Etna Harvest 2013 Report from Salvo Foti & "I Vigneri"

This just in from my winemaking friend Salvo Foti. Salvo is bringing in the last of the harvest from his Etna vineyards and this is a report, word for word, from his letter. Sharing it with you, dear reader.

An Italian Exodus

It seems wine isn’t the only thing that is trying to get out of Italy. Her people are looking outward again. All this while less fortunate ones risk their lives to get into Italy, many often dying in the process. What does this global diaspora mean for Italy, for America and for the world at large?

These are pretty big questions for a Sunday night. Earlier in the day I went to see my friend Mario. He just turned 97, and he’s slowing down. I wanted to talk to him about something he witnessed during World War II. He was in the battle of Hürtgen Forest, where over 60,000 soldiers perished. Mario was captured and taken prisoner by the Germans. He spent the rest of the war in a P.O.W. camp and lost 40 pounds. He never took food for granted after that.

But Mario didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to reminisce about his father and mother and my grandfather and grandmother; they had come over from Sicily about the same time, and they were friends. Their lives were intertwined and they looked out for each other. When I came to Dallas, my dad called Mario and he looked out after me, gave me a job and essentially helped to start me out on the path, this wine trail that has led me back to Italy so many times.

The Changing Face of Italian-American Food and Wine

After the seemingly endless exercise of packing on a Sunday night and heading out to the airport on a Monday morning, I found myself at home wondering what to eat. I’d been in restaurant after restaurant, been fed this Carbonara and that Carbonara. I’d narrowly escaped truffle oil but still had to deal with crappy balsamic vinegar and overly cooked malloreddus drowning in cream. My veins were crying out for simple; for sustenance, not recreation. I gathered up some fresh vegetables, a nice protein and a bottle of Chianti I knew wouldn’t disappoint.

Everything I know about America I learned from Sergio Leone

Some of the characters I encounter, ones who want to sell their wine to America, have some of the darndest ideas about this market. I get all kind of inquiries, probably enough to write a book about, or at the very least a textbook. But the one that intrigued me was when I met with a winemaker from Italy who thought America was more or less like the way it was portrayed in films like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “For a Fistful of Dollars.” Fascinated by this history-cultural slant and feeling like this deserved further elaboration, I have taken said interpretation to the edge and imagined what our world might have been if Italian wine had come west with the great expansion in the 1800’s.

The Death of Rosé

I remember my first time. It was summer. I was in Tuscany. Invited to dinner at the Villa San Michele in Fiesole. I drove my little car up the hill from Florence. Somewhere along the way I got a little lost and stepped out of the car to ask for directions. The town I stopped in was having a party. They were having some kind of Marxist celebration. Wine was flowing; someone pressed a glass of rough red wine into my hand and tried to get me to dance with them.

For Us, There is Only the Trying

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate —but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

                                                                                 -T.S. Eliot

Unable to post on Thursday; travel, work, distraction, exhaustion. Sometimes it happens. It’s only a blog, not some heraldic solution to the world’s problems. Life gets in the way, princess.

Five Hot Italian Wines to Bag for Autumn

Someone turned off the summer switch and turned on the autumn one. To celebrate these cooler days and our procession to the holidays, I have found five wines from Italy that I’m bagging up and taking to the celebrations. They are:

2007 – The Second Tuscan Coming

How many times has it happened to you? You’re in some place where you are just backed up against a wall and have nowhere to go but straight on through it? In the wine business, we’re in the “O” of O-N-D and already it seems like we’ve been at this for a while. We’re backed up against a wall and we still have three months to go.

I’ll Have What She’s Drinking

Imagining the perfect wine

In our everyday world, at the end of a day, many of us go home, change into something more comfortable, look in the kitchen for something to cook and pop a bottle of wine. Like breathing, we do it often. And as is often the case, we don’t think too much about it. And for all intents and purposes that is usually more than adequate.

This morning I read an article in the NY Times, I'll Have What She's Thinking, about scientific inquiry into the nature of spontaneous orgasm. In the haze of an endorphin high and while eating a delicious breakfast, I poured over the article. One graph caught my attention:

“The finding was significant in that it challenged a common stereotype — that men achieve orgasm more readily than women. Now science was suggesting that, at least for some women, all it took was a vivid imagination.”

An Italian Sommelier’s Diary: The Nightmare Table

The scene is an urban setting somewhere in the Western half of the United States. A wine waiter is working a large party of folks who are celebrating. Maybe they have just come from the Emmys. Or perhaps the stars aligned to have all these people in a room at the same time, partying. Our sommelier is called over to a table of seven, four women and three men. At which point I will yield to the wine steward, who will relate the following events in his own voice.

Obsessed with Eggplant - by way of Israel - via Calabria, Sicily and New Orleans

Most of the past week was spent in New Orleans. It’s the closest I can get to Sicily, and the food culture there is somewhat of a recharge for me. The people are relationship driven and the wine and cocktail scene there is bristling with life. It’s my kind of place and it’s in my back yard, so I am very happy to go there.

The Future of Italian Wine in America

If there is one thing in our American’s DNA, it’s our tendency to look forward. We had a brief fling in the 1960’s with being here and now but that passed. And though now we are obsessed with our yoga-ramen- food truck pageant of life; that too will pass. What will never pass is that which we can never have – the stuff out there in front of us that we constantly reach for. And that, dear readers, is where Italian wine is sitting at a little table in a busy piazza, having a caffè macchiato and waiting patiently for us to show up.

One Last Harvest

They told me I’ve been here long enough. Time to make room for new growth. Told me to prepare for my last harvest.

It used to be that an old-vine vineyard was prized, revered. Something in it had the depth of meaning more profound than just terroir. Dirt plus wisdom. Now, those attributes are no longer prized. The owners want bigger numbers. And their analysts tell them they need new and shiny.

Finally! A Refosco to Love

It was a late night and looked to be an even earlier morning. Shutting down the evening with a wine dinner, singing Neapolitan songs with my pal Luciano, I scurried home to pack and sleep for a few hours. 4:30AM arrived sooner than I had hoped. It was Sept. 11 and I was getting on a plane, this time to Houston.

Arriving at the first account at 10:00 AM, my colleague opened up two bags with Italian wine, Barolo, Barbaresco, Sauvignon, Tuscan, rosato, you name it, we had it. And there in the middle of the pack was the Refosco.

I’m not one you can count as a fan of Refosco. I find them too nervous, too blue. They remind me of the dead finger trick, where you put your finger next to a friends and then rub them with your other hand, one finger on each side, to give one the sensation of touching a dead finger.

Little Tony of Italy, Bressan of Friuli and the chasm of cultural chauvinism

A woman ventures out from her familiar surroundings with her daughter and her camera. The era is the 1930’s. An unusual act in those days. Or so the story goes. A series of books ensued, covering stories of children in different countries, from Mexico to Canada, Sweden to Italy, comprising the "Children of America" and "Children of All Lands" series. A friend and a mentor left me a copy of one of the books when he died, one “Little Tony of Italy.”

I put “Little Tony of Italy” on the bookshelf and there it sat. And then last month when the mess in Friuli with Fulvio Bressan hit the internets this book fell into my lap. I thumbed through it and started thinking about racism.