 Welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I am your host, Matthew Harky. Hi, I'm Sherene Tan. Welcome back to the show. We have a fun episode today. We have a Brazilian wine and a Cypriot sweet wine today. Are you excited about this? Super exotic. So it's really cool. Our first Brazilian wine. Actually, our friend, Luis Felipe, brought this to us in Croatia. And it's so funny. He brought this wine. He is Brazilian-American. He brought it from Brazil to Chicago to here to meet up with us. It's a funny meeting internet people in the flesh, for real. A couple of years ago, I remember I was reviewing Mexican wines in Vevino. And he was mentioning, oh, I probably will never taste that. And then on the blue, he messages me and says, I'm going to Mexico next week. What do you recommend? And two and a half years later, what do you know, we meet him and he brought us some wine. Well, you met him. I'm sorry, I couldn't make it that day. That's right. Let's taste this. So we have Guaspari Cera Vista da Cera. Now, what he told me and what I've found about this producer is it's actually a coffee producer. And the coffee producer wanted to start planting vines. I mean, it's high elevation. I think this is growing at 1,200 meters, aged 18 months in oak. We'll see how this goes. What do you think? Do you know when they planted the vines? I have no idea when they planted these vines. Let's check it, sorry about it. So we'll check it later. So, Brazilian wine, for you as you don't know, there is wine made in Brazil. It's in the south of the country. It usually at higher elevation because of, you know, of course, that Brazil can get quite tropical, but towards the south, towards the border of Argentina and Uruguay with elevation or further south, it's less tropical. From what I know, the wines are expensive. I think I've seen that this is a $45, $50 wine. So we're not playing around here. Let's give this a smell here. Lot of oak. All ends of oak. What do you think, right? It smells very right, but it's still true to Sera with like a little bit of blueberry, maybe a little bit of popo flour, maybe not violet, but orchid. It's so funny when these emerging countries, sometimes the oak can just be a little bit too much, but, because the fruit doesn't take it, but just the fruit takes it here. Yeah, I don't find it too much because I still get the fruit. It smells like something you like because there's a little bit of rubber. No, I think the fruit can take the oak. Let's give this a sip here. I do think this wine will open up and get better across the hour. 2014, you definitely get the Sera meaningness. The spice, it is nice, but there's a ton of oak laid down. What do you think about this one? Pellet is much nicer than, much more interesting than the nose. What do you think about it? Good and novel acidity. I find it's kind of heavy. I would say tired, but it's a little bit dull right now and it needs the oak to integrate further for it to become brighter and more vibrant again. I do think that it's a pretty good wine, but as of now, it's just so much of everything. Pretty nice wine. It does show a lot of oak. I'm not super high on this. I think it's nice. But also a lot of nuances. Yeah, there are nuances. It's not, you know what? It's hard to score this wine because there's a lot of oak, but it's just not sloppy. It's actually pretty well done. To me, I'm still a hard critic with Sera. I'm like a 3.8, 3.9-ish on this wine. What do you think? I'm going to reveal like 3.8 flas. I do see that you will get better about for now. Yeah. It's like an 87, 88 point type wine. So it's nice, not blowing my face off. You want to grab a glass so that we can stop this? And I'll cut it out. Or I'll just entertain here. So it's shrimp. While shrimp grabs a glass, I'll just blab around a little bit. I guess this is one of the premier producers. I know nothing about Brazilian wine. I would like to go. It's so funny. I was talking to Luiz and I said, out of all the countries, one country I'm kind of freaked out about is Brazil. I don't know why. I've been to a lot of crazy places. Pakistan, the Middle East for some reason. I'm just a little bit worried to go. But I have to wash the glass with it. Okay. I think we can just pour over. I was worried about it. Let's get started. This is a wine we've actually been to. They sent us a sample. This is La Gria from Cyprus. This is the La Gria Sun Wine 2016 made from sun-dried mavro. So it's like a Cypriot-Vincento-type play. Cyprus is famous for comandaria, which is made of mavro and zinestady. This is sun-dried mavro. Something was wrong. You just looked at me funny. What's happening? Too hot. Well, it's 14-5 out of- No, no, no. The temperature. Oh. So sun-dried grapes, I don't believe it's age-no because I remember a lot of their wines, they just age in stainless steel in the bottle. When I get, you know, Cyprus, I was talking to one producer and they actually said, even though they make dry wines, they said, you know, if it were up to me, I think Cyprus should only produce sweet wines because of the sun and the power of the sun. Cyprus is an island. If you go west to Lebanon, it's there, south of Turkey, gives you an idea about how hot it is. They get a lot of hot air from Africa. We spent two weeks there. Actually, there are some lovely wines being made there. What do you think about this wine? Quite fun of it. I think it would be a lot better if it's served at a right temperature. Really velvety smooth with a very nice toffee and straight-up raisin flavor on the finish. I'm surprised by how balanced it is. Again, I don't have the tech sheet here, but I think that the acidity and the sugar balance is very good and that's why I appreciate about it. Not a ton, not a super long finish, but the finish is clean and fresh. It's nutty. Caramel. Got the dried apricots, some honey. Recently complex. Not super complex. What do you think about this? I just say everything that I want. In terms of quality. Because Commandaria can be fantastic, of course. We know that, right? Straight up, if I don't know anything about this wine at a tasting of sweet wine at a competition, I think this should get a silver, a 90-point wine because of the balance and the complexity it offers. I'm 4.0, 4.1, so to me, I'm by 89. So it'd be like an 89-point type score. I think it's very good considering the fact that Lagre, we like some of the wines, some of the wines we did not. I think this is pretty impressive. I have no idea what the price is. No idea what the price is. So I guess we'll have to seek it out. Anything you want to add on these two wines? Quite exotic showing, right? Well, guys, check that out. I will put some of the links in the description box. If you like this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, Exotic Wine Travel. We'll see you at the next episode.