First there is a tariff, then there is no tariff, then there is.

Learning to love wine again in the era of Patrioligarchy

“Welcome to earth. Please take a glass and a seat. Someone will be with you shortly.”

I was hoping for a haiku, but the words were too long. It was that time of the year again, for my annual examination of my long-standing relationship with wine. What, you say, can one have a relationship with a liquid alcoholic substance? Well, if one can have a relationship with someone who lived and died over two thousand years ago, why not wine too? After all it was His first miracle.

But that was beside the point. What was really set before me, in that examination of that “relationship,” was a deeper look into the  nature of material reality. Anyone who enters into the world of wine thinks, on first glance, that wine is wine, much like water is water. But upon spending years studying wine, one might realize that wine isn’t just wine, it is a lot of other things. It is culture. It is sustenance. It is history. It is agriculture. It is business. It is beguilement. It is seduction. Yes, it is, all of that. And more.

And then….

Tariff Tornado Season: Steering Alee from Excess Wind, Dross and Excisions

"It's like déjà vu all over again" -Yogi Berra

There appears to be no bottom in the hustle to bloviate and sully us with all the excess bullshit that is being produced these days. Now we’re being sucked into the crisis-cycle of European wine tariffs. If only it were wine, and domestic wine at that. One thing for sure, most of it (the bullshit) is domestic production. It just isn’t anything we can distill, ferment or drink. But it’s a heyday for the honey bucket man - the septic and sewage systems are close to overload from our overlords, who have now proffered upon us the threat of a 200% tariff on European wines (up from 100% in 2020). There’s been a lot of wailing and flailing on this subject. We’ve gone down this road before. Before we, once again, surrender to fear and one more distraction, allow me, if you will, to unpack this manufactured crisis with a little bit of perspective from all my years in the wine trade.

Happiness, happiness…

…everybody wants happiness. Round and round we all do race, everybody looking in a different place.

Yeah, pretty much how it seems. I see so many wine professionals rushing all over the globe, living their best life.

Living large!

And I remember when I was in that stream. It rushed, all about me. I was caught up in it, just as they are now. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But it is not forever. It is not permanent. Just like wine, it peaks. And it has a time when it is perfection. And a time when that moment has passed.

I say this as if I am speaking to any one person in particular. They might be laid up right now, healing. But this also applies to all of us in one way or another. I’ll speak for myself.

Who in Hell Knows Where This Ride is Going?

In Memory of Patty Wright-Ferrini...

Yesterday a dear, good friend died. We met in college, that’s how long we go back in time. She was a force of nature, always positive and upbeat. Not to say she didn’t have her dark side. But she never let her flowers bend with the rainfall, to borrow a line from a Simon & Garfunkel song. She will truly, truly, be missed.

And that is where we are at these days, ladies and gentlemen. George Clooney mused recently to his wife, upon turning 60, “I can still do everything I did when I was 30. But in 30 years, I’m 90. That’s a real number.” Let me tell you, from someone who is midway between those numbers, it’s like a train that’s rushing to its destination. Not an Italian train in the 1970’s – more like a Frecciarossa. Look it up.

The Bullshit-ification of the Italian Wine and Food Experience in America

Inspired by Jon Lovitz of Saturday Night Live fame...

I had an epiphany recently. And it was, the new reality in America is that the old maxim – Money talks, Bullshit walks – has been hacked. It appears that bullshit also talks, and man, oh man, are we wading in it, up to our eyeballs these days. That said, I walked into a new Italian-themed restaurant. The “chef” greets me with a “Ciao y’all.” Boy, I must be in a real genuine, authentic Eyetalian restaurant.

The Wine That Wasn’t - Anymore

I’m just going to come right out and say it: I don’t like being me anymore. I was born a wine, but I’m tired of being locked up in this dark, dank, confined space, year after year. If this is living, I don’t want any part of it anymore. I want out!

Oh, The People You’ll Meet! (At a Wine Trade Tasting)

Oops!... I did it again - Went to a wine trade tasting and seminar. Something I used to do, lots and lots of, when I was visible. But now, it is a rare appearance I make for these things. In any event, it stirred up memories of the kind of folks you might meet at an event like that – let’s call them prototypes of  folks who attend such events, classic exemplars:

• The know-it-all
• The late arriver
• The button-downed
• The always curious, always hungry, always thirsty.
• The odd man out
• The perpetual student
• The true believer

Let’s dig in!

The Depthless Abyss

Somewhere in time - when you remember another time - things were deeper, truer, bluer, more connected to a believable reality. But here we are, with this pitiful excuse for a genuine moment. We’ve come all this way through time, through epochs, millennia, and for this to be the current crowning glory of acceptable existence? This is a dark, but thin comedy. This is a poor replica of the future, an even poorer byproduct of the past. This is a stretch that should be wiped away, for all time. And some day, I pray it will be. This is a travesty.

I’d just opened a bottle of red wine. Lest we think it was a commentary on contemporary happenings in the world, well, you might just have been misdirected. The wine was a washout, it displayed no redeeming features. It was foul smelling, sour, rotten flavored and reeked of spray on tan and mimeograph paper. What were they thinking when they brought this one out into the open?

It had been days since I’d tasted wine, as a cold prevented me from imbibing. Standing up, it had been a bottle I snagged back in 2016 and just let it rest in the cellar. It went through a tumultuous historical period lying there in the darkness. So, I thought it was time. Little did I know, if it was time, it was of another time. Not any time that I’d like to be associated with or in. And yet, here we were.

I put it aside and disregarded it. Hoping the next time I’d have a better experience. And just like that I decided not to pick up another one, nor just yet. “Just leave it be,” a voice inside said. “This is not the time. Let it pass.” So, I did.

There are times when one cannot step into the abyss. Yes, I know it’s there. And every time I open one up, there is the possibility that it could be paradise or perdition. I’m just not ready for the gamble. Let ‘em all rest. I’ll come back later.

 

 

© written and photographed by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

wine blog +  Italian wine blog + Italy W

The Sunset Trip

It seems, more and more lately, that aging folks just can’t step away from the dais. Whether it is confined to the wine and spirits trade (and that includes those who write about it) all the way down the spectrum, to the political animals who assume that they are in charge of all of our lives. Once you turn 70, the light just doesn’t burn as brightly. I thought we were going to get a break from the gerontocracy last year, but the old ways, and the illusions about what it is we’re entitled to in this life, burned bright enough to carry them over for another cycle.

The End of the Golden Age of Wine

Wine, associated with appreciation and enjoyment and part of a cultural and culinary movement that was defined by the freewheeling social and economic post-World War II era, succumbed in America today at the age of 79. Wine was pronounced dead by Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States.

“Wine was the quintessential Boomer, having risen up in a time which we will look back at as the golden age of wine,” remarked one longstanding wine lover, who was seen wiping a tear from his eye, among the crowd that formed upon hearing of wine’s demise.

Destroying Memories with Invisible Eyes

Temporarily shut in by the arrival of snow (and winter), I was remanded to a nostalgic dream space that has been annexed by an external calamity of Biblical proportions. It’s a strange land, this Gulf of America, I find myself in. At once I’m excavating images from the past to rework them for a photo project. Yet I can’t help feeling somehow, I am destroying memories. It seems that is the price of art, so I have recently been reminded, by a master in the field.

A French Gladiator on Italian Soil

A young wine friend texted me a photo of a bottle he had in his presence, a 2013 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Pucelles. In the secondary market that wine sells for about $350 today.

In the last month I have been craving a bottle of Puligny Montrachet. I don’t know why. When I was working in Hollywood in the 1970’s, I was introduced to Puligny, and it stuck with me. I loved everything about the wine. So, when my young friend dangled that bottle in front of me, I was both salivating with desire and foaming at the mouth with envy. Alas, it was not to be. The wine was out of my reach.

At Long Last – A Prescription for Uncertainty

This week I cleared out the RSS feeds for wine writing links. Since I’m not following the wine news anymore, and not part of the wine news-making claque, why track it? There’s this unspoken “rule” in photography that I learned from one of the masters that I followed: “When you don’t know what to shoot, turn around and go the other way. After a minute, turn left. In another minute, turn right. That should get you back on track.” So it is with wine, and especially about writing about it.

What I’ve  found from doing this blog since 2005 is that my interests lie not in the latest trends or the buzz around things like that. Just like photographs, my yardstick is, how will it age in 20 years?

Onward Through the Fog ~ A Treatise on Montepulciano d’Abruzzo

At long last, the red wine known as Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is having its day in the sun, basking in the glory from the newly anointed acolytes in the world of wine writing and wine influencers. I say both, because now it is that an influencer has much more sway than a journalist, a blogger or simply, a poster (that is, one who posts). This is not a lamentation as much as it is a tract on how we got here, and why it took so long for us to get to the Promised Land of Abruzzo.

Strange Bedfellows ~ Non-Traditional Wine and Food Matches

Photo by Louis Cevola

In my life, there have been those occasions when a seemingly odd wine and food combination made perfect sense. Far from traditional, these moments offered insight into the arcane mechanism of wine and food pairings. As I add up my revolutions around the sun, I find things like absolutes to be more of a roadblock than a thruway. Viva la revolución!