ed. note: Alfonso is out on medical leave and he is letting one of the young’uns take the reins of the blog until he comes back.
Yes, this will be the year, for me, when we go all resto-mod with Italian wine. I want to embrace the tried and true, not the trite and banal fashion imperatives of my ever so au courant contingent. I’m stoked! 2024 is gonna be such a bitchin’ ride! It’ll be the most sui generous saga I’ve been looking to broker, all my short-lived life - I’m ready and raring to go!! On my way to being an epic polyhistor!!
I got a call from IWG, he was heading out, could I come over and watch his house and his tomato plants? $100 a day to look after the old man’s crap, sure why not? As the taxi pulled up he was rushing to catch up with his adventure. “Where are you going?” I asked. “To a place where these cell phones and internets don’t go.” “When will you be back?” We were changing places in the cab. “I’ll be back soon. Just watch the house, don’t let your friends leave anything in their cars if they park in front of the house. And one more thing, that interview with the Italian wine sommelier, why don’t you test drive it around my blog?” He handed me the keys to his silver bullet, cool, quick German sedan and told me to drive safe. Yeah. Uh huh.
First question: So, Andrea, tell me what are people drinking?
Q- They won’t make it through the summer if they do. But enough about what I’m seeing, over here most of the folks except crazy-wonderful Antonio think they have to mark things up like they’re a gentleman’s club?
Q- I hear more from my friends here that getting a sommelier certification doesn’t get you the dream job? How about your life, how goes that?
AC: I cut down to two posts a week, and proceeded to get some of my life back. I really don’t know how I did three essay length posts a week for almost three years. But now with only two a week, it seems like a walk in the park. Readership is still strong, my posts are still those non-linear stream of consciousness genre-bending rants, but I’m ok with them now. Many of my friends and readers are thanking me for that too. They were telling me they couldn't keep up with the posts and were getting frustrated with my proclivity for providing posts so prodigiously.
AC: I was looking for a way to make money with this blogging thing, so I proposed to my work that I get together a team and start a blog, one for the industry and corporate types along with all the rest of the folks who surf on by.
AC: I see the Latin language is suited to your temperament, young bumble bee. Let me elucidate. Our industry is changing rapidly. Companies are merging; wineries are shifting their allegiance to other forms of delivery, whether it be outside of the three-tier system or by incorporating new ways to lure folks to try their products. I think the world I live in has been successful to a point. But now those existing frameworks are being challenged and folks are storming the castle, in a manner of speaking. Look at what someone like Gary V has done to bring new wine drinkers into the fold. Well, I’m not looking so much at the new folks, in this case, as in giving the established people in the conventional networks an opportunity to peer through their window and see where the change will be taking them, and all of us. That said, if I can make the folks aware, those who built the industry into such a large behemoth, perhaps they can get on the Change Train and help move our industry forward. In other words, be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
BR: So you want to play God in the wine business.
AC: I never went that far, but you’re on to something. Our business must develop sustainable sales programs that don’t rely on the few wine drinkers to keep it propped up. The era of rampant consumerism is over. Over. Now we must expand the bench, widen the field and bring more wine drinkers, drinking a little bit more wine everyday.
That and the reality that a lot of the larger company salespeople have so much on their plates lately, along with just not being into wine and the career of wine. All these cool and groovy wines that we search out for our customers, those customers never hear about them from our people on the streets because they are too busy doing other things. It’s not a secret; I had this conversation with a sommelier the other day. I told him that when I look at a wine-by-the-glass list or the sommelier special wine selection list, I rarely see products from the company I work for, even though I know we have the same level of products. Organic? We have ‘em. Biodynamic? We have them, too. Small farmer, small production, no oak, no ML, not plastered all over retail? We have them. In fact they are so not available in any retail that it is a punishment to see a list and not have one or two of the really wonderful wines that we all go nuts over. I don’t want to go into a restaurant and only drink our products, but I'd sure like to see the ones that we have offered as well. And that ain't happening enough.
BR: Didn’t mean to raise your hackles, AC. Remember your shingles. So where you off to lately?
BR: AC, you're like a dad to me, so I don’t want you as a Facebook friend or anything like that, but you’d be more than welcome to join us south of the border. But I don’t think you have to worry. Just keep stirring the cauldron, you’ll be fine. What else, any last thoughts?
I bet you’re all dying to know, what’s up with the “intern?” I have long ago given up that title, even though IWG still thinks of me as his find. I am so not part of his world anymore, I’ve learned all his mysteries, and I gotta tell you, when he’s running around town saying “ I gotta get more cowbells,” I think we should “make the call", if you know what I mean.
Saturday Aug 30 – 11:00 AMI got a text from IWG last night when he landed. I didn't pay any attention to it till now, Great, what’s for lunch and how well will it go with that last bottle of 1990 Cristal that we be chillin’ up?
Now he is torn, ‘cause he gets this call trying to bribe him to come into the city for a tasting of old wines , journalists just back from their trips, old Italian wines, ready to go. 
He said he felt like he was abandoning his hosts on the “island”. Give me a break, they’d love to see him go 
Sunday Aug 31 – 9:30 AMI told him to not call me before 10. He said he waited until 10:30. Technically, for him, he was right. But I wasn’t ready to hear about his old wine conquests. Our party lasted until 2:30 and some folks crashed around the many beds, while others just split for more private surroundings. I have an aunt of one of the friends who has a cleaning service, he’ll never know. Like he can see anything outside of his own drama? That’s the Mother Lode of Life Theater, boys and girls. Believe me, he’ll never, ever, know.
His Majesty's Truffle dinner and French wine menu:
IWG wrote about going off the reservation, in his last post. Have you seen the movie Apocalypse Now? Well, it’s one of is favorite movies, I know, because once when I watched his house for a week, I went through all his movies. And he had two versions of it.
A few months ago he helped get me settled into this gig where I was around a lot of good wine, some money to pay the bills and a career track. Or so I thought. The reality was that if I don’t fight myself through the jungle I’ll never end up with much of anything. The whole wine biz deal is pretty much set on reaching these conditional goals that are constantly changing. I am Ok with a moving target, but, hey, I don’t see much incentive to excel, when the warlords at the top are controlling the numbers. IWG tells me to be patient, it will all work out. Like hell.
Anyway, he’s in the middle of a deal to bring in a line of new Italian wines and all of a sudden he’s verklempt about it. Dude has some gnarly emotions. Feels like he was handled. I told him to get over it, think about the poor suckers in the vineyards. Little young me, telling he who aspires to the pinnacle. Whatever. So he goes and takes off. Fine with me.
And, you ask me, what does this have to do with the blog? Nada. Anymore than sequestering all the jalapenos has anything to do with making folks feel better. Don’t get me started. Here goes. We are now treating produce like we treat 
Ok, wine. That what everyone wants. I did try some flawless wines from the Loire. Neal Rosenthal stuff. Not Italian, so IWG will probably fuss. Not Verdicchio, he says. Not Fiano. Well, the last Fiano I had wasn’t Fiano. What’s up with that? I want acid, not bubble gum. I tell you, when that producer shows up next month, I’m going to corner him and defy him to turn his property back on track, little ‘ol me. I’ll get my friend in Austin and her southern Italian girlfriend to help me. I don’t want another wine from Southern Italy to taste like it’s from Australia or Paso Robles. Yeah, there’s a kind of hush, all over the world, alright. Telling me to shut my trap.
BR: What happened?
AC: I am a westerner, like to see the sunset and the horizon. New York in 1975 was pretty depressing. I moved back to LA.
BR: What was the wine scene like when you arrived in LA in the late Seventies?
AC: It was fresher, cleaner than where I had just been. I started working in a restaurant in Pasadena, called The Chronicle. It had a fabulous cellar, mainly California wine at the time, but I was exposed to some of the great winemakers at the time. Pasadena was just a little too conservative in those days. I remember the night Jimmy Carter won the election; some of my customers were pretty upset. They looked at me with my longish, curly hair and started blaming me that the country was going down.
BR: What did you do?
AC: I realized I was in an environment that wasn’t healthy. My son had just been born and I was full of hope. The prospect of serving up Ridge and Georges de Latour to a bunch of miscreants motivated me. So I worked in Hollywood across from Paramount studios on Melrose. It was a happening place. Wine was coming down from Napa we had French wine on our list, there were a lot of stars coming in. It was just a brighter place.
BR: So you opted for Italian wine.
AC: That came after a while. I was living in Dallas, working at a great old Italian place, 
BR: Half-full, half-empty, which one is it?
AC: Both. I was recently in a 
BR: Yeah, what’s with you and that flyover comment? I read it on the blog lately.
AC: It’s a reference the East Coast folks make to where I hang my shingle. The midsection of the country. You know, where we can still see sunsets and horizons and have a back yard and a garden.
BR: You have a unique style of writing. How did this blog thing come about?
AC: I have written stuff all my life. I wrote a novel (unpublished) in 1979-80. When I was in Palermo in 1971, I remember writing poetry on the typewriter in my uncle’s library. In those days Italy only used 22 of the 26 letters, I think. So my poetry was a little strange. After my uncle took me around the streets and ruins of Sicily, I read everything I could get from Sicilian authors. This is my basis in blogging. It uses wine as a buoy but launches out as far as I can go, even sometimes in to Borges country.
BR: You lost me there, AC.
AC: I’m not surprised.
BR: Did you ever feel that you had tapped into the Zeitgeist in some special sort of way?
BR: It just came to you?
AC: It just came out “through” me. D.H. Lawrence wrote a poem called “
BR: Have you ever considered moving to Italy? Where you might feel more at home?
AC: I considered that back after my wife died. But then I thought about being in Italy, where they’d always treat me like a stranger on a Sunday night. I’d rather not have any illusions about my isolation. Texas gives me space and I like the out West places well enough. No, I’m not bound for Italy, not looking for a convent in the Marche to redo anytime soon.
BR: So, tell me a secret, AC, something that you have been keeping all to yourself.
AC: I don’t know about that, Beatrice, how about a little dream?
BR: OK, yeah, sure.
AC: I’d like to slow down on this blogging thing, ‘cause it just seems to have a bit too much of a hold on me. I have other stories in me, like my science fiction side. All those years I spent throwing the baseball in my backyard with the old Italian who used to work for Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I guess. I also would like to write a book about a wine personality. I mean one of the John Steinbeck, larger than life people. The kind of person the common man could identify with.
BR: You got someone in mind?
AC: Look around you, here in the Texas Hill Country; vineyards, Bar-B-Q, all kinds of people running around here. There’s at least two or three books scattered around this crowd. Three that I know of. But there is one I am working on. Wait and see, Bea. You gotta practice your patience, young lioness.
BR: Thanks, AC.
Comments to me here:
I just got back from an extended leave at work, traveling and working for a group of wineries. And then I come back to crazy heat, gas guzzling cars, snipers on the tollway and general mayhem in urban America, complete with 
Let’s just say, in a calm voice, I am pissed. I am seeing everything in front of all of us shift dramatically, changes, like we have no idea, are coming. But when someone fulfils their obligations and then gets their feet cut from underneath them, in these times, them there are fighting words.
When are the little guys going to ever be able to get out from under the shadow of the elephants, whose dance of death above us is blocking the sun and causing many of the normal joe’s to suffer? These same joe’s who toil, day in and day out, who sacrifice time with their kids because they need to deliver some cooking (box) wine to their account on the way home on a Friday night. And what do they get in return for this vigilance? They get spat upon by the titans of the industry who go to bed at night between their 600 count Egyptian cotton, in their overpriced condo’s overlooking a bay somewhere out west.
Italy has fallen under the spell of the industrial marketers. So now it isn’t just the Micro-Oxygenators we have to concern ourselves with. Now we have to be on the lookout for the Macro-Expectators, these gurus of the new age with their million dollar salaries and their flatulent bonus programs, which they get when they serve up the shaft to the ground troops. Hey, who needs Iraq, when we have Baghdad by the Bay?
Hey, Italian wines are complicated creatures, what with all the different things to remember and to know. Today I was trying to figure out one little hill in the Barolo district and it nearly drove me nuts. But I did find out, and now I know. And you know what? Knowledge is power. And when it comes to Italian wines, the suits in the suites could give a rat’s keister about this kind of low-level stuff. Doesn’t interest them, doesn’t keep their 80 foot power boats filled with gas. Doesn’t let them live in the lifestyle in which they have become accustomed to. Entitled, they are? Nah. They earned it, fare and square. Don’t believe me? Just ask ‘em. Or ask their PR wonk or their lawyer or their botoxed trophy wives.
I think about any of those little winemakers on a bricco or a poggio who have spent lifetimes developing their soil and their wine and their craft and then these huge marketing companies come by, spout out some crap about the US market, give ‘em a big order, pay up front and bingo! They just sold their souls to the devils in Baghdad by the Bay.
Yeah I know this is obtuse and blurry and I am not going to explain any deeper. And they said, back in the day, suffice it to say, the little guy better look out, because the behemoths are prowling and devouring. Italy, wake up, they are in your vineyards and your boardrooms. They will steal you blinder than Garibaldi plundered the South.
