Selling the Sunlight

Recently I was, what else, talking wine with a friend. Sicily came up (we were sipping on a Grillo) and the notion of just how far Sicilian wines had come, not only in the aspect of quality, but in the perception of quality. France came up, and how French wines had that particular je ne sais quoi with regards to how folks saw French wine in the pantheon of wine greatness. I recalled a story about  how, many years ago I was hosting the father of a client, the father being the director of a very large wine cooperative near Bordeaux. We were trekking to Northernmost Texas to visit the TV Munson vineyards. Along the way this gentleman, Raymond Chandou, and I got to talking about Italy and Sicily, and our mutual affection for the island. “I have many friends there in and around Palermo,” he recounted. I was a bit puzzled.

Passion Is the Yeast, Not the Grape

How many times do you read something, hear something, talk to someone, and the subject comes around to passion. I'm not talking about some arm-in-arm torrid romance that is splashed all over the screens, large and small. No, I am thinking of something a little more internal. And what I often hear is that someone is finally going to follow their passion. When I first heard it, years ago, I bought into it. Then after years of chopping in the woodshed, I realized it is balderdash! Passion isn't something you follow. Passion follows — and it usually follows after years of painstaking and drudgery-filled labor, the 10,000-hour kind.

I wasn't lured into the wine trade because of passion. It was an accident. I needed to make money to support a small family. I started out in the restaurant business, as a server, and then eventually became a manager of a wine bar. Then I moved on to wholesale and distribution, importing, and the worlds that enveloped that. I spent more than 10,000 hours, and I didn't take a test or receive any medals or post-nominal titles. I simply plied my trade.

Don’t Pee on the Oregano

I don't know if this is a redundant type of notion, but once again I am thinking about wine, wine tasting, the wine tasting experience and the overall life experience. And the more I think about it, and live it, the more I am inclined to not isolate wine as an experience separated from the rest of life.

A young female wine influencer recently made a video about this and in it she expressed thoughts about being out with friends in a restaurant. There is music, there are the aromas from the kitchen and the food. There is perfume and cologne. There is conversation and dialogue. People are sharing their lives. The wine arrives — does life stop?

The Wines of Campania: Tom Hyland Gives an Overlooked Region Its Due

Photo ©Tom Hyland 2026

 

Tom Hyland has spent the better part of five decades chasing Italian wine, and approaching 100 trips into the country to do it, so it's a little surprising it's taken this long for him to give Campania a book of its own. The Wines of Campania (Palmetto Publishing, 2026) fixes that, and it does it the way you'd want a region this misunderstood to be handled: on the ground, province by province, producer by producer.

The Dog Days of Summer

Rocco, as I found him on July 20th 

July came and went. My month, and the month for so many people I know and love. I look forward to July every December, January and February. And then when it arrives, it careens through time, like it always does and leaves us in the dust and into the dog days of summer.