The Trophy Life - Did you come this far to be somewhere else?

There’s this natty new watering hole with a wood burning oven on Washington Street in Yountville. I’m waiting there to meet a friend and colleague, to have a drink and go over some Italian business. As I am early, and the bar is overflowing with revelers (it is Napa Valley Premiere week), I stand outside and catch up with emails from back home. Two large multi-person vans are parked in front. Black and shiny, with quirky license plates, monikers of someone’s idea of wine country chi-chi. In reality, these vans are peripatetic conveyances for the moneyed set, with their black and shiny boots, and black pressed jeans, and their tall blonde wives with their tight faux leopard stretch jeans, long-legged, with long, shimmering hair. “Come get in this one with us,” one of the older single men yelps to someone else’s wife. As if she was going to get in and on their way to dinner at Press, something was going to happen inside that van? She just gives him a desultory sniff and climbs into a smaller, more intimate vehicle with her curator.

Oh, the trophy life, it ain't no good life,

But it's my life.

Piero Antinori Interview: Tuscan Tradition and Napa Innovation

Just a short one today, this time from the Silverado wine trail. It has been one heck of a week, meeting Frances Mayes, seeing Margrit Mondavi again after all these years and being around all these great wine writers at the Napa Symposium. Today I caught up with my old friend Piero Antinori, who was in town (St. Helena, CA) for Premiere Napa Valley. Piero and his family have the Antica wine estate in Napa Valley.

Attached is a 4 minute video in which Piero gives some interesting history of the Italian wine scene in the 1960’s and moves through the Super Tuscan phenomenon (Piero was one of the main architects) all the way to his involvement in the New world and wines in Napa Valley. When I get home I will edit better, but I just wanted to get up this piece with one of the icons of Italy, a gentleman and a real pleasure to sit down with and sip on his wine, from anywhere in the world.

Pop a good bottle of wine tonight and tell the ones near you that you love and appreciate them. Believe me, we all don’t hear enough of those good words. Cheers!

written and Flip cam video by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

The Remedial Expat

Class of '73

It was a sunny day in St. Helena, after months of the dark and frigid torrent of winter back home. It should have tinged my disposition, but the blinds to my soul were still lowered. Maybe it was the phone calls. Maybe it was that mean look the workshop teacher shot at me. However this chapter was going to play out, I had to get away from the people around me, not infect them with this taint.

I trudged up to my room, waving off the man in the golf cart who wanted to take me up the hill. No, I would grind my knees on one more hill, maybe it would force the bleak out of me.

Inside my room I returned a few phone calls. My son isn’t working these days and is wedged behind an avalanche of his own winter. We were in two canyons, yelling out into the heavens, but we couldn’t help each other. I could only hope the search team found one of us soon.

Another call to a friend, asking me where he should take his wife to dinner in Dallas. After a few suggestions I thought to turn the question back to him. “I’m in St. Helena, where should I go eat?” He always knew the little secret spots away from the tourists. “Go to Cook. You can get a nice glass of Falanghina and reset your Italian soul.” While it wasn’t quite the buzzing sound of the helicopters sending down a ladder, I figured it was a possible way out of the chasm. So I grabbed myself up and headed to Main Street.

I wasn’t that hungry. I haven’t been hungry for months. I was in the process of eliminating food lust from my daily activities. Not an easy thing for one involved in the wine business. But somehow that was a battle that I was winning.

Inside the little café there was a counter. Perfect for the solitary diner. I took my seat as close to the kitchen hoping the warmth of the stove might sear off my rotten mood. Pre-op.

The glass of Falanghina appeared, like the last rays of refracted light before the sun sets. Getting warmer. A simple menu took the complications out of decisions. And then, Frank Capra took over the rest of the evening.

Looking up at the back bar I saw a bottle, an apparition, from a friend’s winery in Tuscany. It was a large format bottle and was probably set up there for decoration. Querciavalle, 1985, Chianti Classico. Lovely wine from a family that makes wine in the way Frances Mayes could appreciate. The large bottle was a totem from the wine god, “We hear you. We’re sending someone. Soon.”

As the soup arrived, a remedy of cannellini bean and kale, a woman appeared next to me. Her regular seat was taken and I offered to give her mine. But she was well liked by the people who ran the place and they soon made her place ready. I really didn’t know what to make of it; I still had frost burn on the edges and my glasses were foggy. But it didn’t take too long to realize that the teacher had come to have dinner with her student.

All day I had struggled in classes, and at one point when the instructor shot me this glance of disdain, I recoiled so deep inside, it was a shock. I couldn’t look the instructor in the face, couldn’t take another look like that. My crime? I had read something I had written in class, and even though I had prefaced it with an “OK, here goes, I might be going out on a limb with this one,” the instructor made the decisive cut. She hated me. Class over. Close the books.

But that was in the past, and the soup and the wine were restoring me. And this town’s high school teacher was sitting next to me talking me back into the world of the living.

It wasn’t so much what she said as just the simple California dialect we could speak in. I was after all, from this world, originally, these were my tribal places before the fancy people from the East coast showed up with their ideas and their agendas. I didn’t need an extension class as much as I needed remediation. Along with a delicious secondo, poulet au vin, that is what the teacher did, in a kind and simple way.

We were talking about St. Helena; she had lived here all her life and had taught many of the winemakers who were now living in the million dollar bungalows and making the wines that had transformed her town. She had a goblet filled with ice and Coors Light. She looked up to a bottle of jug wine and told me a little story of several of her students and those jug wines. She was coaxing me out from behind the glacier, I could feel the thaw. The wine in the sauce was helping.

I thought of my wife, Liz, who had passed away on this same day nine years ago, part of the reason for my dark mood. But then there was this kind, sweet person who didn’t want to show me up and make herself feel superior at her student’s expense. She just wanted to drink her beer in her ice, eat her chicken in wine and break the monotony by talking to another person. She was better than the wine and the soup and the chicken, for me, she restored me back to hope, brought me out of the cave, all by simply being compassionate.

This week I have been around some amazing people. The women among them that I have met, Margrit Mondavi and Frances Mayes, are what we call in Italian “mitico”, legendary. And there have been the new young up-and-coming ones this week on the wine trail, Molly from Seattle and Whitney from Los Angeles, future M.F.K Fishers and Jancis Robinsons for their generation. But tonight this California expat couldn’t have asked for a better night out than with the dear old high school teacher with her remedy of kindness.

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

The Last Gift

Tonight, I have taken a little detour from the wine trail, and if you indulge me, it is time to remember. Every February 14th and 17th I cross over two events, the birthday of my lost love, Liz, and the date she left us. It has been nine years and so hard to believe we have gone on without her. But life is exactly that way. Not selfish, just survival.

I met Francis Mayes last night, who single-handedly brought Cortona onto the world stage. Nine years ago, during the last Christmas in 2000, Liz gave me a book by Francis Mayes, the last gift she would ever give me. Books, in those last days, were our companions from a death soon to be delivered with slow and painful determination.

Death isn’t neat and the aftermath isn’t clean or quick. When I pull an older Italian wine out of my closet, something from the 1960’s or 1970’s, I think about the hands that touched those wines, hands that are now lifeless. And though those hearts no longer beat, the wine in the bottles carries the lifeblood of those souls who put their lives into the grape and the sun and the wine.

Yesterday, I made a trip to the Tokalon vineyard for a lesson in pruning. As I was cutting parts of the vine back, I thought about sections of my life that have been pruned, sometimes in extreme measures. Always, the vine lives and gives back energy to grow another season. Does a vine cry or is it merely the milk of the life force that a good pruner brings forth? The cycle of the vine and the days of a life are intertwined in their collective destinies of survival and output.

In California, it is spring. Last week in Texas we had a foot of snow, in a day. The week before in New York, there was wind and bitter cold. While winter still wrestles east of the Rockies, spring washes up on shore in California, and fields of mustard bathe the dormant vines in golden light.

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