An Italian-American mantra: "My grandfather made my life possible today."

To Kalon "I" Block

Coming home from a week at the 11th annual Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley, I missed my plane and caught a later flight, and was wired, tired but also inspired. To wind down, I crashed on my ancient green couch and veged out on TV. PBS is running a series on Italian Americans, so I watched a segment.

It prompted me to think about the arc of my family, in that both my grandfathers came to America for different reasons. One, my mother’s dad, Attilio, was trying to escape the most abject of poverty. He was married and left his wife (a “white widow”) and young son. Eventually they joined him, and after four more children were born, they separated. He went on to other pastures.

France by way of Italy

Avignon - 1985

When I was coming up in the wine business, there was this invisible wall between France and Italy, put there mainly by wine snobs who thought France was the epitome of all that wine was meant to be. In those days I would often hear things like “Oh, you are an Italian wine-lover. I never thought all those grapes and wine were worth much of a fuss.” and “Who needs to look any further than France, with the wines of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhone, the Loire and Alsace?” I would be made to feel like my love was a second-class affair, that I could never rise to understand and appreciate wine with my limited Italian prism like those with expertise in French wine.

The Disneyfication of Barolo - The Queen of Jelly and Her Cannubial Bliss

For this observer, Italy is a source of endless fascination. They take rugged, sun scorched stone and turn it into a timeless beauty. They take a land that has for years been revered by the people living on it, and turn it into a parody of modern day life. I love it. There are no barriers, no boundaries. Good taste lies down next to the tasteless. The sacred sleeps with the profane. Italy is humanity’s perfect mirror of our evolution, for better or worse. And now, in the land of Barolo, in the historic Cannubi vineyard area, again, the mirror is pressed to our face. Our existential selfie, once again, is revealing what we value, what kind of a people we are.

Amarone at a Crossroads

This past week I have been in the Veneto as a guest of the Valpolicella Consorzio. The occasion was Amarone Anteprima, an annual event showcasing the release of the latest vintage of Amarone, in this case the 2011. During the week I tasted hundreds of wines going back to 1998, and visited scores of estates, large and small. And while this has been a brief week of exploration into the wines of Valpolicella, of which Amarone is a main player, it has served to give me a deeper understanding and appreciation for this often misunderstood and misinterpreted wine.