Product Launch Manager Online

Valpolicella Wine Tasting at New Year

Last time I posted a small comment on my blog about wine, my web site statistics went stratospheric.  So, purely in the interests of statistics, I have once again pointed my taste buds in the direction of some interesting Italians!

I was fortunate enough to spend New Year with friends who have a wonderful Italian wine cellar.  One of the benefits of having a dozen or so from each vintage is that you can open wines at various stages of their development and decide whether they could do with more time or should be finished off or relegated to the in-house wine rack for quaffing.

We started the evening with Zenato Valpolicella Superior 2007 which was a great palate cleanser.  Valpolicella is from the Veneto region of Italy and is second only to the Chianti region in terms of volume. This wine set the scene nicely for the following beauties.

Second-up was a 2003 Ripassa Valpolicella from Monte Faustino, very fruity and smooth wine. It was a drier style than the Zenato and had a lot more tannin.  This was a fine example of the Ripasso style of wine.

Lastly, we had another 2006 Ripassa Zenato Valpolicella wine with a lot of structure which needed a few more years to be at it best.  John the owner of the cellar had tasted the 2005 version of this wine previously and in his opinion the 2006 was definitely a better wine.  It would be worthwhile tracking this one down and putting a dozen the cellar.

The overall verdict for the evening was that the 2003 Ripassa Valpolicella from Monte Faustino was the best wine of the evening.  A half hour after removing the cork the wine had opened up nicely and we accompanied this with a gourmet homemade pizza – a match made in heaven if I dare the cliché. 

Molto bene

We are now connecting with people across the globe more frequently than ever. 

Have a look at the amazing growth of Skype, (the Voice over IP telecommunications provider), since its inception.   There were over 27.7 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes alone in Q3, 2009.

We are, after all, social animals.  The popularity of Twitter, Facebook and the hundreds of other social networking sites proves that! 

However, something in the human psyche drives most people to seek out face-to-face contact and eventually one-on-one voice conversation.  

 This is where Skype is filling the gap.  With free calls via the internet to many places around the world, along with free video calling, I believe that Skype will continue its meteoric rise fuelled by this rise in activity on the social networking sites.

I wonder how many of you have initiated a Skype call based on a previous conversation on Twitter or Facebook?

Having just visited France to watch the All Blacks thrash the French national team in that brutal game of Rugby Union, I managed to evaluate some local wine whilst staying Aix-en-Provence.  The signature wine of that particular town is a lovely peach coloured rose.  This rose is very fresh and slightly reminiscent of my favoured new world wines from New Zealand.  It was well worth sampling!