Haven’t we been here before? A signpost on the wine trail in Italy

As I look over the essays and posts I have written this year, I warily eye the subject matter that appears on this site. I shouldn’t be, I’ve written all of them myself, just as I have been doing for going on 20 years now. But I can’t help wondering if I’ve reached the bottom of the barrel, tapped out, so to speak.

In essence, the short answer is yes. I’ve done a bunch of stuff here on the wine trail in Italy. And it has become a repository of images, ideas, and notions that I find myself referring back to more often than I ever imagined I would be doing. So, it has achieved the goal of being a web-log, for my purposes.

As to if it still holds any interest to the thousands of reader who happen upon this site weekly, well that is another question for another day.

David Brooks wrote this column in the New York Times recently, Be Careful About What You Want, in which he ruminates over these five struggles:

• The struggle between craft and reward  

• The struggle between gift love and need love 

• The struggle between excellence and superiority 

• The struggle between high and low desires 

• The struggle between ambition and aspiration

Reading and observing over these almost 20 years (in five months) regarding the wine trade where I worked for 40, those struggles resonate. Not just in work-time but in living a full life. Now that I have the time and luxury of reflection, they impart an urgency that grabs me and shakes me and interrogates me and accuses me. 

And I ask this question: Haven’t we been here before? 

Like Nothing Ever Before

How often have you opened a bottle of wine and thought that you had never tasted anything like what just came out of that bottle in your lifetime? Early on in one’s experience, I imagine one could say that often enough. But after a few years of tasting hundreds, maybe thousands of wines a year, when does that special bottle percolate up to the top and reveal itself to one’s taste buds?

Problem: Wine in Crisis? Remedy: Move forward, like an arrow. Fearlessly.

The past month I have been feverishly working on a project involving Italian wine and how better to communicate its better aspects to consumers, who seem interested but are deluged with a tsunami of wine offerings from Italy. Call it a laboratory, if you will. What it is, is one place in time and space where the progress of Italian wine can be measured, albeit somewhat anecdotally. It is a real place and real people are making buying decisions on the wine they will drink tonight or during the weekend, and any number of situations where wine is called for. And I have good news.

In Service of Italian Wine

Now that I am “retired” I’ve spent some time reflecting on the years I worked in the wine trade. I am glad I survived those years, for I have a list of men and women who didn’t. At first, I thought it was just normal, but as the list grew and grew, I realized I was dodging bullets. Scores of young people, my colleagues, perished in the 40 years I was working. And they were not old people. Time just caught up with them earlier than the rest of us. That said, in reflection, I also realize that there were a few bullets aimed directly at me. How I managed to survive them is the subject of this essay.

That ain’t Italy, folks – Tourism in the 21st Century

The image above was taken from the Instagram site of a hotel I stay at occasionally in Rome. It is their way, I suppose, to offer up a fantasy view of a Rome that is Disney-like in its aspirational tone. While I can appreciate their desire to offer up a vision that will lift people up and take them away to a place where light and joy reigns, my present thoughts about travel digress. While we all need a little escape these days, and we are in the summer months, which for many people, traditionally, is a time for a vacation, this is also a time when many people around the world are suffering, needlessly. To take time “off” from the pressing and urgent problems of our day, seems ill-timed. Add to that, the over-consumption that is designed into today’s tourism industry, and put it in a place like Rome, Venice, or all of Italy, and all of a sudden, a country turns into a cruise ship. The recent events in Venice with the spectacle of a billionaire’s second marriage galvanized this concept into a gigantic, sparkling mess.

Wine on lists starting @ $100, concert seats @ $1,000, cars that run $100,000, watches for $250,000 – Excuse me, what planet am I on?

It finally dawned on me - We all live in a yellow submarine – now I know what it means. A submarine, a bubble, a fantasy world, that’s where we’ve landed. While multitudes of innocent children, women and men are sitting ducks for scores and scores of armaments, decision makers weigh in on who will live or who will die, over their espresso martinis and halibut quenelles, and the world outside of the bubble burns crispy.

Inside the bubble, though, not all is rosy. Wine lists where the average price of a bottle of wine is over $100, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour where tickets averaged over $1,000, a plethora of cars (and trucks!) now costing north of $100,000 and, surprise of surprises, a wristwatch that costs more than a Ferrari!

So, how did we get here? And why?

From the Archives: Featured Father ~ A Modern Day Marco Polo

In Memory of Hank Rossi, who left us last year...

Watch out, Bin Laden, "AK-47 Rossi" is on your tail

Enrico “Hank” Rossi has the wandering spirit. Oh, and he likes to wear black, makes it easy to pack a bag and disappear for months at a time. In the shot above he is at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border testing out his skills. He is my featured father for Dad’s day.

From the Khyber Pass to Lalibela, before it is all said and done, Hank will visit almost everyplace his heart desires on earth. He just returned from a 2 month journey across the Silk Trail, spent last Christmas holiday in Egypt and Ethiopia.

How Much Do Wine Expert Ratings Matter?

 

Luciano Pavarotti and young fan at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

In the last year, I have been consulting with my local Italian wine shop, primarily making point-of-sale materials (shelf-talkers) for them. It’s been an interesting project and one which doesn’t take up too much of my time, but also allows me to keep a toe in the water of the wine trade, albeit in a passive and almost invisible manner. Just as I like it. But one of the surprises I have found in making these materials is the relative influence of the various wine writers who review and score wines. There are more now than ever, so the field has been diluted. Hence, it takes a little searching on the internet to find those voices and opinions (and scores) which I gather when making the shelf talkers for the store.

“Don’t Age Wine Longer than 10 Years!”

It was just a simple coffee meeting with an longtime Italian wine colleague, who, last time we talked, has since gone on to their version of fame and fortune. We were talking about how long, ideally, Italian wine should age before it is considered long enough. Seeing as 25% of the wines in my “cellar” are 25 years or older, I was interested in another person’s opinion, as I have had more misses than hits when opening these oldsters. I guess I was looking for advice or maybe validation? In any case, my friend launched into a prolonged jeremiad, which I recorded (with permission) and whereby this post now goes into that mode. Here goes:

In Memoriam: The Death of a Loved One

From the archives

In a world where there are so many tragic events  ̶  from the father who lost his wife and daughter when he was 30 and raised his two sons as a single parent, only to lose a son when he became a grown up, to a young boy who, at 5, lost his father to tribal warfare in Ruanda ̶  what does the loss of one tree matter?

Earlier this month, crisscrossing Texas by car, time and again, I recall the morning I was driving from Dallas to Houston and saw a large, mature oak tree in a field that had toppled over from the rain. I was going 65-70 and as I saw the newly fallen giant, I felt a sharp pain inside. Still green, still hopeful from a Spring filled with energy, this tree wouldn’t see another autumn.

A few weeks later, driving by the same spot, the tree was brown and lifeless now. There was none of that “It‘s still green, it might just be sleeping on its side” pretend one does to internally forestall the inevitable reality of death.

Is Your Favorite Italian Wine ‘Coded?’

It seems "things being coded" is all the rage these days. My preferred AI overview posits coded thusly:

In the context of social media slang, “coded” means that someone, something, or a behavior embodies or resembles a specific character, stereotype, or archetype. It's a way of using recognizable traits to make quick, playful connections and associations, often without explicitly naming the reference.

Jumping off from that point, it got me wondering if Italian wine is coded in these days of disruption. Almost anything can be, especially when one trawls the eddies of social media. Here’s what I have surmised from my brief but spectacular subterranean foray into the dark world of the coded.

An American in Rome – Can a world leader reshape the long tail of Italian wine?

By now the world knows there is a new pope and most of us have become acquainted with him, if just superficially. He, no doubt, will alter the conversation for peace in the world, which has been perched precariously over a precipice, caused by the wants and desires of men.

While the dance cards of peace and humanity and civility and truth and, while we’re at it, reality, get shuffled here in the 21^st century, what about little ‘ol Italian wine? Can Pope Leo XIV reignite the fortunes of growth for this sputtering agro-economic powerhouse? I’m sure there are a few households in Italy where the candles are burning, the altars are set and the prayers are coming at a feverish pace. Yeah, I’m in the “thoughts and prayers” stage over this matter.

A Master Plan for the Master Class

The decade we’re in started in 2020, and it was then that heightened consciousness was brought to racial injustices, and covered many aspects of life, from the way we talk about housing to the language that we use in general.

It was then that the term “Master Bedroom” had a light shone upon it as being indicative of those invisible prejudices we’ve lived with, seemingly, all our lives.

The Red Badge of Carnage (or the other wine that crashed and burned)

While rummaging through my wine stash, I came across a red from Italy and another red from Greece. We were having smoked brisket and I wanted to open up a few bottles of wine to try with the smokey, mellow red meat. I also had cooked up a pile of pinto beans ala Ranchero, the slow way, and they were simmering and ready.

The reds, a 2012 from Mt. Etna and a 2008 from nearby Mt. Ossa in Greece, were my choice after a brief consultation with a friend overseas. Both wines did not make it into my final cut a few months ago, when I consolidated my wine collection down to less than 200 bottles. There just wasn’t room. So, Easter Sunday, they were chosen to show their stuff.

The ˈknobbly road of business, camaraderie and wine compiling

Gran Sasso - Abruzzo

For some reason, I have been going over my wine career and the speed bumps along the road that I incurred during that 40+ year long journey. Not the successes, not even the failures. This dive was into the hearts and souls of people I worked with and for, and their sullied motivations. We are living in a moment where retribution and  grievance are center stage, I get that. And I’m not one to harbor a grudge for long. I’ve witnessed that in wine and friendships since retiring, some have come, some have gone.