk you through the exam, the first daythere is going to be a  written theory exam divided into two parts: one 2 hours paper and then another 80 minutes paper. The written exam is open questions, no multiple choice, and you get to choose the questions from a list - so there is a bit of wiggle room but  you really need to know your...

Hello everybody, Saturday I had the chance to go to Tenuta Borgo Conventi in Friuli Venezia Giulia. It was a beautiful day, sunny, clear skies, lovely wind cooling us down and friends to share this experience with. The new entrance to Tenuta Borgo Conventi Tenuta Borgo Conventi was founded in 1975 by Gianni Vescovo, an entrepreneur with a passion for Collio wines who brought this small winery up to fame in the Italian market but also world wide. Then in 2001 the Folonari family (owners of Ruffino) came forward and bought the estate, bringing further expansion into new, overseas markets. The wines produced are cornerstones of Friuli, Ribolla Gialla, Friulano, Malvasia but also international varities are planted suchs as Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. The "Linea Fiori" (flowers lineup literally) is what brought this small winery into the spotligth, fresh, fruity, Friuli terroir expressing wines that bring the drinker on these gentle rolling hills, standing on the Ponca soil (a...

Hi everyone, I am very excited to share with you my first hands-on experience in a winery. Wednesday I had the chance to go help in the bottling process in a winery in Monfumo, Tenuta Amadio. A friend of mine works there and last week he asked me if I could come over to help with the bottling, I was thrilled about the idea and jumped on it immediately. Tenuta Amadio's vineyards I got there early, at 7.15 am; the truck with the bottling machine was already there and after 20 minutes the three technicians came in and started opening up the container and setting up the machine. We started setting up the pallets with the empty bottles near the front end of the machine, ready to be loaded into it; we moved the boxes at the end of the machine where the bottles would come out; most importantly we set up some gazebos to have some shade when we worked! The bottling machine on a trailer We had to bottle about 6800 bottles of Prosecco DOC "Monfumino", 1450 bottles of Prosecco Asolo ...

Hello everybody, recently I've been in Soave to visit the Pieropan winery. I've been drinking Pieropan's Soave Classico for years now, it is my go to bottle when I don't want to think about what I'm drinking and its very good value for money. Honestly I didn't know what to expect, I knew the name was fairly big but I never knew how big; when I reached the winery I was surprised. The Pieropan family has been making wines in Soave since 1880; it was founded by Leonildo, a doctor, who decided to make something of the family estate named "Calvarino". He started the winery in the family house, Palazzo Pullici, in the village center - where it has been up until very recently. The business was then picked up by Leonildo's sons. In 1970 the last remaining heir, also named Leonildo, restructured the business, he bought significant plots of land in the hills of Soave, he introduced new technologies in the winery and started experimenting with new techniques....

Hi everybody, You might be wondering what is the Wine and Spirits Education Trust, well it simply is one of the biggest wine education providers in the world. Its awards and diploma are recognized world wide as one of the highest standards in the industry. That is why I decided to go on with this path after getting my WSET Level 2; of course I want to learn more about wine and everything that revolves around it to feed my passion, but getting a Diploma that is valued world wide while doing it isn't bad either right? When I officially decided to enroll in the Level 4 Diploma, in February 2022, I had a few choices: Germany, Austria, France, UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Greece. My first choice was London, the country where the trust was founded and the city where it holds its flagship school (fancy!). But of course being so far away from home I couldn't attend weekly or weekend lessons so my only option was the block release. Basically the lessons are all concentrated in a week...