Wine Life - Houston

One of my favorite visits during my recent to trip to the Dâo was to Casa da Passarella located in the Serra da Estrela subregion. Casa da Passarella is a historic wine house which began producing in 1892. The estate was instrumental in the creation of the official Dâo wine region demarcated map in 1908. The Dâo region is the oldest for still wine in Portugal. The Cabral family now owns the estate and has worked hard to maintain the traditions and the stories of those who were there first, their slogan is "Stories written in wine." Fortunately, while some of the history has been lost to the past, fanciful legends now fill in the blanks. Paolo Nunez, the winemaker at the property since 2008, greeted us in the courtyard. He shared that he was born in Douro where he studied enology. He had tasted Dâo wine and liked the more refined style from the region. He wanted to make this type of wine rather than fortified Ports so he came to the region in 2003 to work as a consulta...

When two wine samples arrived from the Salice Salentino region of Italy, I quickly realized how limited I was in my knowledge of this area. Although I had met one producer from Puglia a few years ago, I had not encountered any other wines from the region besides his since then. A quick search of some wine textbooks from previous classes showed me that I was not mistaken, I really had not learned much about this area during my formal wine education at all, my WSET-3 textbook, for example, had one sentence regarding Salice Salentino in their two paragraph coverage of all of Puglia. It seemed a little research was in order. Puglia is located in southeast Italy in what is commonly referred to as "the heel of the Italian boot" surrounded by both the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. The climate is sunny, warm and dry with a good diurnal shift making it ideal for many types of agriculture along with grape growing. Salice Salentino is located in the southern part of the region near the ce...

As originally seen in the January 2019 issue of Galveston Monthly magazine.