Amanda Barnes

Author: AB

  • Beyond Chateau Musar… Lebanese wine

    Written for Wine-Searcher

    Lebanese wine has been on the radar for some time, but it’s only recently that the reputation of this ancient viticultural region has evolved beyond Chateau Musar.

    One of the oldest wine-producing countries in the world, with records traceable to 7000 B.C., Lebanon‘s rich history features the Phoenicians and Romans as well as claims that Qana (Cana) in the south of the country is where Jesus miraculously turned water into wine. Under the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922), winemaking was restricted to church use only and viticulture languished until Catholic priests of the Jesuit order replanted vines in 1857.

    In the late 20th century, the Lebanese wine industry was all but killed off by 15 years of civil war. Only the celebrated Chateau Musar continued production amid the fighting and shelling. Its amazing story and acclaimed wines have traveled far, but it is the rapid growth of wine production in the past 10 years – when the number of Lebanese wineries has grown from five to 40 – that is changing the country’s vinous reputation.

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  • Pinotsaurus: Pinot Noir and Dinosaurs in Neuquen

    Pinotsaurus: Pinot Noir and Dinosaurs in Neuquen

    I looked at the grey stony structure. Almost the same size as my entire body, this was just a single vertebra of an entire spine – just one piece of the enormous puzzle that makes up one of the largest creatures that ever walked the earth – the 90 million year old fossil of an Argentinosaurus. Imagining it makes you think so hard that the back of your skull itches.

    If you do have the itch for dinosaurs, NeuquĂ©n really is the place to go. An unassuming city, most people pass through it. It is a transport hub and is called the ‘gateway to Patagonia’ because it basically connects the deep south to everywhere else – Buenos Aires, Mendoza or nearby ski and mountain resort town Bariloche. Few tourists venture beyond the bus station doors or airport runway. That is a real shame. Because NeuquĂ©n has some of the richest paleontology sites in the world and some pretty interesting wine to keep you company in the evening too. With the massive investment pouring in from oil refineries, the city is becoming more and more affluent and is one to watch.

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  • Interview with Laura Catena

    Laura Catena is an emergency room doctor in San Francisco. She is also a fourth-generation winemaker from a family credited with revolutionizing Argentinian wine – Bodega Catena Zapata’s flagship label, NicolĂĄs Catena Zapata, was the first wine from Argentina to score a Robert Parker 98+.

    How did you first fall in love with wine?

    When my father was starting this whole revolution with Argentine wine in the ’80s and I was going to school in the United States [Harvard and Stanford]. My father used to visit me and one of our traditions was to go to really nice restaurants. His objective was to make Argentine wines that could stand with the rest of the world, so we had to try the best wines on the list. I became a wine snob rather quickly. That’s really how I started: sitting and having these incredible conversations with my father over wine.

    Is great wine made in the vineyard or the winery?

    Definitely in the vineyard. There’s no way you can make a great wine without a great vineyard. Impossible. However, you can ruin a great vineyard by making a bad wine. I think both are important, but without the great vineyard, there isn’t a great wine.

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  • Dia del Amigo…

    It is one of the busiest days of the year… no, Christmas hasn’t come early, nor has Thanksgiving been adopted by Argentines. This Friday is Friend’s Day.

    It sounds sweet, soppy and like something taken from an episode of Sesame Street, but this is actually one of the biggest days on the Argentine calendar. When the 20 July comes around everyone starts to sweat beneath their collars and start planning for weeks in advance on how to fit their friends in, see them all and not offend anyone. The big day to see your friends is on the actual Dia del Amigo – the 20th – and this is the premium friend slot (reserved only for those that you really, really love), but in a country where people invite on average 500 people to their wedding, you can imagine how many other friends they feel obliged fit into their busy friend week. I have one Mendocino friend who will be celebrating Friend’s Day with a total of 11 friend gatherings spread over 5 days this week… This is not as unusual as you’d think.

    There have been many attempts to set up an international Friend’s Day, but no-one (not even Hallmark) quite achieved it. Paraguay was actually the first country to organize a national Friend’s Day and they celebrate it on 30 July. Argentina, just to be different, made theirs 20th July. Why the 20th July you might ask… because that is when we celebrate the Apollo 11 landing. Confused? Yes, me too. But apparently the Dia del Amigo founder, Dr. Enrique Ernesto Febbraro (a professor and general do-gooder) felt that this was a day of international friendship as the moon landing united all mankind. And so he declared it Friend’s Day in 1969 – one small step for man, one giant leap for friendship and drinks promos in bars. It was later legalized as an official day by the Argentine government. So far it is only Uruguay who also celebrate Friend’s Day on 20 July. But you can’t blame Dr Febbraro for not trying – he did send 4000 letters to 100 countries asking them to be part of Friend’s Day too. No-one else really took him up on the offer.

    So perhaps if you are reading this from outside Argentina, you could raise a toast with your friends this Friday (maybe it calls for a good Malbec) and give Dr Febbraro a friendly metaphorical pat on the back. If you are however in Argentina, be warned that this Friday night you won’t find a table or stool in any bar or restaurant for love nor money, and the phone lines will have a complete breakdown for the majority of the day.

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  • Chainsaws in Uruguay and the new ‘alternative tourism’

    A bare-chested 70-year-old man burst into our room, shouting something in Spanish and waving his arms. It was 4am. My boyfriend and I had been asleep: it was our first night couchsurfing in a stranger’s house. His voice boomed around the dark room for a minute and then he slammed the door shut and stormed down the hallway. I turned to my partner in bed, we looked at each other, and having no idea what else to do, we decided to roll over and try to feign sleep. Then the chainsaws started


    I’d been couchsurfing for a year at this point, and this was without a doubt the weirdest experience so far. We’d arrived late the night before at this small farmland in the backwaters of rural Uruguay. Our host Pedro, who we soon dubbed Crazy Pedro, had picked us up from the bus station on his clapped-out moped around 7pm. He seemed nice and quite smartly-dressed, although you couldn’t help but notice he didn’t have any shoes on. ‘Fine’ we figured, we’d both been living in flip flops for the past year so who’s to judge? Then we arrived at his ‘house’. I use inverted commas intentionally.

    On the couchsurfing website he’d described it as a large farmhouse with three double rooms, a beautiful farm of friendly animals and a private beach. It sounded dreamy and, on honest reflection, a bit too good to be true. As we arrived to what can only be described as Dorothy’s Kansas crib after the tornado, Crazy Pedro explained to us that this was his grandfather’s house – which until yesterday, had been abandoned for 35 years. This he said with a gleeful and slightly manic smile. Super, we thought. It got more disappointing and all the more strange inside: derelict, broken furniture; a dank bathroom with no running water (bucket and hose outside for manual toilet flushing); and the small red handprints of a child sliding down the walls (they weren’t blood apparently – he was a school teacher and had invited one of his kids to paint the walls
 reassuring? Definitely not.) We spent the night eating BBQ-ed sausages indoors – Crazy Pedro decided it was fine to light a fire in the middle of his kitchen floor – and watching our host dance around to acid house music until the early hours of the morning. This all appeared quite eccentric and a little bit loopy, but he didn’t seem dangerous and so we figured it was fine. That was until we heard chainsaws outside our bedroom window at 4.10am.

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  • A look through the drinking glass with Riedel…

    ImageWritten for The Vines of Mendoza

    We all know that the temperature a wine is served at can have a huge impact on how it tastes, and also that some wines need longer time to ‘breathe’ than others, but I guess I have never really thought too much about the glass I drink it through.

    I prefer a big glass but I’ve always thought that was more to do with wanting a bit more quantity rather than improving the quality of a wine, and I don’t smirk too much drinking from plastic cups. But that has all changed after a Masterclass with Maximilian Riedel, eleventh generation glass maker and President of Riedel (aka ‘The Wine Glass Company’).

    I was deeply intrigued and perhaps a little bit skeptical going into a tasting with three wines and six different wine glasses last week at the London Wine Fair.

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  • Dispatch from the Frontline

    Written for Wine-Searcher.com

    Lucas tears at the vine stalk; dry leaves crunch, stems crackle and grapes bleed under the force of his hands, but the stalk won’t snap off. The extra effort makes his tired arms shake, his bent legs cramp and another trickle of sweat roll down from his sun cap to the spine of his neck. It’s 36°C (96.8°F). He pulls his scissors out of his side pocket and cuts the bunch of black berries, cupping it in his hand and dropping it into the bucket below piled with grapes. He grabs another bunch. Cut. Drop. Cut. Drop. Cut. Drop.

    He sees Juan next to him ripping off bunches two at a time with his hands. It’s twice as quick, but Lucas got told off by the vineyard manager yesterday for not using his scissors, and as the harvest comes to an end and work opportunities dry up he doesn’t want to risk losing a day’s work. He needs to take money home.

    It has been a tough three months of harvest and by now Lucas’s back is agony, not helped by the hard floor he sleeps on each night. Last night he was hoping he’d get more sleep but Mario woke him and the others up as he stumbled into the house steaming drunk at 3 a.m., waking everyone except the one he intended to arouse – his half-deaf, snoring wife, Maria-Lucia.

    “House” is an overstatement for the place where Lucas lives. It is a squalid, mud-brick shack in rural Ugarteche. When he arrived in Mendoza from his home town in Bolivia three months ago, he had a contact his brother had given him for somewhere cheap to live during the harvest. At first, it was just him and six others in the three-bedroomed “house,” but now more than 15 bodies are crammed in and sometimes the men bring back girls. Sweaty, musty, fatigued bodies lie on overlapping mattresses and blankets, with creaking hammocks above.

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  • Hey Presto! A Winemaker’s Box of Magic Tricks

    I guess namad_scientist_final_smallively I always thought wine was very simple to make: pick some grapes, let them ferment and hey presto! You have wine. I figured it was probably discovered in some backwater farmland in Ancient Greece sometime when a forgetful farmer left his basket of picked grapes out in the sun too long and under the watchful eye of an imperturbable goat, the juice gradually turned into wine – a discovery to the delight of the Greek family that Sunday afternoon and to future wine drinkers around the world.

    How wine was actually ‘discovered’ is a mystery, but what we do know is that people have been making it since at least 6000BC in Georgia. The oldest winery found so far dates back to 4000BC in Armenia and has relics of wine presses and fermentation vats. If they were that advanced 6,000 years ago, chances are the ‘discovery’,with my goat as the first eye witness, was long before then.

    Something we perhaps neglect to realise though is that winemakers have also been adding things to their wine for a couple of thousand years too. We are often misled to think that 100 years ago, everything was ‘natural’ – there were no chemicals added to food or drinks and that using ‘additives’ is a nasty development since the chemical revolution and McDonalisation of society. In fact, winemakers have always used additives in wine – it was developed simultaneously as an integral part of winemaking. Even the Romans would throw in lots of sulphur to their wine.

    One of the biggest clues that wine is not just fermented grape juice is when you see labels on bottles stating that they are vegan, or even vegetarian. What? Go back a minute. Vegan? Vegetarian? Why wouldn’t it be? Animal products in wine?! This is where you read a bit further and see: ‘contains milk’ or ‘contains eggs’ which can be pretty confusing for new wine drinkers who thought they were just drinking grape juice.

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  • Power Soup! Banish those wintery blues…

    I woke up this morning and it was cold. Autumn is approaching in Mendoza… And having been spoilt living in a place with 350 glorious days of sunshine a year, when the weather is even half a degree below my desired temperature it puts me in a bit of a stinker. So, I decided to make, what I call, Power Soup this morning.

    I like to say ‘Power Soup’ with real superhero conviction. It kind of sounds like ‘Pow Wow Slap’ and I can imagine it slapping my winter blues away with lots of explosions and snap, crackle and pop. My secret weapons are chilli and ginger – they are the total A team for kicking some winter blues butt. You know the science. The sweetness of the squash makes it comforting and warm, and the coriander makes me think of warmer climates.

    Here’s the recipe (accompanying hand karate movements are optional):

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  • The Wine Routes of Uruguay

    Uruguay is the little country between Argentina and Brazil on the coast. It’s not Paraguay, and they are separate countries. Sounds patronizing, but its surprising how many Uruguayans will tell you anecdotes of how most westerners they meet actually have no idea where this little gem of a country is.  And if you look at any bottle of Uruguayan wine, they almost all put a map of South America on the bottle, highlighting where their country is.

    If you are travelling in the Southern Cone, don’t miss it out. Yes – it’s organized, it’s clean, people go to bed at a reasonable hour and public transport runs on time, but that doesn’t make it boring. With Christmas and New Year’s celebrations taking the form of huge cider throwing fights, endless fireworks and lots of parties, the year gets off to a good start here, but the best time to visit the capital city of Montevideo has to be Carnival in February and March. The longest Carnival in the world, with 40 days of theatre, music, murgas and candombe – it even gives Rio de Janeiro a run for its money.

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