Bottle Blondes Wine

This week, new age tech moguls and aspiring natural wine enthusiasts Hunty Miles and Mack Horsey guest host for the Blondes. They cover questions that often pop up around the natural wine movement and explore the differences, and the overlapping similarities, between organic and biodynamic wine production. Join Hunty and Mack as they pitch ideas to start their very first NFT winery, decide how many personal shamans they need, and regale the harrowing time they summited Mt. Everest… for the 4th time.

That's right, we just got back from holiday – not in Portugal unfortunately – but from a brief little excursion to Long Beach, Washington, where we recorded this episode just for you! Take a journey through Portugal as we cover some of the country’s main exports to the U.S., including Vinho Verde, red blends from the Dão DOC, plus fortified dessert wines from Port and Madeira. Learn about the famous Douro Valley and listen to some fun facts that you can casually drop into conversation with your friends over a fine glass of Tawny Port while sitting in your immaculate study that smells of rich leather chairs  and old books.

“There is Zinfandel in them thar hills!” Why yes, old-timey prospector man, there is! California is known for its big red wines (like Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa), but they are also known for spicy and fruit-forward Zinfandel! So move over Napa, because this week Hallie and Adrien are taking a steam locomotive to Lodi and Paso Robles to showcase other diverse regions in California’s massive wine country.

From our very green corner of Portland, OR, we take you to another lush and rainy place...known as Green Spain! Or Basque country, to be more precise, where citizens drink the lightly fizzy wine known as Txakoli (CHA-koh-lee), and use way too many consonants in everything. Hallie and Adrien discuss this upper northwest corner of Spain and why it’s a haven of white wine, and even get a visit or two from a famous pop star (please Seal, don’t sue us).

For part two in our series covering the Coastal Region/Western Cape of South Africa, we play an exciting game of South African Jeopardy, look at the Bordeaux blends of Stellenbosch, welcome the comeback of the blind tasting... And of course, play 7 things, in which we are pretty sure Adrien has a new product pitch for Shark Tank for cold single people and Hallie has big carnival plans for some sheep.

In the first part of our series covering the Coastal Region/Western Cape of South Africa, we look into the area’s history, wine origins and discuss some of the strange names they have for climate and soil. We explore the appellation of Swartland, Chenin Blanc, and discuss Pinotage’s strange history from a life at an “experimental farm” to a grape that divides wine critics with fun tasting notes like banana oil and road rage.

This year, Adrien became a French Wine Scholar and Hallie became an Italian Wine Scholar through the Wine Scholar Guild. So this week, we decided we would use some of our new knowledge to help anyone still hopelessly staring at French and Italian wine labels in your local supermarket going, “what the whaaaaa?” Plus we each talk about a region we found particularly interesting during our studies: Campania in Italy, and the Roussillon in France.

No, we are not talking about a mediocre Ben Stiller movie from 2007, but the grape that breaks hearts from France to Oregon: Pinot Noir! Citing irreconcilable differences and cultivation difficulty as reasons to divorce growers, sometimes Pinot pulls through in just the right terrior and puts in the work to make the marriage work. And speaking of Oregon, this particular Pinot Noir episode we are on our home turf of the Willamette Valley AVA. Join us as we explore some of the Valley’s main Sub-AVAs.

 

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If we made 20 million dollars shooting one movie, or doing one album tour, we would probably buy a bunch of vineyards too. As it turns out, some famous people are pretty good at this wine thing, and others, not so much. This week we tackle the phenomenon of celebrity wines covering famous people who just stick their name on something vs ones who are actually out in the vineyards getting their hands dirty. Plus a very special “7 Things” where we ponder which famous face should try their hand at making wine, or at least slapping their name on a label.

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Walla Walla Washington, ONIONS! WINE! ONION WINE! (j/k that would be DISGUSTING) This week’s episode is all about one of Washington’s most well known AVAs, the Walla Walla Valley. We take a deep dive on the area and wineries to explore when visiting. We also finally unpack the Missoula Floods, which you have probably heard people name drop in a wine tasting and you just smile and nod like you know what they are talking about. Well now you get to know!