A History of Italian Wine in America from 1977-2012

 

I was waiting in a long, slow line on the freeway for the traffic to pass by an accident on the side of the road. As often happens, everyone was slowing down to gaze at the wreck, which only made the collective crawl slower. But there we were, what can you do?  Behind me, though, there was a car with a driver behind the wheel who was going to get through, if they had to make a new lane. Honking and tailgating, screeching on his brakes while talking on the phone and smoking. All this with only two arms and one very overstimulated and under-exercised brain.  There was nothing we could do but wait for the fools in front of us to peer and move on. There were no cops moving the traffic along; no law, no order. Just the blunt force of humanity creeping ever so slowly towards their destinies.

Along the way I had been slowly digesting a barrage of disparaging remarks I had recently read about the state of the wine business in America. Mostly it went like this, “Everything sucks! I can't get the wine I want. The current system is a dinosaur and needs to be tore down. I want what I want, is that such a big deal?” One can find it regularly on (wine) blogs, and usually from folks who are armchair quarterbacks or who have no idea of the scale of the wine business in this world.

“I want what I want.” You hear it all the time, in so many ways, from the driver behind me to an angry commenter on the internet. It’s really the American anthem in the 21st century, not just about wine and fast-flowing traffic, but politics, material goods, travel, entertainment, even love. All the while we wag our tails with our bone in our mouth, looking at the other dog in the pond below and wondering why it is his bone is bigger than ours.

Then I started thinking about wine and specifically Italian wine, because if this blog is one thing it is an Italian wine blog, non e vero?  And so let’s hop into the way-back machine and see how far we have come. It is so much more fun to time travel than to curse the present condition, isn’t it? Take a ride with me.

1977 – I am living in Southern California, near Pasadena, and working in Hollywood at a restaurant on Melrose Avenue. Ours is more of a continental restaurant, but I get around to other places nearby on Melrose, Chianti and Emilio’s. In those days, there was Ruffino and Brolio for Chianti, Fazi Battaglia for Verdicchio, Fontana Candida for Frascati, and a few other wines. An Orvieto . Lambrusco, which was just not cool in those days.  Soave, Bardolino and Valpolicella from Bolla. Oh, and the Amarone from Bolla as well. An occasional Barolo from Bersano, maybe a Barbaresco from Calissano and of course Asti Spumante. That was about it, 35 years ago. Seriously.

1980 – I am living in Dallas and working at the Mother of all Italian restaurants in Dallas, Il Sorrento. All of the above wines were available and thanks to the insight of a local trailblazer, Tony La Barba, there was also available Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio, which was kind of a stretch for most folks in those days. And the list branched into Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Barolo and Barbaresco vintages going back a few years. Bardolino in a 1.5 wicker basket was a big hit, as was Ruffino’s Rosatello, which was a light, fruity rose, the precursor of White Zinfandel. Also a big seller was Ruffino’s Del Magnifico, which was simply a vino da tavola, also a precursor, this time to the Toscana IGT, or in a smaller vein, a Super Tuscan. Biondi-Santi and Poggio alle Mura Brunello were available. Poggio alle Mura was eventually folded into the Castello Banfi Empire as the crown jewel of their Tuscan holdings.

1982 - Things started changing. I started seeing (and selling) Gaja, Giacomo Conterno, Vietti, Selvapiana, Illuminati, Barbi, Cavallotto, Girolamo Dorigo, Scavino, and Lisini. It was a great birthing, and as I was being born into the wine business, so was all of this wonderful Italian wine coming into America. And imagine, I was in Texas. New York was exploding. But Texas was holding its own.  I was selling stupid amounts of 1968 Sassicaia for $28 a bottle.

1984 - My first trip to Vinitaly and my first trip back to Italy since 1977, when I spent harvest in Calabria and Sicily, Umbria and Tuscany.  1984 was a magical time for the Italian wine business. Imagine, those of you who have been to and seen Vinitaly today, how simple it was to traverse the few pavilions back then. In two days, one could have talked to everyone. You could run into Lou Iacucci, Leonardo Lo Cascio, Armando de Rham, Neil Empson, Eugenio Spinozzi, Dominic Nocerino, Tony Terlato. They were all young and full of energy, like bulls in the ring waiting for the matadors.  Heady times. 1984 was the crack open year for the Italian wine renaissance in America. I was 32, and it was better than being an M.W. or an M.S. in 2012.

1990 – Pinot Grigio is beginning its ascent. Santa Margherita was an easy sell, but there are knock-offs and everyone is trying to get a piece of the pie. Even Paterno’s Terlato was trying to blow up the category with line extensions of the Santa Margherita brand. It was crazy; they were giving away Mazda Miatas, all kind of nuttiness.  California wine was fighting back with their varietals, fighting Chardonnay and White Zinfandel. It was getting serious, but there was momentum upwards. A long cry from thirteen years earlier when literally there were a handful of wines available from Italy in America.  Around this time, 60 Minutes came out with the French Paradox show, and we sold every kind of red wine imaginable in the warehouses. God Bless Morley Safer, I would chant the mantra at night. Ruinite Lambrusco sales were through the roof, they couldn’t bottle the stuff fast enough. A far cry from the scandals in the late 1980’s. Everything sold. And then we started preparing for war in Iraq. And things sold even better.

1997 – Really a seminal year for Italy, kind of like 1982 was for Bordeaux. Not that 1988, 1989 or 1990 were forgettable. Far from it, there were some great wines, especially from Piemonte in those years. But for some reason 1997 was the year Italy stepped up to France and to California and made its presence known. Before that, there was a little chatter about Tignanello or Sassicaia, the seemingly never-ending stories about Biondi-Santi or the news stories about Banfi and their Piemontese conjurer, Ezio Rivella, who was reshaping ( literally) the Tuscan landscape and the wines that were coming to America.  “We’re deliberately adopting a California style because our main market is the United States,” Rivella proclaimed in an interview in the Wine Spectator in 1982. Fifteen years later, Brunello wines with mid to the high 90 scores from the same magazine had collectors clamoring for wines they had never heard of five years earlier. I really never warmed up to the ripeness of the 1997 vintage; they seemed awkward and muscular, very heavy in the testosterone area, geared towards high alcohol and even higher ratings. But they did serve a purpose. They were the needed gateway at the time to larger consumers, who no longer cared for the uncool Lambrusco and Soave and sissy Pinot Grigio and Asti Spumante wines. They got white American males, who were big in the consumption end of things, to add these Italian trophies to their stables, next to their Porsche Carreras and young, blond and buxomly 2^nd wives. Guys like Sergio Esposito at the Italian Wine Merchant were making a fortune selling Sassicaia, Gaja, Voerzio, Bruno Giacosa. He continues to do well these days, selling and reselling many of the same wines he sold then to new collectors in Asia. More power to him. 1997 was one long ride on the Blue Italian Viagra train.

2001 – Google, AOL, Yahoo, the Bubble and then came September 11. And the carousel stopped. And then a few months later folks stared drinking, right about the time the US started rattling the sabers. Just like 1990 and the first Gulf War, but this time America was a little more wounded. They started drinking more but at about half the price of what they had been drinking. Sales stayed the same, volume increased. And kept growing, until folks just got into the groove of the new reality. America was vulnerable, but Americans weren’t going to stop drinking Italian wines. Just a slower ascendancy, but steady, steadier than the S&P 500. It was a time of innocence lost. And it was also a time I noticed fear in voices. And then anger. Not really a good combination with any alcohol, especially over-barriqued Sangiovese/Cabernet blends from Tuscany.

2008 – Two of my friends started a business in the fall of that year, and they are doing well. They came from Italy and saw, even with smelling the charred destruction of the Twin Towers as it floated past their apartment windows, that America was a place where there was opportunity. And now I have two Italian-American colleagues who will never go back to Italy. I like to think of them as reinforcements for those of us who brought it to this point. Not that I am through. Not in your fondest dreams.

2011- Saw a year of double digit growth. Italy is the largest importer of wines into America. And while America is not the main market of Italian wine, it is a very large and growing one. But my Italian winemaking friends know Brasilia, Phonm Penh, Hong Kong, Berlin, Vancouver. Theirs is a world market, and they live in a global village. People like Roberto Bava, who travels the globe once or twice a year. It isn’t just America, but America is still very much on their minds in Italy.

Which brings us to the present day. Anyone who complains about not being able to get an Italian (or any other) wine of their choice is either lazy, unimaginative or just plain silly. Go down the aisles of a local liquor store, and see the immense selection we have now that we didn’t have in 1977. I hear the complaints, and I have to take a deep breath. There are so many of us who have labored our whole career to get it to this point. And when we hear someone complain because they cannot get the Etna Rosso they want, I want to ask them, “Where were you in 1982 when we brought the stuff in and no one wanted it?” I have a million wine stories like that. And so these feeble complaints about the 3-tier system or the choke-hold the large distributors have on the process, or that free enterprise needs to be free and unfettered, they all sound like the collective tantrum that many Americans have gotten themselves into when it comes to choice.

Like the car behind me, sometimes you cannot make a new lane, sometimes there is an accident ahead that everyone wants to stop and gawk at.  But it doesn’t have to be your wreck. That is all in your mind. Take a look around; there is an embarrassment of riches available in Italian wines in America. Better than ever before. Try some of the ones that have made it here. They got here, not because of some conspiracy of the wholesalers, but as a group effort, lifting and rowing and baling and carrying the stones up the conveyor to make pyramids. They are living proof of the hard work of thousands who have gone before. All you have to do is open your eyes and open your heart. And open another bottle of wine.

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