Haven’t we been here before? A signpost on the wine trail in Italy

As I look over the essays and posts I have written this year, I warily eye the subject matter that appears on this site. I shouldn’t be, I’ve written all of them myself, just as I have been doing for going on 20 years now. But I can’t help wondering if I’ve reached the bottom of the barrel, tapped out, so to speak.

In essence, the jury is still out. I’ve done a bunch of stuff here on the wine trail in Italy. And it has become a repository of images, ideas, and notions that I find myself referring back to more often than I ever imagined I would be doing. So, it has achieved the goal of being a web-log, for my purposes.

As to if it still holds any interest to the thousands of reader who happen upon this site weekly, well that is another question for another day.

David Brooks wrote this column in the New York Times recently, Be Careful About What You Want, in which he ruminates over these five struggles:

• The struggle between craft and reward  

• The struggle between gift love and need love 

• The struggle between excellence and superiority 

• The struggle between high and low desires 

• The struggle between ambition and aspiration

Reading and observing over these almost 20 years (in five months) regarding the wine trade where I worked for 40, those struggles resonate. Not just in work-time but in living a full life. Now that I have the time and luxury of reflection, they impart an urgency that grabs me and shakes me and interrogates me and accuses me. 

And I ask this question: Haven’t we been here before? 

Like Nothing Ever Before

How often have you opened a bottle of wine and thought that you had never tasted anything like what just came out of that bottle in your lifetime? Early on in one’s experience, I imagine one could say that often enough. But after a few years of tasting hundreds, maybe thousands of wines a year, when does that special bottle percolate up to the top and reveal itself to one’s taste buds?

Problem: Wine in Crisis? Remedy: Move forward, like an arrow. Fearlessly.

The past month I have been feverishly working on a project involving Italian wine and how better to communicate its better aspects to consumers, who seem interested but are deluged with a tsunami of wine offerings from Italy. Call it a laboratory, if you will. What it is, is one place in time and space where the progress of Italian wine can be measured, albeit somewhat anecdotally. It is a real place and real people are making buying decisions on the wine they will drink tonight or during the weekend, and any number of situations where wine is called for. And I have good news.

In Service of Italian Wine

Now that I am “retired” I’ve spent some time reflecting on the years I worked in the wine trade. I am glad I survived those years, for I have a list of men and women who didn’t. At first, I thought it was just normal, but as the list grew and grew, I realized I was dodging bullets. Scores of young people, my colleagues, perished in the 40 years I was working. And they were not old people. Time just caught up with them earlier than the rest of us. That said, in reflection, I also realize that there were a few bullets aimed directly at me. How I managed to survive them is the subject of this essay.