During the harvest of 2006, when I was in Tuscany, I passed by an estate in Greve. I recognized the place as I passed it, going to and coming from an appointment. I didn’t have time to stop. Behind the wall of the estate there is a story that is really out of this world. It is a story about a family with ties to Chianti that go all the way back to Ricasoli, pass through Antinori and head north towards Milan and Trentino, to the hillside vineyards of the Northeast. It is a story about a water parched parcel of earth, a noble family and a mystic farmer who brought water and abundance to the land.A parcel, a building, several hundred years of neglect. A child of an artist walks on to the land and is moved by what he sees, hears, feels. The land is in the middle of Paradise, but it was in a temporary Purgatory. Now the doors will be pried open by the new generation, with a little help from an ancient one.
The young man speaks Italian like an Italian, French like a Frenchman and English like an Englishman. He stands straight and tall and has clear, piercing eyes. He is young but his soul is that of one much older than he. When he looks around the estate he sees centuries of history, for it courses through his veins and his DNA. He is bringing new life into this thirsty vineyard.
There is no proper well on the property, so it must be abandoned during harsh weather. When a place is empty for periods of time, it is like a person who can read but only stares at a television. Things start to fall apart. Tuscany and all of Italy had the fortune in the past to have people who could read the land. But those people are dying and their craft has not been handed down. The craft of the diviner is one of those.
One day the noble young man summoned a local farmer, a contadino, to the property. The farmer, it was said, had the gift. He could find water. Yes, he was a bit crazy. Yes, he scared the women and the young children. At first. But squirrels would come up to the man and talk to him. And he would answer them. Birds would follow him as he walked through the land, keeping an eye on what was ahead. Dogs loved the man; they sensed his ability to tune into their frequency.He appeared at the door of the Castello and the young man welcomed him. Yes, he would help to find water in this estate, which in Italian meant “re-dried”. It would not be inexpensive, but he wouldn’t charge unless he found water.
He walked around the property for about an hour reciting Dante. He had memorized the Divine Comedy by heart and was prone to reciting verse after verse. It would take him to that place where his mind would no longer pay attention to the distractions, and then it could get on with the work of bringing back life to the dirt.
The mystic farmer fashioned a rod from a branch he found on the property. With it he started walking in search of the water source. At a point he found indications of water, but told the young man he wanted to find the place where the two underground rivers met. There is where the well would be dug and a stronger water force could be found.
The young man was a bit skeptical but he stayed in the background, letting this walking encyclopedia of Paradise and Inferno go about his work. When the farmer found the confluence of the two rivers he brought out a little pendulum. “Ecco”, he exclaimed, he had found the spot. He then told the young man that he would find water at eighteen meters. The young man asked him how much he wanted for his service, but the old man told him to drill first and if the water was found he would be back with his bill.To drill for water is expensive. But the people who do such things were summoned and started right up. The deeper one drills the more expensive the job is. But eighteen meters was not so harsh. As they neared ten meters, the workmen thought they hit some kind of hard mineral. But after a time they moved on. Past fifteen, to twenty meters. Still no water. Deeper, to thirty, forty, fifty meters. Nothing. An hour or so later they found what they were looking for. As they hit the water there came a sound out of the bowels of earth that could have been from Hell. Deep and haunting was the rumble and silence for a brief moment. Then all Hell broke loose and a force of water shot twenty meters into the air. There was no way to stop the water until the workmen came back to cap it the next morning. When they returned to finish the work, all of the property had been flooded. They indeed had found the joining of the two rivers, not at eighteen meters but at eighty.
When the farmer came around to collect his fee, he was apologetic and didn’t want to accept any money. He felt bad that he had misled the young man and made him drill deeper than he had divined. The young man persuaded the old man to accept his fee, and asked the old man how much it would be. The farmer explained that he had expenses and had to keep his old farm running and had to keep food on the table. This talent that he had was a way for him to subsist. The young man started getting nervous, thinking this was going to cost more than he had imagined or allocated. When the old man asked him for 250 Euros, the wise young man wrote him out a check for 1,000 Euros. Because the old man had miscalculated the depth by four times, the young man also miscalculated by four times when he paid the fee. It seemed a fitting way to repay the man for his “mistake”.
Now the property still carries the Italian name “Re-dried”, but the property has water year round. Swimming pools dot the property and the vines bear luscious fruit which become delicious wines.
If you ever visit Tuscany and are in the area of Greve, please do not hesitate to visit this property. This is a true story and the estate accepts visits off the street. Email me and I will send you the information, when you want to go there.
Lately, when I sit in front of a blank screen with absolutely no idea about what I am going to write about, one word shouts out to me. Dogs. So today I am going to exorcise, pay homage, or do whatever I need to do to get this voice out of my head.
When my son got older than a few months, I’d put him in Aunt Betty’s old Falcon wagon with me and Fifi, and we’d head up into the hills for a walk. This would give his mother some time in the shop to get some work done. My son and I were born within blocks of each other, he in our little California bungalow with a midwife and me in a hospital surrounded by nuns and vineyards. The last I heard, Quentin Tarantino used the forgotten hospital as a set for Kill Bill. It is in an area that was a vineyard for old Los Angeles. On those days when we would head up Eaton Canyon to walk and air out the dog, it was hang time before getting picked by the wine gods to carry on the work that I do.
I believe in some kind of intervention, be it Divine or otherwise ordained by a power larger than all of us. Nature guides and leads us to what we must become and to where we must go in order to express that energy that seethes through our spirit. D.H. Lawrence wrote a poem, called, We Are Transmitters, in which he expressed that idea so beautifully.
How can anyone decide to go into this business and not want to embrace all that it represents from the history of thousands of years of this cycle? How can one not want to squeeze every last ounce of joy from the experience, the gift we have been given to gather and tell stories and open bottles and eat and drink and laugh and love? This sounds so naïve, and that coming from a vet who has been in these trenches for 25 plus years.
The other option is to go through the motions. Don’t answer your phone before 9:00AM or after 4:30PM or during the lunch hour, or when you are otherwise occupied. Don’t engage in the dance of the grape. Don’t wake up. Just lie there in the bed staring at the ceiling waiting for someone to rescue you. From yourself.
A Nor’easter is bearing down on NYC, planes are arriving late and I am packed and ready to catch a 7:00 am flight, right into the middle of the Big Slushy Apple, tomorrow morning. Hopefully, I will get there in time for the events. Importer 
I was really concerned to see folks in the store looking to buy wines, expensive wines, and they were having a hard time finding the wines that correlated with the shelf talker. When I got down and looked with a couple of customers, I even was having a hard time finding the wines. But now it is all in order. That will last about 2 days. It’s really a shame, because the salespeople who just throw a wine in any old place really do a disservice to many people. First, to the consumer, making it hard for them to find the wine. Secondly, to the hard working, never-take-a-vacation store owners, who invest money in product, only to see it be merchandised not in a user-friendly way. Let’s see, we’ll just put an Amarone in the Barolo section, where there is a hole. Or let’s put a Sangiovese in with the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo section. Thirdly, the salesperson is doing a disservice to their employer and their importer and their winemakers, because the wines get lost and all that hard work getting the wine to the front line gets hidden in a bunker, never to see the light of day. It has been like this for as long as I have been in the business, but it really is a primitive problem, one that online retailers don’t have to contend with. And friends of mine, who would rather hunt on-line than in-bins, don’t spend their money on wines we all have worked so hard to get out there.
Now for the wines.
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