By Wayne McGurk, Opimian member, Quebec
My love of delicious wine and food has taken me to different parts of the world. Whenever my wife and I are travelling, we enjoy meeting new people and experiencing the country through the local cuisine and wine.
In 2013, we travelled to Zihuatanejo, Mexico with other foodies. We decided to go out for dinner in the city of Ziwa, so not being locals, we checked Tripadvisor for a restaurant.
We found a review of this little restaurant, El Murmullo (roughly translated, “the wind whisperer”), a street-food place with an award-winning chef and an outdoor kitchen. It looked like a hole in the wall with a couple of chairs.
We settled in to eat on the street and the meal was amazing. As wine lovers, what really blew us all away was when the staff brought out a carafe and balloon wine glasses with this fantastic Chilean wine, which we had never heard of: Casa Nueva Cabernet Sauvignon 2012. It was a wine that was out of this world. I loved its body and flavour and as the evening progressed, we went through a few more bottles. We had an amazing experience that will stay with me for a lifetime.
I fell so much in love with that wine that, upon my return to Canada, I went on a mission to find more. As I was privately importing some wines from California through the Quebec liquor board at the time, I knew how fastidious the process could be, so I hoped to find someone who was already importing Casa Nueva products. Through web searches, I found Opimian, and that’s how my journey started with the Club in 2014. Ever since I became a member, I have been making sure to order wines from the Chile offering.
Through the Opimian head office, I recently had the chance to get my hands on two of the Casa Nueva Family Wines Heritage Cabernet Sauvignon 2012 from a Founders’ Choice case. Although the joy of wine is all about sharing, I will certainly not be sharing these! Drinking them will bring back such fond memories of that amazing experience in Mexico.
