Tag: wine tasting

Intipalka Winery Tour

I had a long weekend, so I took a four-hour drive down the coast from Lima through the small town of Ica, and arrived at the grounds of Intipalka Winery where they have places to stay among their vineyards. They provide you with everything you need to enjoy yourself during your stay, but one of the things that they schedule you for is a tour of the winery where they produce not only fine reds, and whites, but also the drink of Peru, pisco. It is not required for you to go on this tour, but considering that it comes with a wine-tasting, a sunset viewing, and a stroll through the vines, it is worth considering.

Like most things in Peru, the tour was delivered in Spanish, and since I am still in the process of picking up the language, there were a lot of the details that went over my head during the tour. I did get that the pisco is the main drink that they produce on the grounds, and there are three different types of pisco. I also learned that pisco is a strong drink sitting at about 42 percent alcohol, though the sweet taste does not make it seem like you are drinking something that strong.

I also learned that the grounds of the vineyards extended much further than it looks like from inside the compound. All of the vines are regularly maintained and the water is supplied from the runoff from the Andes Mountains that loom over the grounds. The grapes do produce nice red and white wines which you can buy at cost in the restaurants, but I would stay away from the rose that they make. It was really sweet, even more so than the pisco, but the other wines are great, and would rival anything that you could find over the border in Chili. And of course, if you do not wish to have a bottle of wine to share, there are always pisco sours or chilcanos.

They do load up cars at the end of the tour and take everybody up to a lookout that looks over the expanse of land they use to create their wine, piscos, and brute champagne. It is here that they allow you to try the sparkling wine while watching the sun set over the fields. The day I went was a little hazy, but I know that this is not always the case. We had much better sunsets the first night we stayed here, and I am looking forward to seeing what the other nights have to offer. Still, it was a pretty location, and the wine added nicely to the atmosphere.

Out of the many things that the place has to offer, it is the one must do thing that you should do. It really highlights the beauty of the region and gives you the insight of what it means to run a winery. Even if your Spanish is not great, you can still get a lot out of the experience.

Blue Wine – Cyprus

It is not a trick of the eyes, or a way to play with the light. It is really a glass of wine of a new variety, blue wine. To be fair, it is not new, but it is a rare thing, and there are not many places in the world where you can get a glass of blue wine. The mistake that first brought this wonder into the world was in California, but five other countries repeated the process to produce their own blue wine. One of the wineries that produces this delicacy can be found in the hills of Cyprus outside the small village of Omodos called Linos.

Omodos is a charming village in the heart of the wine country in Cyprus, and is a short hour drive from Paphos by car. It is one of the places that everybody should visit if they make it out to Cyprus, and not only to taste the blue wine. The village is a fun place to stroll through that transports you back in time when streets were narrow and the only way to get from one place to the other was by walking. It is covered now with touristy shops and restaurants, but looking around, you can still see and imagine the way it once was.

It is also nestled right in the heart of wine country. Linos Winery is one of the bigger and older wineries in the region, and the only one to boast about the blue wine, but there numerous wineries around that allow you try the nectar that they have created. They have many traditional variations, and few grapes that can only be found on the island, but the one that the people of Cyprus brag about the most is commandaria. This is a desert wine made from raisins, and it is not a sweet as I would have thought. It falls more into the category of a lighter sherry and goes great after dinner.

Commandaria, like much of the other things that can be found in Cyprus, dates way back in history, and holds the distinction for being the oldest variety of wine in the world. According to people on my tour, they made the wine all the way back in the Hellenistic period using old presses much like the one pictured above. They would squeeze the raisins and grapes between the two large beams while men twisted the press below. They would then collect the juice in these large earthen jugs to ferment, and when the wine was ready, they would serve it to their guests.

The process has changed over the years, and now they collect the wine in oak barrels to age, but this does not take away from the history of the wine making process of this region. Commandaria is the wine that is talked about in Odysseus’s voyages, and Richard the Lion Hearted drank it during the crusades. It adds to the flavor of going out on a wine tasting tour in Cyprus.

It is easily one of the things that you should plan to do when taking a trip to Cyprus. There are many tour companies out there, and the one I took was called Cyprus Wine Tasting. They came to our place earlier in the morning and drove us to three different wineries while talking about the history of the island and the wine. The tour included a traditional lunch, and walk through the village of Omodos. And the most important thing was the driver to safely transport us from place to place. This is a great company to work with if you decide to take a tour and the one I recommend.

In the meantime, I raise my glass of blue wine to you and hope that someday you make it out to this part of the world.