Making Sense of Today’s Italian Wine Lists

"Everything that is done in the world is done by hope." - Martin Luther

I’ve been checking out some of the new Italian spots in my region, as this area, North Texas, has become one of the most dynamic economic sections of the country. And with commercial development and growth comes the hope of diversity in the new restaurants that have been opening up lately. Further down the rabbit hole, though, is the discussion of what an all-Italian wine list should look like. And because my recent forays in town have offered up a plethora of new choices in Italian wine lists, my quest for the optimally curated wine list is what this post is all about. So, let’s dig in.

The Luxurious Privilege of Outrage

I was taking a coffee break recently with a friend, catching up, and he remarked about some crappy restaurant service he’d recently gotten. I quipped back at him, “Yeah, you’ve got it real rough. You’re white, you’re financially set and you’re relatively healthy and young enough. Sounds like your 1%^er  white privilege is kicking in, cowboy.” He laughed. Of course, our banter can get a bit barbed, but it’s usually not jugular. But it can be to the point. I could have easily made that same remark in the mirror and it would have had an equal degree of accuracy. So, no glass houses here.

Peddling Prosecco on Skid Row – An Anamnesis

My last paying gig in the wine trade was as a national ambassador for a venerable maker of Prosecco. One of the days I was out, working the market, in Los Angeles, near where I was born. Los Angeles is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to Angelinos it holds a special place in one’s heart. So, to go back home and be thrust out into the streets, with a bag full of wine and a day full of appointments, was a memorable occurrence.

Italy is Ready For You – Are You Ready for Italy?

Recently I returned to Italy, after an absence of four years – for me, the longest interlude in a generation. It couldn’t be helped. There was Covid, of course, which altered everyone’s life on the planet. But there were subtle factors; health, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the economic turbulence in the world. And the reality that Italy was hit hard by the pandemic and I wanted to give it enough time for them to recover and be ready for visitors.

Well, they’re ready for you – but are you ready for Italy?

The Four Pillars of Italian Wine

Italian wine is a diverse sea of flavors, colors, buoyancies, styles and price points. There are thousands of grapes, and as many or more wines to go along with it. But what drives the business? What grows the market share? And what keeps the lights on?

It falls to four wines, all with relatively humble beginnings. The four wines encompass four different types of wines – white, red , sparkling and sweet. And although they may not be on the tip of the tongues of today’s tony sommeliers, they provide needed cover for the more esoteric and trendy wines currently being touted by the in-crowd and influencer-wannabes.Too often we chase the trends and forget what brought us here.

Caution advisory: These are not considered cool wines by the high toned up-and-comers. Those dashers consider them boring, dull, run of the mill, yawn, give-me-a-break, get-away-from-me type of wines. They are misinformed.

An Italian wine lover's incessant love affair with (lithe and sexy) Trebbiano

Recently, the Italian wine producers have been hitting the road. Tre Bicchieri and Slow Wine road shows, along with an agglomeration of small producers, importers, p.r. firms and producer consortiums, have been traversing the globe, once again. Even with our pandemic hangover still lingering in mind, if not in deed, the world must not stand still. And so, I ventured to a local tasting of the Slow Wine Tour, here in my home base of Dallas, Texas.

The day would be crowded with other obligatory duties. My son was scheduled to get an elective procedure (snip, snip) and he needed me to drive him to and fro, which constituted crossing several urban centers in our metroplex, a round trip of about 100 miles. In addition to that, the weather was dotty. Rain was in the forecast, and in Texas, in March, that could mean anything from a light downpour to an F5 tornado.

The Big One is Coming! Hurricane, Cyclone and Typhoon Season in Italy

Over the past 50 years I have been an avid Italy watcher. In time I became an active participant in the wine trade. In the boat, either rowing or rocking it, depending on my role at the time, navigating the sea of Italian wine has been a vigorous and spirited undertaking. But now that I have debarked, I observe from the shore. As we go into the month of December, the world is collectively gasping a sigh of relief, as the hurricane, cyclone and typhoon seasons are winding down.  But the way I see it, for the future of Italian wine, there is a storm season coming, a big one. And for those on the wrong side of the squall, there will be an unprecedented jolt. For the way of Italian wine is undergoing, once again, a tectonic change. People get ready!

I Numeri Del Vino - My World in Italian Wine

People who know me, know I have this thing about spread sheets. No, I’m not a bean counter or a number cruncher. I don’t even like the word “metrics,” as it triggers uncomfortable meetings with dull accountants. But I do like lists, and they often include numerical jottings.

For instance, I have a spread sheet on my cholesterol numbers going back to the mid 1980’s. And a list of all the foreign trips I have taken to Italy and elsewhere. I also have a spreadsheet which tells me what I have in my freezer. A list of my watches. A list of valuable coins I’ve inherited (watches and coins are vaulted up, folks). I have a spread sheet of the wines I have collected, so I can access any wine I want within seconds. Ditto for my vinyl LP and CD collection. You never know when one will want to spin Steely Dan’s Aja or Moondog’s Snaketime Series.

By the Bottle: Esther Mobley

Wine lovers on wine and the vinous life.

Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle

I met Esther at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley, and saw her talent and her zeal in its budding stages. She has blossomed into one of the most influential wine writers in America as the wine critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. Esther exhibits endless energy for wine and writing about it, and her perch from the Bay City in Northern California offers her a vantage point that few wine writers have these days. Thankfully her audacious ardor supplies her wide range of subjects with a sincerity of spirit. Please welcome Esther into the bottle room. 

 

What wines do you have standing up right now?

Well, I have a lot of wines standing up right now, maybe a few dozen, because I've run out of space in the wine racks and wine fridges in my apartment. I have a whole wine cellar at the Chronicle office, but I haven't been working from there since March 2020, so my apartment and garage have become quite crowded with bottles.

There is no box wine in Heaven. Or is there?

I don’t know what gets into me. I was reading an obituary and it just sent me down a rabbit hole. Maybe it’s because my ice cream is melting and I’m getting closer to the abyss. Ah, whatever! I’m not sure, when I no longer breathe, wine will mean much to me (or anything at all, for that matter), but this line from the obit a few weeks ago really lit me up, in a good way:

“On July 2, 2021, Betty Kuhne Sawyer Hitchings, 93, marched through the gates of Heaven and immediately asked for directions to the River of Boxed Chardonnay.”

[Read Betty’s obituary, it really does sound like she had a wonderful life, regardless of her choice in wine]

What I do know is this: If I’ve been a good boy and minded all my P’s and Q’s, there better be something better than Franzia waiting for me at the Pearly Gate Café.

By the Bottle: Robert Camuto

Wine lovers on wine and the vinous life.

Robert Camuto is an American wine writer based in Italy. I first met him in Dallas, where he was promoting his brilliant book about Sicily, Palmento.

Author of forthcoming South of Somewhere: Wine, Food and the Soul of Italy (October 2021) At Table University of Nebraska, and Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey (2010).

Writer of twice monthly on line column Robert Camuto Meets… @  www.robertcamuto.com

 

What wines do you have standing up right now?

A lot of Chianti Classicos. This spring after all those months in lockdown in Italy (including a bout with Christmas Covid), the first place I headed to was Tuscany for the comfort of good old Sangiovese.

I am on a Sangiovese tear right now. It’s possibly the most emblematic Italian grape. I love the different expressions from all the different parts of Chianti Classico—austere, mineral and vertical in Radda to softer and sunnier around Castellina. Sangiovese cries out for hearty classic Italian foods and salumi. In C.C, you have the pure Sangioveses and the blends. It’s a world.

 

What’s the last great wine you drank?

Yesterday at lunch with a friend in Verona, we drank a bottle of Le Ragnaie 2015 Brunello di Montalcino. Long, smooth, earthy and elegant.

 

Are there any classic wines that you only recently had for the first time?

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I first tried (speaking of Sangiovese) Montevertine’s mythic Le Pergola Torte. It was at the end of a central Italy summer dinner with a bunch of crazy winemakers. Sadly, I can’t remember what the wine tasted like. (One of those evenings!)

10 Wines that Forever Changed the How the World Sees Italian Wine

From 8½ by Federico Fellini

Italy was once a forlorn country, vinously speaking. The wines were made haphazardly. The flavors were sometimes off, especially the white wines. They didn’t “travel” well to foreign countries. And the producers and the importers thought, in order to get a foothold in the market, that the wines had to be cheap. So they were. And, in the immortal words of Rodney Dangerfield, they “didn’t get no respect.”

We’re talking the 1960-70’s here, which is a universe away from the world we live in now. But to get from there to here took a revolution that hammered away at the commercial, cultural, logistical and financial worlds that prevailed. It was a long, slow climb to the top, where now Italian wine enjoys a reputation as one of the great wine producing countries of the world. No longer is Italy in the shadow of France, as it was when I started out. But it took some dogged determination, and the blood, sweat and tears of a diverse group of producers (and importers) in order to pull this revolution off. Here are ten of those fomenters who created a new reality for Italian wine, and changed forever how all of us see wine from Italy.

The Deciders vs. the Influencers – A saga for espousing wine in the new era

There are voices out there, in the ether of the internet, who are pushing the idea of the demise of the old guard. “The decider class is dying,” they clamor, hurling salvos about the decrepitude of the voices that have guided many folks into the world of wine. “It’s all over now, the blue bloods no longer tell us which red wines we should buy, with their 100-point scales and bloviated tasting notes. It does nothing for me, tells me nothing about my experience, my relationship with the wine I choose.” It’s risen to more than a gentle ferment. The young lions want the silverbacks to “get the blazes out of our world.”  Is the age of the authority done with? Or is the new blood punching the upper crusts out of the way, hustling out the Decider Class and ferrying in the Influencer Squad? Is it really a new age, or is this merely a successive approximation, dolled up to look hip and dope?

The top 10 destinations for Italian wine exports in 2019? Once again, China wasn’t one of them. In 2020, Quo Vadis?

Young Italian wine professionals had been posing wistful pictures on their Instagram and Facebook feeds, when travel destinations such as China, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand and Singapore were de rigueur for building their Italian wine business. From first blush, one would think there’s a lot of business for Italian wine in Asia. I’m looking at the numbers from 2019 and prognosticating upon what the possibilities for growth in 2020 are.

Has the battle for Italian wine in high-traffic retail been lost?

Now that I’ve scaled down my activities in the wine trade, I spend more time shopping for groceries, including the occasional bottle of wine. But I’m finding something about buying Italian wine in high-traffic retail (groceries, convenience stores, drugstores) to be very discouraging, verging on the sinister. The battle Italian wine has waged, interpolating itself into the greater American culture in the last 50 years, has been lost. It’s disheartening. And it’s disgusting. Because it treats Americans in search of Italian wine in those outlets, as if they are a bunch of immature babies just looking for a sweet lollipop.

So, let’s dig in and take a look at this situation.

Prohibition's 100-year Anniversary and the Disastrous 100% Tariffs - Analysis and Strategies

“Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.” - Robert A. Heinlein

After reading a handful of pieces on the proposed 100% tariffs, and the plaintive pleas for it not to happen, I’m thinking: Is this all one can do, to ring the fire bell and ask people to write their leaders, sign a petition? There has to be more to it than the wringing of the hands and the signing of a petition. Those letters seldom get read. At best they’re put in piles: Yay vs. Nay. But no one is going to read them all, let alone respond. And a petition with 500 or 2,500 signatures, is that anything more than a feel-good gesture from the easy comfort of one’s laptop or smartphone? Come on.

I’d love to see someone dig in and ask the large distributors and importers what their collective plan of action is. Lobbying, donations, pressure? What is it? And also, if this is getting back at Airbus for subsidies, why should Boeing be a beneficiary when they are showing little in the way of cleaning up their own house? And why must wine (really, alcohol) suffer?

“喜劇結束了” - The State of Italy - Wine, Culture, All of It - in 2120

“Italian investment of time and resources in importing wine to China will ultimately turn out to be a big mistake. The Chinese will eventually get their production to a level where they can be seen as prestigious as the first growths of Bordeaux (the French are complicit in helping them get there, and along the way, have sold their souls for a buck). And when the state media of China convinces Chinese (or compels them) to be loyal to their homegrown wine, which is better than anywhere else in the world, "La Commedia è finita" [ 喜劇結束了]. Italian wine will have been pared down to miniscule levels, and will be so rare and exclusive as to be the private domain of billionaires and NPC apparatchik. You and I will be dead then.” – Luisa Parker-Ragg in 2020

Assisi - February 14, 2120 A.D.

Where to start? As everyone knows by now, around 2040, things got tough for Italians in these parts. The Chinese population alone in Tuscany was nearing 500,000, displacing many generations of Tuscans who died in the 1st Pandemic of 2020. Along with that, the birth rate declined so extensively that it was hard to keep some of our industries going. Native manufacturing all but disappeared. And farming wouldn’t have survived if not for AI. Vineyards began to shrivel, with no one to work the land. And then, as if overnight, we found out that China owned 58% of Italian land and industry. We had been invaded, overrun and taken over by our own hubris and inertia. Now we are a colony.

The top 10 destinations for Italian wine exports? China isn't on the list

From the looks of young Italian wine professionals Instagram and Facebook feeds, one would think China is their top market. Add to that the obligatory posts from Kuala Lumpur, Phuket, Bangkok and Phnom Penh, one would think there’s a lot of business for Italian wine in Asia. Let’s look at the numbers.

According to Istat data, 2019 (From Italian Wine Central) of the 20 top destinations for Italian wine exports, 2018, China isn’t even in the top 10. Yes, it’s a country with good growth potential and 1.2 billion inhabitants. But is the investment in time and travel worth it?

So you think you want to import Italian wine?

While I have, more than once, addressed the challenges of selling one’s Italian wine to America, it seems I haven’t touched enough upon the complexities of importing Italian wine into America. Since I am no longer “ITB” (in the business), I have gotten a barrage of emails from people looking to “get into the business,” from both Italy and America. It’s probably time to go over some things in relation to the realities, in 2019, of pursuing that path.

Erbaluce, where have you been all my life?

There’s nothing more enjoyable and illuminating than to rediscover a wine, a grape or a region as if I’d never had an iota of exposure to them. Such was the case with Erbaluce di Caluso from Piedmont last week while there for the food and wine workshop Gastronomix. It’s a spin-off of Collisioni, with Ian D’Agata directing the education.

I’d had some exposure to Erbaluce in my past life in the wine trade, but never went much deeper than dipping my toes in the lake. This was full immersion, with a real master class, taught by one with mastery of the subject, and over several days.