In Praise of Pitigliano

Leaving Rome and heading north up the west coast is a little like exiting L.A. and heading up Hwy 1. I had never done it before but somewhere after Civitavecchia it started looking familiar on a molecular-memory level.

It was Sunday morning and after a little cappuccino in the hotel in Parioli we crept out of Rome, with help from the she-devil Gps. The sky was overcast and there was an early autumn breeze in the air. We were heading to California.

I am newly acquainted with the Tuscan coast, so I wonder why it took me over thirty years to get around to it. Maybe it was my mania for visiting every region in Italy. That is, except for Sardegna. I must go there with my landscape-chef friend Francesco, who as a child looked out from Orosei towards the land we were now driving up.

Sunday was a quiet time on the SS1 and once we passed Montalto di Castro my partner in crime started getting hunger pains. The night before we had gone to a little trattoria and had our second on many Last Suppers, but it was a new day, a little rain was starting to fall and there you have it, time for pranzo.

I spied a delivery truck in front of me and saw that he was pulling off into a little roadside place and my inner Gps said “follow that man.”

It was a very humble place, no tourists and a lone Indian inside the entrance peddling exotic jewelry and speaking a strange hybrid of Italian and Hindi.

We took a table opposite a large picture window and watched the rain float, then strike the outer world. But we were safe inside the little lunch room, and thirsty. I asked the waiter for a good local wine and he recommended a fresh white from nearby Pitigliano. It had been years since I had thought about the Bianco from Pitigliano, when I once brought in a 20 foot container of the stuff for a Jewish client who had an Italian café and retail store. He loved the stuff and sold the hell out of it. I remember it was light and dry and crisp and it reminded me of the Trebbiano from Abruzzo that we drank so much of in those days.

In those days we didn’t call it the Maremma. It wasn’t yet fashionable to render it so. The wines were cheap and cheerful and under appreciated. Morellino would eventually reach the close out list and we’d all make friends with $4 red from Scansano.

For now, it was Sunday afternoon and the Pitigliano was still cheap and cheerful. The owner had opened the picture window and a cool,fresh salty-rain breeze washed over us. And with a platter of fresh fritto misto from the nearby waters, maybe a little plate of fresh tomatoes and mozzarella, a small dish or two of zucchini and patate, was there a more wonderful way to spend an afternoon anywhere on earth?

I just have to say this. A wine like Pitigliano, if it were my local white wine, I would be a very happy man. Yes, my tastes are getting simpler and simpler, and Pitigliano is a perfect wine for the pensioner, the student or the wine lover who just wants refreshment and no barrel chatter. Yes, I would be ignorant, but happy.

After lunch and a café, it was almost like the Indian knew we were thinking about him. He came up to the table and had an array of jewelry, each one with a story. I bought one that my contramico liked. He wanted to sell us two, three, four. He really was a fish out of water, but the water he had landed in was just fine. I mean how could a guy from Mumbai land in the Tuscan coast selling jewelry from God knows where? I’d say he won the lottery of life. He might beg to differ, what do I know?

As we neared Castiglione della Pescaia, our she-devil navigator steered us onto a side road towards La Badiola, where L’Andana was waiting for the fortunate ones who were destined to stay within here pampered walls. It was just like we had seen on the website, except that Alain Ducasse had long left the place to his trusted surrogates.

As we checked into the little jewel of a hotel, I got a faint sense that there are many Italy’s. There is the Italy of Rome. There is the Italy of the roadside café and a simple plate of misto fritto and a bottle of Pitigliano. And there is the Italy of the Alto-Borghese. We were grifters upon this refined side of Italy, with linen sheets and one star Michelin restaurants. With home made donuts in the morning, steaming cups of cappuccino and the sweetest melon this side of the Pecos.

Nowhere but Italy - Guess the wine region, become a millionaire

After a sweet little nap and some mindless television, we would press on into the full moon landscape and try our luck in this new world. It had shaped up to be a very special Sunday along the Tuscan coast on the wine trail in Italy.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Roma: Lupi Apud Oves Custodes *

* The wolves are watching over the sheep

As we were in Rome, so it is also the same as we are back home. Several days ago, I cold-called a new Italian place in an older part of town. The owner was receptive and friendly. So I handed the info off to a colleague. Yesterday I walked into another account to set up a wine event for women only, and our company order was rolling in. Everyone was out taking lunch, so I checked the order in and, seeing as it was the lunch hour, put up part of the order. Part of that “now go back home and sell some of this stuff” business. Who has time to look for a job? I have more work than I can say grace over. A couple of articles needing to be written, deadlines looming, a panel of tasting notes for another piece, an educational piece I’ll be needing for next Tuesday, and a proposal for a tasting today in Cowtown. Too busy selling this stuff to worry about mergers and acquisitions. Selling, not buying, that’s the game. Getting harder, but not as hard as being on the outside looking in. That’s a bowl of future-tripping.

Anyway the salesman finally shows up to the account with his young acolyte in tow, and they are giddy. Seems the youngun’ has written a proposal for the new Italian place I handed over to his older sidekick. They wanted me to take a look at it. Now mind you, I just went in and talked to a potential customer about an Italian wine list for an Italian-styled restaurant. The youngun' hands me his list, and there’s a Malbec from Argentina on it. I ask him, what the hell is that? I’m sitting looking at a pile of wine for the tasting today and there’s an Aglianico and a Montepulciano, a Monica and a Cannonau. Why Malbec? And then I see the proposal populated with California wine and wonder if we will ever get off this not-so-superstrada of New World wine somnambulism and get back to the Italian wine trail. Yeah, right.

I woke up a few hours later and went to my office. Jet lag was rousing me from my Italian-time afternoon nap and telling me to get busy, lyrics from Dylan’s “Highlands” clamoring in the pre-cappuccino pre-dawn,

Woke up this mornin' and I looked at the same old page
Same old rat race, life in the same old cage
I don't want nothin' from anyone, ain't that much to take
Wouldn't know the difference between a real blonde and a fake
Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone'd come and push back the clock for me
Well my heart's in The Highlands wherever I roam
That's where I'll be when I get called home

Rome is a walking town; the she-wolf always seems to get you on her turf. I was lucky enough to have my wife Liz still able to walk, when one June we pressed all around the place looking at the antiquities. Stopping in a bar to drink that cool white Colli Albani wine that then flowed into the ever-so-willing carafes. Eyes always staring out from some quiet corner.

Caput Mundi has her silent sentinels stationed in every quarter. In this memory, the most recent of the Roman reminisces, somewhere between the Sistine Chapel and the Colosseum, I eyed a tiny alley with some tables. It was a cool day, and we had miles to go. A few minutes earlier we had stared at and touched a Michelangelo sculpture in an anonymous church, no guards telling us to stand back, no €6 Euro entry fee. Now flatbread and fresh mozzarella called, a spray of arugula and some prosciutto, and that damn carafe of red wine.

Why, when I can have any Italian wine from any list, do I order the red in a carafe? You have a sweater and it fits after so many years. It is broken in. No, it doesn’t go with the Isiaia suit, isn’t meant to. But it is comfortable and familiar. I like to go back to the carafe, especially in Rome; it’s a barometer of the state of Italian wine.

Walking Rome stirs one to reflect about Italy, and all that those of us who work for her wine industry all these centuries. The missionaries in flyover country, the stylists on the West Coast who are like Terry Riley or Harry Partch in their orchestrations of the wines and the interpretations of the food. The driven ones in New York and Chicago, those who actually sell wine for a living. And the Roman salesmen, the home boys on the cobbled streets, with their Vespas and their briefcases, walking the Testaccio and the Trastevere, The Parioli and the Via Veneto. The not-so-silent sentinels. Pressing the flesh for the fruits from the wine press. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Just like 3,500 years ago, when the Chaldeans worked with the female Egyptian factors to ensure a continuous flow of red wine to the Pharaohs. Or am I being too archetypical for you?

Rome has become a coarser urban setting, more people with their hands out, hands looking for your pockets. On one of the days, there wasn’t a moment when someone didn’t want to interpret (for a price) what I was looking at. As if seeing it for the twelfth time in 27 years didn’t inoculate me from the swirling bats. Always in threes, non ce' due senza tre. We swat them back into their caves and endure the travesty of time and humanity with our limited interpretations of such things. Or am I getting too paradigmatic for you?

Those old faces staring back at me from behind their glass cases take on a resemblance that 30 years ago I wouldn’t have recognized. Now it’s more like staring at my death mask. Rome is filled with death masks, and they are beginning to look more contemporary to me. Maybe it’s just the familiarity of the remembrance after so many visits, like visiting an aunt in Alcamo or a cousin in Cosenza. These cold, stone carvings are like my family now. Or have I become too paronomastic for you?

And then there is that tattoo-dosage of modern reality that tells you as long as there are people on this planet, there will be those who will have to learn it all, not from staring at the ruins of a long gone empire, but by walking in their own flip-flops amidst the gaze of the Capitoline wolf and making their own mistakes, going their own way without the benefit of history. To survive or perish.

There is fear and dread in every corner, and there is hope and clarity after a long night in the corner of a cold room on top of a hill in some forbidden village. How one interprets that opportunity or yields to the udders of the she-wolf, well, that’s up to each and every one of us in our own way, isn’t it?

written and photographed by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

In Gps We Trust

Rome, Rome, Rome, always the beginning and the end of so many stories. In the recent events, it was the point where we started the circle and finished it.

Coming into Rome from the airport was so much easier than it was the first time; just turned on the GPS-she-devil device and plugged in the hotel address, and 30 minutes later we arrived at the front desk. Not like the time in 1990 when I had my wife, Liz, jump into a cab and I followed her to the hotel. After wandering around the city for two hours.

Driving in Rome is an interesting challenge, one that seems to have become more intense in the last 30 years. Italy, too, has become less civil and angrier on the road. And then there are the motor scooters and two wheeled space invaders that plague today’s Rome. But that’s the way of a city, even one as old as Rome. Wisdom doesn’t come so easily.

The 2008 harvest is underway and in the coming days I’ll be posting notes from what I saw and touched, drank and thought. This year the harvest report centers on Central Italy, with Tuscany and the Maremma on one side and the Marche/Abruzzo on the other, like a teeter-totter between Sangiovese and Montepulciano. Other grapes as well. But we won’t be going off too far into esoterica on this trip, no, this isn’t the time for too much autochthon. This is a time to batten down the hatches and lean out, make it through the present cycle, which is not without its challenges.

I have a friend who is starting an import company right now, and mainly working the NY-east coast. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. But to his credit, he understands that the relationship with the restaurateur is more important than holding the hand of the winemaker. It’s a buyers market, and like my 20 new best friends, wine salesmen in Rome, told me last week, it's all in how you bond with the customer.


Interesting find in a neighborhood that I like to stay in, Parioli. A little spot called La Balestra on the Via Simeto 2/F. Not on anybody’s radar, no reviews, just a great neighborhood spot with good service, clean food, fantastic wine prices. I will post about it later.

Another place, on the other end of the trip, was in Monteporzio Catone, in Frascati country, a place called I Tinelloni, found as a result of a Slow Food recommendation from a book Sausage Paul pressed into my hands before I left. Definitely worth a post as well.

The wine trail led us this year, from Rome up to the Tuscan Coast to Castiglione della Pescaia. We climbed over and into Firenze to meet up with an old friend, and then trekked over to the Marche/Abruzzo coast at San Benedetto del Tronto. A couple of day trips from there, one during a wet afternoon to forage for mushrooms over white tablecloths. Fish on the coast, meat in the hills. And then back to Rome via Monteporzio Catone.

One story. On the last day, we were about 40 km from the airport, with traffic no more than an hour. I set the GPS for the quickest route, not the shortest (I had learned that the hard way when we went from Castiglione della Pescaia to Firenze, over every last hilltop town).

But then we got into the traffic flow, and flow is a kind word, more like a molasses surge, I knew we were going to have a tale if we didn’t miss the plane.

Roman drivers are singular in their ability to ferret out every last drop of pavement in which to claim their driving space. They are aggressive, meaner than a junkyard dog, sometimes not paying attention, and ultimately forgivable in their ability to recognize another who just has to get to the airport on time.

I drove the wrong way on a street to jump in front of a traffic line and get myself back in the direction that the polizia told me to go. I gave people a wave to go in front of me and got the finger by someone behind them because I didn’t give it to them as well. I got honked at mercilessly by an ancient Roman because I was blocking the road, never mind that I had a red light. He had to turn right. Guess the poor old guy had to pee. In any case, the polizia, who just gave me directions, turned their heads away as I crept past the line so the vecchione could get on with his turn. I had scads of bottle rockets, Vespas and other two wheeled insects buzzing all around me, you think I was a pile of oregano in bloom the way they were swarming the car. But I made it through, without a scratch. Two hours later.

What it did to me later, as I was resting in the plane, was to give me the royal boot back to America. “So there you have it Italian Wine Guy, we took care of you one more time. You slept in nice beds, had great food, saw wonderful countryside, and drank delicious wine, from the carafes you love so much to the finest vintages. Now go back home and try to sell some of this stuff. And don’t come back until you do.”

Oh yes, I got my due. And now it’s back to paying my dues.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy