Terrabianca Extra Virgin Olive Oil

The Terrabianca estate in Tuscany is loaded with style, after all the fashion industry provided the financial fuel for this beautiful estate. However, never satisfied with just good looks, the Guldener family has pursued quality both inside and outside of their bottles. The wines of Terrabianca are justifiably famous as each is of superb quality, but wine is not the only excellent liquid that Terrabianca puts into bottles. They also produce a delicious extra virgin olive oil from their Il Tesoro estate in Maremma on the Tuscan coast. To make things more interesting, Terrabianca offers some perfect stocking stuffers (mine please Santa), a range of flavored oils that comes in an assorted gift set of six 100 ml. bottles. The package includes one bottle each of Terrabianca extra virgin olive oil plus bottles of their oil flavored with oregano, basil, white truffles, hot peppers or rosemary. These oils add an easy creative touch to your cooking - and like all things from Terrabianca they look good on your shelf too.

I Was Big Glass Gluping

The Riedel explosion has done much more good for wine than bad, but one negative aspect has been the onslaught of giant wine glasses. My recent experience at Thanksgiving not only exposed me to many wines I would never drink on my own,  but it also brought home the change in the way people drink wine today as compared to  a few years ago. In a typical exercise in American overreaction, we went from glasses that were too small to glasses that are just plain huge. I am reminded of The New Yorker cartoon where a man is drinking from a huge glass of wine and comments that his doctor has recommended he cut back to one glass of wine a day. While I understand (and agree with)  some of the Riedel philosophy that the space amplifies the aromas, all to often most wine glasses these days are just big. While the exacting designs of Riedel and other fine wine glass producers without a doubt improves the wine experience, most other (read cheaper) glasses don't do anything for wine except to hold more of it. Many glasses used today make the host look cheap if less than a third of a bottle is poured into the glass. This phenomenon works well for mass-brand-wine-beverage producers as they are more interested in consumers that gulp than those that savor. Bigger is not always better when it comes to glasses.  Invest in fine quality glasses of medium size if you don't want to own dozens of different types of glasses for each and every type of wine. A great wine shows its character in any well designed glass, but can be lost in a glass whose only quality is its size.

Thanksgiving Mix and Match

With families thousands of miles away, holidays take on a different personality. This year for Thanksgiving we were kindly adopted by a friends family in Portland. It was a full-blown, traditional Thanksgiving feast and the thirty plus guests attacked it ferociously. The tables were filled with a mishmash of all of today's most popular wines and there was shiraz, merlot and lots of labels with bright funny animals. I cannot resist trying to taste every wine in such a situation as these are bottles I would never buy on my own.  The wines were generally what I expected, but what stood out to me was the fact that almost none of them matched well with kaleidoscope of food on our plates. What I also noticed is that no one else in the room other than me seemed to give a hoot. The  wines flowed, stomachs stuffed, bottle after bottle emptied with nary a comment about how they matched with the food. It is at these moments that you really see what a wine geek you have become and how separated you are from the way most people experience wine. You also clearly understand how millions upon millions of cases of (what I consider) awful wine can disappear down the throats of wine consumers. There is indeed two segments of the wine business: first there is the wine beverage business and then there is the fine wine business. The second is microscopic in comparison.