The Scandal that has Shaken the Universe of the Masters of Ŝophisticated Ҫannabis

Dateline: April 20, 2049

It’s been nearly a year since 420 anxious Cannabis Sommeliers amassed at the Hotel Zig-Zag in Portland, Oregon. The purpose? To accept a challenge to pass the most rigorous testing to become one of a handful (now standing at 1937) of Masters of Ŝophisticated Ҫannabis (MŜҪ) in the world – fewer than have traveled to Mars.

Surf, swell and tides on Verdicchio Island – Matelica, the monster wave

I first encountered La Monacesca in the late 1980’s – My friends Eugenio Spinozzi and Sam Levitus (partners in Tricana) imported it into the USA. The wine was in a long, renano (Riesling shaped) bottle and was capable of good aging, developing secondary attributes and becoming a different wine, evolving into something deeper, more than just a run of the mill white wine from Italy.

Matelica - how does it differ from Castelli di Jesi? Matelica and Castelli di Jesi are like two siblings. They resemble one another but they have their own unique personalities. Generally speaking, the Matelica aromas are more towards wildflowers than the peppy citric two-step of Jesi. Matelica has a longer, more stretched-out body of the wine. The topography in Matelica is higher up, more spread out, arranged differently in regards to the nearby coast. And the soils are a world apart.

New York – The Center of the Wine World – for Some

I’ve been to New York three times in as many weeks. They’re getting to know me by name at Aldo Sohm Wine Bar. Some folks in Texas have even asked me if I’ve moved back there. But after all these years, I know my place.

Do Americans love and drink Italian wines more than Italians?

There is a pattern I have noticed lately when talking to Italian winemakers about their production and where they send their wine. That is, the domestic market for selling Italian wine (in Italy) is a mangled mess.

Premature Jubilation

When I left my home Monday morning it was dark and foggy. I decided to head to the airport a little earlier in case the flights were being juggled around. When I got to the airport the fog had lifted and the sun was rising in the east. Another week on the road, one of many in the life of an O-N-D warrior. Last week it was Austin and Marfa, Texas. This week it is New Orleans. Tuesday there would be a national election. I had scheduled a full week’s worth of work before heading back to Italy this weekend. My bag is staying packed until Thanksgiving.

Thanks for a Rockin' October!

Milan

October was an especially busy time on the wine trail in Italy. Traffic was up 28% from October of 2011. Before the wine blog awards were announced I had been thinking about taking the blog posts down from 2 a week to maybe 1. No reason in particular, just a busy life. But I kept plugging away. In October I posted 19 times, something I hadn’t done since May of 2010 when I was in Sicily. So thanks all for reading and keeping me motivated. For those of you who have been too busy or those who have told me, “You are posting too darn many times, I can’t keep up with them,” I will list the posts from the most popular on down. I have had a huge week of travel with wine dinners every night this week, in Dallas, Austin and Marfa. And with no end in sight for the foreseeable future.

So read on, if you care to. I will be posting as I care, too. Probably a little more than I should, but the tap has been turned on. There’s very little I can do about it.

October's posts in order of popularity: ( after the jump)

Three Wise Wines

From the "I'm Dreaming of a White (Wine) Christmas" Collection

In the traditions of the wine world, the conventional wisdom has been that the real serious wines are red. Old wine books push the adage, “The first duty of wine is to be red.” And scores of wine connoisseurs wandered into Burgundy or Bordeaux, Piedmont or Tuscany. But the times they are a changing.

For all of my wishing, I have hoped to be one of those types, where red wine was placed high on an altar so I could too worship it. And I do love red wine. This evening we sampled an Etna Rosso next to a Chateauneuf du Pape. But I cannot get over how much I love white wine. I really have affection for cool, crisp, luscious wines. They seem to go with the foods I love and I never have enough of them around the house.

Here are three wines that I do hope to have around for the holidays. Please read on.

The Italian Wine List in America

From the "Knick-knack paddywhack" dept.

The setting: A hip Italian neighborhood restaurant, once upon a time in America.
The clientele: Well-traveled, well-heeled, conservative but adventurous with food.
The chef: Inspired, deft touch. Hails from the neighborhood; sensitive to the seasons and the spirit of Italy.
The wine buyer: Newish, youngish, enjoys big wines; is not from the neighborhood.
The challenge: fitting the sensibilities of the chef, the expectations of the clientele, the tastes of the wine buyer and trying to make it all work in harmony.

I am setting up this scenario, an amalgam of places I have noticed, from Park Slope, Brooklyn to San Francisco, California (and places in between) in order to try to understand how something like this can work best.

Let’s say this is not a classic Italian place, for which there might be other factors, such as a well established wine cellar, a clientele who are used to certain things and don’t want to see much change in them. After all there is a place for vitello tonnato and Gavi. Or pasta Bolognese with a hearty red wine.

Italy’s 1%

Recently I was perusing Doctor Wine’s website. Dr. Wine, aka Daniele Cernilli, had to settle for the English moniker (Dr. Vino having been snapped up by Tyler Colman years ago). But don’t cry for Cernilli, for he hasn’t missed much. If anyone knows how to monetize the internet (or anything else) it is Doctor Wine.

On his site, he has a post about the Gambero Rosso awards from 1988 up to now. Cernilli recounts, “The idea of a classification in terms of ‘Glasses’ was mine”, in case anyone had doubts. Whomever had the idea, a virtual Pandora’s Box was unleashed, when Slow Food, in concert with Gambero Rosso, and their “Three Glass” awards started gaining momentum. Recently Gambero Rosso and Slow Food parted ways, with both pursuing their own “awards” process. It is too soon to tell if the separation will dilute an already fatigued public, confused from now having to follow Wine Spectator and James Suckling, a new Wine Advocate (with Galloni taking much of the work over for Parker), all the fractured publications along with the eno-blogosphere and any number of other critical corridors in the wine world, all supported by what the futurist Alvin Toffler called “The great growling engine of change - technology.”

Mom, Apple Pie and Throwing the Italian Wine Goomba from the Train

So you make wine or you write or you bake and you think there is more. You think you want to take it from a hobby or an advanced passion to the streets. You start marketing your wine, you sell a piece here and there, you start selling your apple pies to the local cafe.

And then, late one night, you actually think you can take the giant step. Outside of your norm. Maybe even make the big change. Make a living doing it, full time. But you need a boost, a validation from something larger, something "out there." You think you need to win greater approval before you jump.

If you make wine or write or bake or engage in any activity, you might think to enter a competition. Or someone might nominate you for one. It happens all the time. Full time professionals are lauded all the time. The Nobel, the Pulitzer, the Oscars. People love to compete. And win.

How many times have wine-sellers in my field gone to their clients and told them, "It won a Gold Medal in the Orange County Fair"? How often I have looked to see which science fiction writer won the Hugo Award. Or the Nebula. Or if both, slam dunk into my shopping cart.

Blitzing with Barbaresco

What goes with BBQ besides Babaresco? How about a little 1990 Ridge Montebello for starters?

You’ve gotta love a guy like Aldo Vacca, who gets off a plane straight from Italy, and heads right into a situation that requires him to be “on”. Not that being at my home on a Sunday is exactly something you have to shine your wing tips for, but nonetheless, there he was, at the front door with bottles of his 2005 single vineyard Barbarescos, ready to get after some Texas BBQ, classic Caesar salad and King Ranch chicken casserole.

The idea for the week was for Aldo to come into Texas and swing his way from Dallas through Austin (right smack dab in the middle of SXSW) and ending up in Houston. By now he is readying to go to Colorado, but an intense few days it has been for one of the hardiest working men in the wine business.

Marea with the Maestro

That's right Marea - not Marfa - not yet

There ain’t too many people I would get out of a warm, dry taxi and go hunt down a shovel to clear a path for, in a snowfall, but Filippo De Belardino is one of them. And to do it, to make a way to one of the best meals I will have this year, let’s say it was worth it. Oh yeah! Man if I was a gambling man, after SD26 and Marea, I should just go home. First the disclaimer and then the details.

I know some folks just don’t like reading these kinds of posts. It could come off like a nah-nah-nah-nah-nah kind of brag-fest. But I promise to interject love and life and good times about friends and the most important thing in the wine business – the relationships. If I remember. Or I might just brag.

It’s hard not to love a guy like Filippo. Even when I get mad at him (rarely) I still love the cat. He is warm and generous and he gives me room to be myself. I think of him as a brother-in-arms. Thankfully, not a brother-in-law.

My Favorite Island

One might think from reading these posts that it might be Pantelleria or Salina, Elba or Ischia, but in my heart, my favorite island is landlocked. It’s a large and varied island on the border of Mexico. It is in the state of Texas, and while it is Texas to the core, it shares none of the mean spirit that one can find in cities. It is wild and it can be life-threatening, but it is never cruel. It is the Big Bend, and I love it as much as any place on earth.

I go to Italy for business, and often when I am there I have a moment or two to relax. But when I want to go where the cells phones don’t roam and I cannot be found, that place is the National Park of Big Bend, where I can hike and wander to my heart’s content. The wine and food scene isn’t so great, unless one goes to Marfa, where I had one of the best meals I have had this year. But that isn’t the reason why I go to my favorite island. I go there to get away and to go somewhere where away isn’t away. It is in smack-dab in the middle of a world that heals me. It’s real and it’s in my face and I love it.

The weather was perfect. The hiking was strenuous at times, like the day we hiked to Emory Peak. The first time I went to the summit in 1990 I was 20 years younger. This time I was in better shape. This time we saw less than a dozen people on the trail, all day. And that was the most people we saw on any day on any trail. So the traffic jams of Yosemite and Yellowstone, well, they just don’t make it down to the Big Bend.

The light, oh the light. Daylight, twilight, midnight light, oh so very wonderful. I was testing a new camera, one that shoots in a square format. Yes, a digital camera that sells for under $500 and crops the image in a square. I have my Rolleiflex groove on again! But this isn’t the post to talk about that subject; it’s in the works. No, this post is how the desert helps and heals.

When I left the city, my nose was bleeding daily, sometimes for as long as 90 minutes. Blood pressure? My doc prescribed a blood pressure medicine and my already normal blood pressure lowered so much I almost passed out. How about the stress of city living? Texas, the country, is rough and harsh, but not mean. The cities, however are filled with people who I don’t know where they came from, there is so much mean-spiritedness, so much vitriol, so very toxic. I don’t know how they live with themselves. I know I cannot live with them, and even though I live in the city I cannot let them poison me any more. I will not bleed out from living amidst the hate vampires in the city.

My favorite island, then, doesn’t rely on great food or wine, but on a land, that while it can be harsh and unforgiving is never unfair or mean. It draws on the light of the heavens and all the planets and suns that spit their light on this darkened landscape at night. So bright it woke me up one night coming through the window. It is nowhere near water or my beloved Pacific or Adriatic, but there is water enough to survive. And air, what beautiful, dry, clean air, which heals with every breath.

Does it sound like I had a great week off? Well, I did. And tomorrow I jump back onto the metropolitan carousel and take a spin for another week. And I am thinking where it will spin me will be someplace I have never been to yet. But I am hopeful, I have the mountain lion roaring in the night to guide me through the brush.

And I will always have my favorite island, deep in the heart of the real Texas, waiting, anytime I, or anyone of us, need to be shown the way back home.

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

No Country for Old Wines

Happy 82nd, Oscar!

Have Italian wines become like cinema? Has oak become what full frontal nudity was in the 1970’s, now hackneyed and dull? Do we look for nuance in wine and film and walk away from a dark room or a disappointed table with similar letdowns?

Last night I went to visit my friend Jay the pizzaiolo, who was halting his guerilla restaurant for a few weeks of renovation. Inside the dining room, people had brought their own wines. I surveyed the tableau – Silver Oak, Kosta Browne, Caymus. I had brought a little Piedirosso, and it felt like I had just landed in America with my little satchel of handmade (and outmoded) clothes, walking onto the stage of my new life. And that is what the original wines from Italy must endure when they, too, come to America, walking the red carpet, without the sponsorship of Muccia or Donatella. Perhaps that is why some of the new, young energy of Italy, those affluent enough to send their children over to visit or to work in Napa or to take classes at Davis, have sussed out the future of the business. We aren't in La Terra Trema territory anymore. No, Italian wines have morphed into some Avatar of expectation, at least in many minds who reside in the heads of those who sit at the tables across America. And apparently in Italy, too?

I’m not going to go all sans soufre on y’all, but once again I stand on the corner of Any Given Sunday and Bloody Monday, that glorious time between reflection and heading back to the streets, and wonder if I am ever going to get Back to the Future?

Which begs the question, “OK, Alfonso, what do you think they need?” To which I begin by answering, "It's The Magnificent Seven meets The Barbera 7". It’s not what they think they need, but it is what we need to bring back – and those are the real expressions of Italian wine, that even when winemaking was less sophisticated, those old guys (and gal) were able to coax into the bottle.

My feeling is that it has more to do with the character of the person than the vineyard or the barrel room. The terroir of the human soul. I keep thinking of those people who still have the connection, who aren’t acting, who are living out the drama of their lives but with a realism that has been lost, in the bottle and on film, these last 20 or so years. And that is the crossroads that Italian wine teeters on, seemingly often.

Enough of the Blazing Saddles romp we have been getting, this is a High Noon moment.

How do you know you have lost something precious if you have nothing to compare that loss to? It is that way with so many things in youth. We cannot fathom the loss of a soul mate or a parent, because it hasn’t happened to us. Sure, one can read Lampedusa or Emily Dickinson or Paul Auster, but until the pin pricks your finger and you bleed, you will not know it as intimately. Viscerally.

And again, the director taps me on the shoulder and asks me to pull focus, bring it in for a close up, get to the point.

I do see light in the tunnel. The Piedirosso I brought to the pizzaiolo had been sanded with a rough grade of paper, but it had True Grit. The Primitivo we served in Marfa last week had the rough-and-tumble character of Accattone. You could almost feel the glass shards piecing your poor bare feet as you let a wine slip from the stained cup into your unbrushed teeth. Was it pleasant? It wasn’t pretty from all the make-up. It was a Giant, but it was frank. It was truthful. And that made it a beautiful thing.

What was once the key to the kingdom, getting a great revue and 90+ points or the three glasses from Gambero Rosso, all that has been rendered useless in this Mad Max world, where the rules of economics have been disco-oxygenated so trophy hunters can fill their silos. They can still have their 100 point Walk in the Clouds and drink their $300 cult wines too. When The Eclipse comes (isn’t it already here?), those with mega Euros will have plenty of oaked wines to drink with their canned foie gras in their tax deductible offshore underground shelters cellars. "I'm gonna live forever, baby remember my name." Oh yeah.


Until then, I will hope for a time when more can take pleasure in the joys of wine and in the simple satisfaction of unadulterated, accessible, drinkable wines. Wines that have Places in the Heart . Wines that we can really, really love. Wines that go with real food. Then maybe it will be time again for a Capra-esque return to that Wonderful Life.



And the winner is….

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

Photos from Oscar nights of past

Longing, Returning, Leaving

A few days ago while I was foraging for lettuces and herbs in my back yard, I heard a familiar cry. At the top of a tall power line the sparrow hawk was hailing me. He was back to raise another brood, teach them to fly and then head back to wherever they go when winter returns. For me it was a hopeful sign that this very long winter might be coming to a close.

The next day I got on a plane and headed to far West Texas. An hour flight and a three hour drive led me back to Marfa for a wine dinner. The journey in is always a mind cleanse for me. From home base, the hard core urban setting, to the airport, where all of our fears are laid bare as we walk shoeless though filters poised to reveal anomalies in hope of finding evil, so that it might be rooted out. Then to a dusty, rural airport, Midland, home to my dear Uncle Lou and his family, amidst oil wells and childhood homes of world deciders. But the real purge comes in the drive from Midland to Marfa, when the landscape that is revealed sews itself in ones pocket so deeply so as not to ever be lost. There are many people at my final destination that night who are longing- longing for art, longing for love, longing for simple. One night under a universe of lights wont abate that longing, more to serve as a reminder to the city dweller that a larger universe of ideas, of Everything, is still there in spite of our tendency to narrow it down to an explanation that puts each and everyone of us in the middle of a micro-oxygenated universe of our own making.

Nothing you can know that isn’t known.
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.
It’s easy.

I have done my 200th wine dinner, again. They are like kites- trying to keep them in the air, making sure the tail doesn’t tangle, hoping the kite doesn’t tear away, and when the kite finally flies and one runs out of string and the kite sails for 30 minutes or so, to reel it in? Or let it go? This night I got the kite up in the air pretty quick, got the room where I thought I wanted to go, like some West Texas preacher testifying about the Revelations of Gaglioppo and Inzolia. The dining room, high ceilinged, like a cathedral, held the dry air. I didn’t need to shout. I started channeling the poets, Lennon, Neruda, Whitman. I had them, the tail was untangled, the wind was blowing steady, calm. And then, just like that, I let all the string out and freed the kite. To the West Texas heavens under a full moon, the last vestiges of winter under those sent whirling back to their private universes.

So we sailed up to the sun
Till we found the sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our yellow submarine

Afterwards, some of the group wanted to pilgrimage out to see the Marfa lights. Having been indoctrinated in those mysteries long ago, but only recently having become a Believer, I was up for it. I have a fantasy of someone putting a bar out there, like those blue bars we used to go to in Italy in the 1990’s. A piano, dark blue lighting, a great selection of single malts and grappas. Then a window to the vast unknown in search of those famous lights. But we stood out there in the high desert, shivering, our lone companion a traffic cone that had been placed over the telescope that is used in warmer nights to seek out the origin of those mysterious lights.

Would you believe in a love at first sight
Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time
What do you see when you turn out the light
I can't tell you but I know it's mine,

When I was putting the wines together on a sheet for the dinner I was searching for a way to start a conversation with the people coming to it. One of my dinner companions remarked that he recently had a dinner for 12 people and they discussed the food and the wines. A salon. Yes, of course, I would love to come back and do something like that. But this night I was imagining these five wines as lines from a Beatles Album, the Yellow Submarine, in an effort to strike a match against the imagination and start a little fire of non linear conversation. Alas, it was probably something that was meant for My Universe, perhaps too much of a stretch. Too non linear. How did one of my teachers tell me, “Al, save the imagination for the drawing tablets.”

Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high

My experiment with wine and song having wilted, I consoled myself under that cold and deep desert night with the happiness that other teachers had cultivated a biodynamic rebellion against those who would have me be a square peg in a square hole in a cubicle somewhere in a square building. Of course, we must report back, head up the elevator and slip into the meeting, hoping that someone in that meeting will be receptive to the accounts from the front lines. As long as I don’t make them too poetic. Or out there.

Out there. Out there. As I was driving back the next day to get back to the city and a tasting of Super Tuscans and Brunello (acclimate, acclimate) I found myself wasting time, putting it off. And as I drove, the radio playing Holst’s “The Planets” made it even more difficult to leave, to return. I stopped one more time at the base, this time the traffic cone had a retiree in a Winnebago for company.

Pulling away from the highway out of Alpine, the junction, one to the Big Bend and the other back to the Big City, I had a visceral reaction. I felt sick to my stomach, maybe it was the huevos rancheros?

As I left the wilderness, returning to the power line that I always came back to, I promised myself to come back here again, for a week or more, to camp, to hike, to clear out the Big City. I really, really love the desert, it is my Tuscany.

One, two, three, four
Can I have a little more?
five, six, seven eight nine ten I love you.

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

Lyrics by The Beatles

Some Wine, Not Much Italy, But Lots of Trail

This past week has taken me on another trail, lots of trail. For a week we have been out in West Texas to do some hiking in the Big Bend National Park and surrounding areas. This is Texas as the Italians love to romanticize Texas and The West, with huge vistas, wide rivers, lots of wild animals and plenty of big blue sky during the day and starry, starry skies at night. It was also very therapeutic this week, because out there the cell phones do not work. So lots of rest and respite from the civilized world. During the last five or so years September has taken me to the wine trail in France, Portugal, Sicily, and Italy. But for some reason this year, I needed a break from Italy and wine. For one glorious week I didn’t think about whether a wine was natural enough or not (btw, the more natural the wine is the happier my headache prone skull is). I didn’t drive very much and when I did it was never over 45 mph and usually to a placer to hike for the day. I got sunburned and star burned even more, because out in the Big Bend the sky viewing is amazing. Oops, looks like I am full speed ahead into a mommy blog post. E' la nave va. Dallas to Midland is a short one hour flight. In a car the drive to Big Bend is a lot like flying to Europe. Long. So the program was Midland via SW Air and then a rental car for the 3 hour trip to our first destination-Marfa. Marfa is that little town in West Texas where a person like me can feel like this was a town made for people like me. Good food and wine abounds, interesting and friendly people, lots of art and the wide open sky of the romantic Texas Italians love to fantasize about. In a little café in Marfa, Maiya’s we set about our first night to nosh. Maiya’s is Italian-centric so there are some nice food and wines to choose from. We settled on a Pio Cesare Gavi, a 2004, that was nutty and in perfect ready-to-drink shape. I did say 2004; there must be something about the dry West Texas conditions that keep a 5 year old Italian white in shape. But anyone who has ever had an older Gavi knows that a good one can take some age. Marfa is an artistic community centered around, but not exclusive to, the efforts of Donald Judd and his Chinati Foundation. I will be heading back to Marfa soon to do a series of wine and food dinners, hopefully with some artistic element added to it. My university background was in art and architecture with photography, film and cultural forms studies making up the curricula that I focused on. Marfa is really a place out of my American West soul. And you can find a pretty good pizza there too, in this dog loving town. I grew up in California in the western part of the Sonora Desert (sometimes called the "Colorado Desert"). Marfa and Big Bend are part of the Chihuahua desert. So not exactly the same, but enough similarities for me to be very happy. On long walks in the Chihuahua desert this past week, I could have sworn some of the trees were brujos and of course I thought I could smell the snakes (another post, but yes, snakes do emit a unique odor). At night looking out the window I felt the pull of the billions of the galaxies and stars. One night I even think there were things other than stars that were reaching out to me. Yeah, yeah, I know, active imagination. But the world we think we see isn’t “all there is”. What something like Big Bend and other National Parks can do for the common man like myself is to find me a place and a time where I can go to restore my equilibrium from the pressures of civilization. It’s in the wilderness that I can find my lost self. Monday morning I head back to work, but not before having had a glorious week like I haven’t had for years. I think it was probably back in 2005 in Portugal where I was able to re-up my energy. Not saying that the work or even the urban scene of Texas is all that stressful. It isn’t like living in NY or even LA. Because Texas, for me as well, is a romantic notion or freedom and unlimited horizons, as much as it might be for the Italians I often come into contact with in the wine biz. These next few weeks Ken Burns is screening his National Park opus on PBS. Thankfully, I have had a week to immerse into one of my favorite National Parks in America. And while it might not be as obviously beautiful as my California love, Yosemite, Big Bend is a wonderful, peaceful, dangerous, beautiful, mystical place that for a desert dweller I have managed to save a large part of my heart for.

All through the day in the saddle I sway Visions glow as I go trail dreamin' I see a home on a blue mountain dome Lovingly that I made, trail dreamin' There's a rainbow trail that's lined with stars That leads to a gate with moonbeam bars And it's welcome, I feel, till my visions so real Turn to dust 'cause I'm just trail dreamin'

-Sung by Marty Robbins, lyrics by Bob Nolan

Great guide to Big Bend HERE by Richard Campbell

 

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

Selling Brunello when Mercury is in Retrograde

All week the wine has been dogging me. There it is, like the omnipresent character in a Twilight Zone episode. Every corner you turn, he is waiting with that silly little smirk on his face. Taunting, laughing, obstructing.

“You need to sell my 2003 Brunello so I can send you then 2004. I would hate for you to miss out and go from the 2003 to the 2005.”

I took a look at the Brunellos we have in the market. In one store yesterday they had on the shelf 1999, 2000 and 2001. All considered good to great vintages. Sitting on the shelves from $50-75. Good producers, no flies. Not like some end of the world rations that sat in the bomb shelters waiting for someone to climb on down and wait it out, while the rest of humanity sweated it out on the beach.

Waiting. Waiting.

What to do? I need an idea that works. I really need to come up with something, pull something out of my repertoire. Show the rookies this is just a cycle. Make it to the 26th mile. Again.

This is a singular moment for me. In thirty plus years I cannot remember this pattern happening quite like this. Down economy, trying to recover. Wine, tainted by a hot vintage and a scandal. Lousy exchange rate caused by a government trying to discourage foreign trade by weakening the dollar. And a stellar vintage, waiting in the wings for a window of opportunity that isn’t quite now.


The 2004 Brunello is Cinderella. But while the planets move backwards what can one person do?

This is like having to eat tainted meat while the perfect pie is cooling on the window sill. This is torture. Not like Abu or Gitmo, but for slaves to the wine god, this is a perfect storm debacle for the ’04 Brunello. More like Mars in retrograde than Mercury.


Two visitors, like passing planets across the skies, light up the screen with their brief candles. Let’s hear what they have to say about the bright light in the Montalcino skies, the 2004 vintage.

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

Artwork from The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas

Dark Star

Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes.

Two men looked out from prison bars: One saw mud, one saw stars.

This has been a long week. What started out as a short trip to visit family and then a run up to Napa for a three day seminar at the CIA, on the Terroir of California, well, that all changed. I would have to find my own terroir. I did, along with any number of moments that harkened back to childhood. I was going back to a place where you can never return. I just didn't know that’s why "they" were sending for me.

That place would be the California of my youth. That California no longer exists. Sitting at a wine bar in Hollywood talking among folks, who a few moments before were strangers, they asked me why wouldn’t I come back? I’d had these conversations many times before in Hollywood, in the days when I worked there. Nights in October when the jasmine filled the air with their blossoms and Southern California truly was a magical, intoxicating place. That place now is now valet-parked in the corner of my mind and it probably will never be retrieved. And even if it is discovered, who am I to lay any claim on it now? It didn’t work for Balboa; it surely won’t work for me.

Look, the California of my parent's youth seems as if it was even more treasured. If I were to reinvent California it would be in those days; quieter, less polluted, less crowded and you could get away with a lot more than now.

But that night in Hollywood, we sipped on dry-farmed, native-yeast, full-of-life wines from France, Italy and Austria. So, in effect, I had found my place once again. It wasn’t the murky, muddy backwaters of Southwestern Louisiana, no, that will come later this month, if all goes well. It wasn’t the star spewed and endless horizon place like Marfa. But for one brief moment, on a bar stool in Hollywood, I had found my sisters and brother and we were enjoying some really great wine.

Odd, here I was in what are my tribal-home grounds, LA. And I was the only native Angelino in the bunch. They came from Connecticut, Ohio, New York, and Illinois. And they were asking me why I wasn’t still living here. “I got in on the ground floor. I’m done with it now, except for these brief reunions. It’s all yours, folks.”

Sure the blue fin Toro was like nothing else I've ever had. And the back streets of the hills behind UCLA are a magical place. But I’ve been steering this craft back home all my life. I don’t reckon I’ll make it all the way to Italy. Hell, the Italy I once knew is gone too. Not a problem, the river pathway will be just fine. Somewhere down the Guadalupe’.

I do love the desert, though. Maybe it was all those years sitting on that little rock out in the vacant lot out in front of my house flying kites and staring at the mountain. I see my spirit friends, the hawks, the prairie dogs, the snakes, the lizards; they flash to me from the mountains and hills and tell me they are OK. They’re watching over things. Muchas Gracias hermanos.

Dammit, open the Pod Bay doors, Al!

Funny thing about the way it is vs. the way we want it to be. On the plane coming home yesterday I was trudging a couple of carry-ons and my hands were full. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but on the way to the seat, an older couple was struggling with getting their last carry-on up in the bin. They asked me if I could help them. Normally I am very accommodating to people and I was in this case as well. But not before I told the couple that they shouldn’t try to carry things on that they weren’t prepared to handle, that’s what checking luggage is for. The lady, perturbed that I had the audacity to challenge her good judgment in her old age, quipped back, “Just you wait till, you don’t know what it’s like. Someday you’ll be old.”

“Yes, ma’am, and when that day comes, hopefully more mature than the behavior you are exhibiting.”

As I propped their misshapen luggage into the bin, without as much as a thank you, she simply called out, “You’re an idiot!”

To which the only reply I could muster up was an effortless, “You’re welcome.”

It’s good to be home.

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