The Most Important Meal of the Day

Family outing Old California circa early 1930's - Nonna bottom right

Marion Nestle doesn't believe in breakfast. At 89, this nutrition expert who's spent decades exposing the food industry says most of the research claiming breakfast is the most important meal was sponsored by cereal companies. Kellogg's and General Mills needed to move boxes. They manufactured urgency. We bought it.

But nobody marketed the meals that actually mattered. My grandfather's brick bar-be-cue in old California. Every Sunday under the grape arbor. Probably the first place wine touched my lips. Those traditions—gathering, sharing a meal, an anonymous bottle or two of wine—they're gone now.

Persona Non Grata

Retrieved from my spam file 😉*

 

 

Click images to enlarge

 

* --- Editor's note: No actual consortia were consulted in the writing of this memorandum.

 

© imagined and photo-synthesized by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

wine blog +  Italian wine blog + Italy W

Midnight in the Cellar: Wine, Sleep, and the Slow Burn

Wine, time and transformation

The scent woke me. Not an alarm, not a voice - just that yeasty, intoxicating pull of fermentation working in the dark. It reached through the window, through my first sleep, drew me from bed the way the aroma of those ripe figs had drawn me when we first arrived in Bucita that September of 1977. Siren calls, both of them. Irresistible.

I made my way to the cellar. Cool stone underfoot, a single light carving shadows from the darkness. My cousins were already there, not doing much of anything. Just present. Just attending. We didn't talk much. Didn't need to. The wine was holding court - that gentle gurgle and hiss of wild yeast doing ancient work in wicker-wrapped demijohns that might have held our great-grandparents' wine.

The Great Inversion: How Italian Wine's Future Moved South

Here's the thing nobody's saying out loud: northern Italy is dying faster than the south.

Not literally. Not yet. But the vines are telling a story that contradicts oodles of years of wine history. Barolo is sweating. Chianti is scrambling. Prosecco is looking nervously at the thermometer. Meanwhile, on a volcano in Sicily and in the forgotten hills of Basilicata, indigenous grapes that have spent millennia dealing with heat and drought are suddenly looking like the smartest bet in Italy.

For the first time in modern wine history, the center of gravity is shifting. Not because of fashion or critics or investment. Because of physics. Because southern Italy—the part that was always too hot, too rustic, too other—turns out to be the part that already knows how to survive what's coming.