Choosing Your Hill

So much of what we’re enveloped in lately seems to be a battle over where to plant one’s flag. There is such an overabundance of information pulling us one way or another. I’m not just talking about the wine world, which has it share of battles, but the overall sphere of experience and existence. It just feels like everyone is itching for a fight. Which hill are you willing to die on?

What the Next Ten Years Actually Held

redoing a 2025 blog post over a 2016 set of guesses about Italian wine in America 

Ten years ago this past January I sat down and made a list of guesses about where Italian wine in America was going. I hedged at the top, the way one might:

Looking back is so much easier than this. But the past is dust. So where are we going? All I have are some educated guesses. Maybe not predictions, but inklings from the tea leaves.

The past is indeed dust and the tea leaves have all dried out. Here is the scorecard.

Ziff & Dale Decanted - The Strip Returns

It's been the better part of two decades since a corkscrew and a decanter first started arguing with each other in the back of a restaurant, after hours, over whatever was left in the bottle. Ziff & Dale. Some of you might remember. Most of you won't, and that's fine too.

A few things have changed since then. The wine world, obviously — natural wine wasn't a headline back then, orange wine was still a curiosity, and nobody was asking a bot for a food pairing. The people those early characters were drawn from have gone their own ways since. 

Selling the Sunlight

Recently I was, what else, talking wine with a friend. Sicily came up (we were sipping on a Grillo) and the notion of just how far Sicilian wines had come, not only in the aspect of quality, but in the perception of quality. France came up, and how French wines had that particular je ne sais quoi with regards to how folks saw French wine in the pantheon of wine greatness. I recalled a story about  how, many years ago I was hosting the father of a client, the father being the director of a very large wine cooperative near Bordeaux. We were trekking to Northernmost Texas to visit the TV Munson vineyards. Along the way this gentleman, Raymond Chandou, and I got to talking about Italy and Sicily, and our mutual affection for the island. “I have many friends there in and around Palermo,” he recounted. I was a bit puzzled.

Passion Is the Yeast, Not the Grape

How many times do you read something, hear something, talk to someone, and the subject comes around to passion. I'm not talking about some arm-in-arm torrid romance that is splashed all over the screens, large and small. No, I am thinking of something a little more internal. And what I often hear is that someone is finally going to follow their passion. When I first heard it, years ago, I bought into it. Then after years of chopping in the woodshed, I realized it is balderdash! Passion isn't something you follow. Passion follows — and it usually follows after years of painstaking and drudgery-filled labor, the 10,000-hour kind.

I wasn't lured into the wine trade because of passion. It was an accident. I needed to make money to support a small family. I started out in the restaurant business, as a server, and then eventually became a manager of a wine bar. Then I moved on to wholesale and distribution, importing, and the worlds that enveloped that. I spent more than 10,000 hours, and I didn't take a test or receive any medals or post-nominal titles. I simply plied my trade.

Don’t Pee on the Oregano

I don't know if this is a redundant type of notion, but once again I am thinking about wine, wine tasting, the wine tasting experience and the overall life experience. And the more I think about it, and live it, the more I am inclined to not isolate wine as an experience separated from the rest of life.

A young female wine influencer recently made a video about this and in it she expressed thoughts about being out with friends in a restaurant. There is music, there are the aromas from the kitchen and the food. There is perfume and cologne. There is conversation and dialogue. People are sharing their lives. The wine arrives — does life stop?

The Wines of Campania: Tom Hyland Gives an Overlooked Region Its Due

Photo ©Tom Hyland 2026

 

Tom Hyland has spent the better part of five decades chasing Italian wine, and approaching 100 trips into the country to do it, so it's a little surprising it's taken this long for him to give Campania a book of its own. The Wines of Campania (Palmetto Publishing, 2026) fixes that, and it does it the way you'd want a region this misunderstood to be handled: on the ground, province by province, producer by producer.

The Dog Days of Summer

Rocco, as I found him on July 20th 

July came and went. My month, and the month for so many people I know and love. I look forward to July every December, January and February. And then when it arrives, it careens through time, like it always does and leaves us in the dust and into the dog days of summer.

1989 La Chapelle Hermitage - Thirty-Seven Years After

There is another story I really want to tell, but this one comes first. Last week I had a few fellows over for a birthday meal — they were all (or had already turned) 50, and I was 25 years ahead of them. Good for them: they still have more time than I do to do whatever they need to do in this life. For my part, I have spent years doing things I wanted to do and had to do. One of them was collecting wine. For this evening, I pulled out one of four remaining bottles of 1989 La Chapelle Hermitage from Paul Jaboulet.

In the last century, I obtained three cases of this wine — one case of the 1985 and two cases of the 1989 — intending to enjoy them for special occasions over the years: holidays mainly, but special birthdays too. Over time I got to know this wine well; it became something like a member of the family. I tried both vintages as the years passed, but found the 1985 was developing faster than the 1989 — which was fortunate, since I only had one case of the 1985. That vintage is long gone, but the 1989s carried me forward to this point. Three bottles remain.

Annotations from a Life in Wine, Writing, and Photography

...my 6 bits worth

There is something about a birthday that both excites and terrorizes me. Of course, the excitement comes from an early age, with the anticipation of a celebration and all the ensuing detritus that is attached to it. Fun, maybe a party, gifts, and being the center of attention are the upsides. The downside is the inevitable march towards oblivion that we all are making. Yeah, I know, I think about that, especially now that I have many more days behind me than before me.

That said, it's time to take inventory. What do I need to sell, what do I need to keep, what do I need to cast off, what do I need to drink, what do I need?

For those still hanging on to an identification that no longer fits?

(homage to Gianni Di Venanzo)

Terry Theise has a new piece up wrangling for the defense of "fine wine" as a category. His method is to sort wine into three tiers — schlock, good, fine — not by how it tastes but by why it was made, and whether the wine respected the person drinking it. It's an idiosyncratic approach, but I’ve learned that tangling with wine writers over their semantic intentions is, as we say in these parts, like pissing in a dust storm in West Texas — everybody gets soiled and no one goes home happy.

While Terry has been busy developing his taxonomy, I've been wondering about something else: what happens to the person who built an identity on that taxonomy, once the taxonomy stops organizing their days?

Vinitaly Books Passage on a Propagandist's Ship

There's a press release sitting in my inbox announcing that the Amerigo Vespucci — Italy's training ship, the so-called most beautiful ship in the world — is sailing into New York Harbor for the Fourth of July. It'll anchor off New Jersey, join fifty-some tall ships in a parade up the Hudson, dock at Pier 86, and spend a week hosting Italy's defense minister, its navy chief, the Carabinieri commander-general, the ambassador to the U.S., the mayor of Genoa, and a delegation that reads like the guest list for a state funeral. The America's Cup trophy is flying in from New Zealand to sit on the deck for a photo. The UN's Chiefs of Police Summit is convening below decks. It is, by any measure, a genuinely big deal — 250 years of American independence, a navy turning out its flagship to mark it, real history happening on real water.

And somewhere in the middle of all that pageantry, on Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m., Veronafiere is giving a PowerPoint about Vinitaly.USA. Woo-hoo!

After Drops of God: What Wine Means to Me in 2026

Of late, wine has been coursing through my thoughts. Not the alcohol — that's not what this is about. No — it's what wine did to my life, and how I have changed through it. I recently watched a TV series in which wine was the anchor, the search for the greatest wine. You might have heard of it, Drops of God. I know, I came late to this show. The way wine is portrayed in film and television seems so performative, draped in 21st-century airs of importance and branding. For me, wine was livelihood, and in a way, I was pressed into service by necessity.

Reprise: Fathers and Sons

from the archives

Great-Grandfather Assuntino Luigi Cevola in Palermo - 1890's

I never knew my Great-Grandfather, Assuntino, but I met him, thirteen years after he died in Palermo, in 1971. I was feeling sick and was in his bed, in the house on Via Roma, 97. It was August and sweltering. I had eaten something, I think it was an omelet, and it didn’t set well with me. I was going in and out of sleep, sweating, the heat and fumes from the busy street, floors below; it was a confluence of moments. And then, in a dream, I think, he appeared. “What are you doing in my bed?” he asked. “I am sick and resting in it,” I answered. “Who are you?” he questioned again. “I am Alfonso.” He looked at me, “You are not my son.” I returned the look. “No, I am your great-grandson.” He gave that sideways stare he was known for and replied, “Va bene, you can stay.” And he disappeared.

In Search of an American Burger with a Sicilian Surrealist in a Forsaken and Deserted City

In continuation from here...

 

 

After the dinner Giorgio’s wife made for us, we sat around in his drawing room sipping on Cynar. It was August and Rome was stifling hot, humid and deserted by all but the tourists and the stalwart Romanisti. It was nice, though, for it felt like family and was very familiar. Giorgio was sketching something near me or behind me, I don’t know what. But he was intent on capturing something in the light of the room. I was exhausted from a day of roaming around the city and had a few more days before I was to go back home and to college at Santa Clara.