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Huracn Rita

Septiembre 20, 2005

Ms de un milln de personas abarrotan las autopistas de salida de las ciudades de Houston y Galveston (Texas) en respuesta a las evacuaciones decretadas ante el avance del huracn Rita. La cercana de Rita ha motivado un xodo masivo hacia ciudades del interior de Texas, como San Antonio, Austin y Dallas, que ha superado todas las previsiones de las autoridades. Se han distribuido mapas (1) -(2) con las zonas a evacuar, clasificndolas segn % del riesgo, el golfo de mxico est atravesando uno de los peores momentos de su historia.
Imagn desde el espacio del Huracn Rita
La comunidad de Weblogs ha habilitado la bitcora ritahelp.blogspot.com con informacin actualizada, que se complementa con las entradas en el Wiki. Los meteorlogos han advertido de que el huracn Rita podra enviar el sbado una marejada de casi siete metros de altura sobre algunas partes de la costa tejana, de 965 kilmetros.

Desde este enlace puedes seguir la direccin de Huracn y su intensidad sobre un mapa de Google. Si quieres comprobar con tus propios medios las localidades con probabilidad de ser afectadas descrgate este archivo KML de Rita y brelo con Google Earth donde podemos hacernos una idea de las previsiones del NOAA’s.

Huracan Rita previsin de ruta

Esta otra espectacular imgen de la Nasa muestra la magnitud de Rita.
Imgnes de la Nasa del Huracn Rita
Actualizacin 1.- Algunos artculos interesantes desde 20minutos.es; xodo masivo de las zonas costeras , Se acaban los nombres para los huracanes , La produccin de petrleo, en peligro.

Escrito por ebierzo · Almacenado en Sin categoría 

El Bierzo is filling this Spanish gap in cool reds, as I found out on a recent trip.

Septiembre 14, 2005

No lo decimos nosotros la noticia es Wall Street Journal. Que en un artculo publicado el 12 de Agosto, no escatima elogios hacia nuestros "Tintos".

Via desdeelexilio.com :" Para sentirnos un poquito ms orgullosos an, si cabe."

Spains Frontier: The Cool Reds

Using French Methods, Vineyards in El Bierzo Showcase the Local Grape
By WILLIAM ECHIKSON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 12, 2005

CORULLN, Spain When European wine lovers want to uncork something new and powerful, they should begin to look to the little-known region in isolated northern Spain called El Bierzo.

More than almost anywhere else in the Old World, an exciting can-do attitude exists these days among winemakers in Spain. Centuries of tradition are being overthrown in an explosion of creativity. As I wrote last year, this revolution has spurred the emergence of previously neglected regions such as Priorat, near Tarragona on the Mediterranean coast. Within a decade of starting to produce serious wine, Priorat already challenges traditional Spanish wine-growing regions such as La Rioja and Ribera del Duero.

Recently, friends in the wine business have told me Spanish pioneers are moving north to El Bierzo in search of cooler climes to make world-class cool red and white wines. Until now, Spain has produced few memorable whites, and its classy reds, including those from Priorat, have a hot tone, natural in a growing climate where sun-drenched grapes and the strong natural spices in Mediterranean grapes produce dense, full-bodied, jammy wines. Wines from cooler climates often have cool flavors, fresher, fruitier and more mineral.

El Bierzo is filling this Spanish gap in cool reds, as I found out on a recent trip.

The climate and land are exceptional, says Ricardo Palacios, looking over his vineyards in Corulln clinging to a steep hillside shimmering under the summer sun. Its like Burgundy here, with warm summers, cool nights and plenty of precipitation and we think we can make Burgundy-style terroir wines. These are wines from single vineyards with tastes that echo their specific landscape. In the past few vintages, I believe he has succeeded, and the Palacios operation stands at the top of the El Bierzo pinnacle, both physically with its hillside vineyards and in its widespread international distribution.

The majority of wine from El Bierzo is sold locally and often remains primitive because it is made from unripe grapes in antiquated cellars. But some locals, and a group of ambitious outsiders such as the Palacios family, are going upscale and changing the region. Their wines are found more and more often in shops outside the region and also outside Spain. In addition to Palacios, some good names to look out for include Dominio de Tares and Luna Beberide (which also makes a wine called Paixar).

The El Bierzo region is part of the Len Province in Spains rural northwest. It lies on the pilgrims path to Santiago de Compostela, and wine has been made there to fortify walkers for centuries. (The road to Santiago also passes through other areas in Spain and France, and historians note that as monks were the medieval worlds best winemakers, this may have helped raise winemaking to a cult in places such as Burgundy.)

The local grape in El Bierzo is called Menca. Traditionally, almost all the wine was sold locally in bulk because the local winemakers focused on high yields, harvesting early and making the wine in primitive cellars. The big cooperatives that dominated the market didnt push for quality. The result was bitter, oxidized wines.

One look at the regions striking geography shows it can do much better. North of Madrid, the plains of Castilla y Len are flat, treeless and arid a barren landscape dotted with isolated villages. True to the new Spain, a new highway knifes through the dullness until, 430 kilometers northwest of Madrid, the road rises, and the summer landscape, despite Spains drought this year, turns green. In sight are the Sierra de la Cabrera mountains, punctuated with cyprus trees. The scorching heat is replaced by a gentle breeze.

It is a rural region the largest town is Ponferrada, with only 60,000 inhabitants. The main winemaking village, Villafranca del Bierzo, features medieval buildings and spectacular walking routes.

My first visit to a winemaker was to see Ral Prez, perhaps El Bierzos most ambitious native winemaker, as compared with the outsiders Palacios, who come from La Rioja. The stocky, ponytailed, 32-year-old bachelor drove me in his jeep through the nearby vineyards, which have been in his family since 1750. His cellar is newly constructed; Mr. Prezs father grew grapes but didnt bottle his own wine. Like most older El Bierzo winemakers, he also grew grain and cultivated fruits and vegetables. Mr. Prez studied oenology in far-off Valencia on the Mediterranean coast and returned home determined to concentrate on wine. For a decade now, Mr. Prez has been a pioneer and an avid experimenter, planting small plots of various non-Spanish red and white grape varieties such as French Chardonnay, Gewrztraminer and Pinot Noir. I like to have fun, he says.

All are interesting, but by far his most ambitious and successful wines are made with the local Menca. His El Castro de Valtuille, around 15 a bottle, bursts with flavors of cherries, blackberries, raspberries, tobacco and truffles. His premium wine, simply called Valtuille, sells for about 35 and is a more concentrated version. These are chewy wines, high in alcohol (14%), but they remain vibrant, with a freshness and coolness often lacking in other Spanish reds. These wines are available in selected wine shops both in the U.S. and Europe. Look for the 2003 vintage it is the best ever from the region.

In contrast to Mr. Prez, the Palacios family comes far from El Bierzo. For four generations, they have owned the Bodegas Palacios Remondo estate in the most traditional and esteemed of Spanish winegrowing regions, La Rioja, in the north, toward the French border.

In the early 1980s, Alvaro Palacios was sent to Bordeaux to study. When he returned to Spain a few years later, he wanted to make the type of modern wines that were becoming popular there, using ripe fruit, harvested late, and vinifying it slowly in oak barrels. These fruity forward Bordeaux are ready to drink young, with fresh, jammy flavors. Back in Spain, Mr. Palacios called his wines alta expression, literally high expression. They were purple in color, an explosion of fruit and flavor, compared with the traditional pinkish-red Rioja.

Mr. Palacioss parents refused to let him change the way things were done on the family estate. So he took out a loan and bought vineyards in Priorat. His fresh, powerful, modern wines and those by other vintners in Priorat using similar methods soon began garnering praise. In the meantime, the family firm was in trouble. After his fathers death in 2000, Mr. Palacios said he would be willing to take over the business, on the condition his brother Antonio, who was then running the estate, leave. His mother, sister and several of his brothers eventually agreed.

Today, Mr. Palacios is Spains most famous winemaker, having revived the family bodega in La Rioja and still producing top-flight wines in Priorat. His new priority is El Bierzo. Since 1998, Mr. Palacios and his nephew Ricardo, who also went to oenology school and did internships in Bordeaux, have been purchasing the El Bierzo mountainsides they believed held the most promise particularly around the town of Corulln.

Their El Bierzo wines are less flamboyant, and less of a blockbuster in taste, than those made by Mr. Prez. But they are more ambitious and more focused, displaying greater finesse and elegance, and a pungent peppery note. While Mr. Prezs Valtuille vines are in the valley the easiest place to cultivate them because tractors can be used and water can be brought in for irrigation if needed the Palacios family bought up the unwanted hillside vines, many of them decades old. Growing at elevations from 400 meters to 1,000 meters, their production is low, but their quality is high as the grapes get more sun. We couldnt use tractors here, says Oscar Alegre, the Palacios estates export manager.

The philosophy is to mimic the elite Burgundy practices, making wines from grapes grown in single vineyards, with names referring to the geographic location such as San Martn, Moncerbal, Las Lamas, Fontelas and La Faraona and then aging them in small Burgundy-style barrels of new oak. The top single-vineyard Palacios wines from El Bierzo go for 50 and up. But the more basic Ptalos del Bierzo (10.78) and Corulln (31.17) cost far less and are a good introduction to the style: They have soft, sweet, ripe tannins and a bracing scent of blackberries and cherries, with hints of chocolate and pepper on the finish. Over the past few years, I have learned how good Spanish red wines can be. El Bierzo showed me yet another side to this up-and-coming wine success story.

Escrito por ebierzo · Almacenado en Sin categoría 

La Web 2.0

Septiembre 13, 2005

Hace un par de semanas, Phil Wainewright escriba un interesante artculo en el que enumeraba algunas razones por las que Microsoft puede convertirse "en historia", y verse superado por Google. Todas ellas se pueden agrupar en que, mientras Google enfoca sus productos en Internet y en cualquier dispositivo que se pueda conectar a Internet, Microsoft se centra en la experiencia del usuario con su escritorio, y su modelo de negocio se basa en que nos actualicemos el Sistema Operativo y los paquetes de ofimtica cada tres aos.
Y es que, como nos recuerdan en el blog ‘dospuntocero‘ (sobre un interesante artculo de Jason Kottke), desde hace muchos meses se viene teorizando sobre un hipottico ‘WebOS’, el Sistema Operativo basado en la web, que hara del navegador web su principal interface, y que accedera a las aplicaciones de la conocida como ‘Web 2.0′.
Esta nueva versin de la WWW (por supuesto, se trata de una nomenclatura inventada por un gur de Internet) sera una mezcla de las nuevas "tecnologas" que estn surgiendo (Ajax, feeds, webservices, microformatos) y las aplicaciones sociales (blogs, wikis, redes sociales, Flickr, del.icio.us) que permiten que la web sea un espacio de flujo de informacin entre todos los usuarios, y no solamente desde unos portales web hacia los clientes. (Via Dirson)

Google est apostanto mucho ms por esta nueva generacin de WWW, y para luchar contra ello Microsoft prepara para esta semana que comienza el lanzamiento de una nueva versin de su ‘MSN Developer Center’, esta vez denominado ‘Web Platform’. Segn CNet, maana da 13 la compaa de Bill Gates nos ofrecer nuevas herramientas que no solamente permiten desarrollar aplicaciones dentro del escritorio, sino tambin interfaces de programacin para interactuar con el buscador ‘MSN Search’, con ‘MSN Visual Earth’ (la competencia a Google Maps), o con ‘MSN Messenger’.

Escrito por ebierzo · Almacenado en Sin categoría 

El Huracn Katrina por Google Maps

Septiembre 4, 2005

Va dirson leemos:
Google acaba de anunciar que en su servicio ‘Google Maps‘ se ha comenzado a incluir un botn rojo con la leyenda ‘Katrina’ cuando se visualizan imgenes de Nueva Orleans (ver ejemplo del Lousiana Superdome).
Si pulsamos sobre ese botn, veremos imgenes de satlite de la zona tomadas el mircoles 31 de agosto, justo despus de que el Huracn Katrina arrasase la costa sur de EEUU. Las fotografas provienen de la compaa DigitalGlobe, de la cual Google obtiene los datos.

Escrito por ebierzo · Almacenado en Sin categoría 


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