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!

Dispatch from the wine cellar: Is there a place for Italian wine in 2025?

After Thanksgiving I started a project: reducing, eliminating, paring down and finely tuning my wine collection. After 40+ years of amassing wines, I realized there were wines that were: 1) too old, 2) already dead, 3) not interesting, 4) too many and 5) I’ll never live long enough to drink all of them.

Now, we’re not talking about thousands of bottles. I’m not that kind of collector. But it has gotten up into the hundreds. And my wine closet, where I kept most of them over that past 30 years, just didn’t seem to be a good usage of space and energy. I bought a small unit, holding about 160 of the top wines I wanted to keep. And I had an older unit, which could hold the larger format bottles, the port and some additional wines that didn’t make it to the larger cooler, but I just couldn’t part with them yet. That left me with 150 or so bottles that just needed to go.

Everything I Know About Wine I learned in Ballet Class ~ A Revision

Well here we are December 1^st! Wow, what a year it’s been. For me, it started off with surgery and a knee replacement. And then, like a snowball – on a one-way road down to hell - it just kept accelerating towards chaos. I’d share more about the trials and tribulations of yours truly, but quite frankly, I’m fed up with them. So, I’m going to pivot, now that my leg is much better.

When I was in university, the arts department chairman and his wife, who ran the dance department, “recruited” me to join the ballet class. They “needed” men, and I was low hanging fruit for the picking. I “volunteered” at first reluctantly, and then after I realized I would be in a close setting with 35 women, just them and me sweating to the oldies, I thought again. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

The epiphany moment I had was when we were doing this “opening of the flower to the sunrise” choreography. I was the “pistil” and the women were the “petals.” They all laid their hands on me and did some movement and their pressure held me in place while I held them up, in a manner of speaking. It was then that I realized that not only was ballet an amazing discipline, both physical and cerebral, but it was a model for things to come in my future life in wine. Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch. But so was the all the stuff I learned about wine from the nuns and Catholic school. So, here goes:

End of harvest notes: "So, where we at?"

“Are you still doing your wine blog?” I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard that lately. Usually followed by “For some reason, I haven’t been getting them.” Which was news to me, as I hadn’t realized that I was “sending” them to anyone. Maybe once upon a time, Blogger had a process by which that happened, But if they did, long ago they stopped that. And seeing as I am not invested in technologically figuring out how to deliver my weekly blog to folks, I’m a bit bewildered. Actually, it doesn’t really matter to me. It is a web-log, after all. It is something I do as a weekly exercise, for myself. Anything beyond that is gravy.

From the archives: Remembering Dad, Dallas, JFK & a bottle of Thunderbird

Friday would have been my dad’s 98th 109th birthday. How the world has changed since he left us in 1985. I was thinking about that as I was driving past Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository the other day, while in downtown Dallas. Dallas, the place where so many things happened that affected me, my family and ultimately our country.

What Does the Future Hold for Wine in Sicily? A Sicilian Sojourn Pt. II

“You’ve got it all wrong, Alfonso,” a young influencer tells me. “You have to get yourself in front of the camera, show your face, strut your stuff!” Yeah, that might have been OK for me 30 or 40 years ago, but now? I don’t think so.

That was part of a conversation regarding one’s place in the world of wine and how to explode one’s brand online, as recommended by someone who is very successful at it. They also happen to be young, good-looking and affluent. None of which I purport to be, ever again.

Always Coming Home: A Sicilian Sojourn Pt.I

Imagining cultural difference that sheds light on the limitations of one’s own culture.

Riding on a bus, from Catania to Palermo, my time on Etna was done. I had apprehensions about coming back to Sicily, almost cancelled coming. The last time I’d been here, someone, or some thing,  tried to kill me. They failed, but not without leaving scars. With the passage of the last eight years, and all that we have been through, what with Covid and the ensuing chaos that surrounded that time, I didn’t know if getting on a plane to come to Sicily would be a wise thing.

Fortunately, last year, my experience in Venice allayed larger misgivings about travel. Look, Italy is a very easy place to be in, for many people. Even if one isn’t the most fluent in the Italian language or knowledgeable about the quirky regional customs, with a little humility and the faintest hint of awareness, one can navigate across Italy, and it can be a most pleasant experience.

Like no other place on Earth ~ The Etna Report 2024.5

It happened, after tasting over one hundred wines in a three-hour period, that the vinous impact of Etna became overwhelming. But not before the realization that what Etna means to someone like me goes way past wine. There has been a sociological adaptation made, with regards to agricultural practices, which is driven beyond mere climate and seasonal changes. There is the reality of La Muntagna – and La Muntagna drives everything, and everything derives from it.

If we didn’t have climate change, or as some called it early on, in the beginning, global warming, we’d still have Etna. Can the local practices put into place, because of the pressures of Etna, act as an instructional manual for other grape growing places in the world dealing with the immediacy of climate change? I wondered that as I walked along a lava strewn path early one morning. The weather was changing from the warm breeze of summer to the looming fog and coolness of autumn, in the background was the eternal soundtrack playing the low groans of the earth’s core and Etna acting as a megaphone for those rumblings.

Interview with a Centenarian ~ The Etna Report 2024.4

One of the advantages of having Sicilian blood and being raised in California in the latter half of the 20^th century is the uncanny capacity to listen to life forms other than humans. I first found out about this ability at university, when  a palm tree told me the story of its life one evening as I was sitting up against it. It was a fascinating experience and one that was apparently not singular. So, when I was on Mt. Etna recently, I happened upon a very old grape vine, well over 100 years old, up in one of the vineyards I visited. It was at the end of the day, and the vineyard was a short walk from where we were staying, so I asked my minder to allow me to stay awhile and make my own way back. I’d heard about this old vine from a winemaker friend who intimated that I might be interested in hearing its story one-on-one. Said winemaker knew about my propensity to channel other life forms on earth as we once talked about it and he understood completely what I was talking about. As I’ve mentioned before in these reports, Californians and Sicilians are kindred souls. And seeing as I’m a hybrid, I reckon my openness to these kind of interchanges is facilitated by that. So, here goes. I was standing there when she made contact, we’ll call her Dora, or as she more than once said, Nonna Dora (ND).

“Giuseppe Versus the Volcano” ~ The Etna Report 2024.3

For those who work in Nature, there are certain immutables. Fire and water are forces to be respected, not ignored. We can try and tame them with dams and forges and make them work for us. But there comes a time when furies are unleashed that simply overwhelm mere humans. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and volcanoes come to mind.

While on Etna recently, I talked to a farmer, Giuseppe. He’s been tending his land for several decades now. He’s not a young man, but he certainly has many years left under the volcano. I asked him about co-habitating with La Muntagna.

“I fell into a burning ring of fire.” ~ The Etna Report 2024.2

When I was a young boy, I lived in the shadow of a great mountain. For hours, I would sit outside and stare up at it, mesmerized by the play of light and shadows as the day progressed. Known for centuries as i a-kitch, I still dream about that mountain.

While on Mt. Etna recently, I would get up early, before sunrise, and sit on my little patio, watching the sun making its way to the mountain. Birds were awakening, the world was rousing. Etna was there, waiting.