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: