I started out to write about a trip I took to Galveston, and a wine that changed my life, the 1964 Monfortino. But as often happens when I am gathering my images, a sign appears and we are on another road to Alba.It happened once, many moons ago; we were on our way there by way of Novara. They make wine from Nebbiolo grapes there as well, and we were going to visit a tartufaio, or truffle hunter. He was a round, jolly man and we met him in a local cantina.
OK, I cannot go any further until I get this little piece of business taken care of. A colleague handed me the latest Wine Advocate and asked me if we had any wines in there. There were some pages about the 2004 Barolo inside and he wanted to know if we had any offering available. I scanned quickly and saw so many of the usual names, when I came to Giacosa. The Rocche del Falletto 2004 had been given a 99. I remarked to my colleague that the 2004 Giacosa was in there but we still had some 2001 and 2003 available. But at US $180 plus (I don’t even want to think about the 2004 price) it and all of those highly rated wines have become a trophies for people who aren’t in the wine business.
I walked into my little wine room to talk it over with the bottles inside. Many of the wines have been there for some time and so the spirits of the winemakers frequently hover and we have this little chat about the state of things as they are now. Luigi Pira sits on the shelf with an ancient bottle of d'Yquem, while an expired bottle of Marylyn Monroe’s Chardonnay lingers and livens up the bin with her sad little smile. So much tragedy on that row between Pira and Monroe, forget that in 1959 d'Yquem was just happy to get a harvest after the disasters of 1956, 1957 and the lackluster 1958. Pira, it had been said, was depressed and 1980, a harvest of misery, was the coup de grâce.So what is the use of a score unless there is some music that comes from it? If I hear another winemaker tell me what Parker gave his wine, what am I gonna do? Nothing. But I sure would like a way to tell them, abbastanza, I am not the person who will or can buy the 95 point wine anymore. I only can afford wine made by dead people.
Take that 1974 VINO VINO VINO VINO, bottled to commemorate the 20th harvest of the Cantine Sociale dei Colli Novaresi. Signed by the contributing growers, what pride they show in their signatures. A 90 point wine, then? Who cares? Most of them are dead and rid of us, but that little US$7 bottle of wine lives on.
Luciano de Giacomi of Cascine Drago was a hard crust of a man. But he had a soft, warm inside. The archetypical serious Italian, and the founder of the Order of the Knights of the Truffle and Wines of Alba. He was over educated for the world he found himself in. But there he was, in his cellar with his factor, Barone Armando de Rham, taking new wine out of old barrels to teach the young acolytes about Nebbiolo. I remember more from that afternoon than from a month of reading reviews. In fact I remember nothing from reading reviews. Niente.All I want is the music inside the bottle. I don’t want to know that your winery is carbon neutral, but you take your private jet to France every year to pick French barrels, which you replace yearly. That's not a carbon-neutral imprint, that's a McMansion floor plan. What kind of shadow does this cast? It's the Hummer school of wine, and they have the big, bad wine reviews to gas them up and send them scurrying from city to city, recanting their narcissistic-cum-artisanal stories of how great they are. Huh?
That's not how the old dead guys taught me in Italy. We went to lunch, yes, and without cell phones. So maybe, once in a while we headed down little dirt roads in fast Maseratis, but all with respect to the localita’ of it all.
What did they do to me? Did they turn me into the mean old men they were? Or did they inoculate me with their un-steroided Nebbiolo? Delicate? Yes. Light in color and not ashamed of it? Yes. And if we had Dolcetto, it tasted and cost like Dolcetto, not some œuvre-oaked, muscle-ripped, winner-take-all winegasm, for the 1% who can afford it.Yeah, I've gone deep-end-of-the-road on this one. You know the one, it’s a little out of town, and on the right there is this little cemetery filled with the souls of winemaking past. And from time to time they “call” on me to ask how things are going these days.
And I tell them, at my house, it goes well. As do their wines.
Buon Anima ~ Luciano e Armando
This week I came roaring out of debt-free status, after five years. For that time I felt like a millionaire, insofar as I had nothing hanging over me. But opportunity called and the timing was right. So I signed a loan to buy a condo as an investment. No big deal, compared to what folks have to do to buy a place in NY or San Francisco.
Tonight in North Texas is getting a might cool. Nothing like Minneapolis or Sondrio, but we’re in the thick of it for all that we’re used to. The new harvest is deep in the core of the earth, slowly emerging. The bees have disappeared from the tree in front of the house. Even the pitiful old black cat is scarce in these times. Squirrels are a bit cranky, it’s like they have entered some period of collective insanity. They peer over brittle branches and shout their staccato insults at invisible dogs and peacocks. Poor things.
Valentino said farewell in Paris. If he hadn’t, the hook was there in the wings, ready to pull him off. There they were, telling those around him that his day was done, his time had passed. Fast forward 25 years and they will feel the chill from the metal synch. Be it Milan or the ancient vineyards of Chaldea, 3,000 years ago or 200 years from now, one's time is brief and then it is time for the new bees to appear. Nothing to feel superior about, it’s merely a cycle that is more dominant than man. It binds us to the earth in the wine business, because we must follow the cycle and be in symbiosis with it.
Last week Matteo Bisol was telling some folks about the vineyards of Cartizze. In case you’d like to see a picture of Cartizze, some of the most expensive vineyard real estate in the world, here is a picture I took four years ago with Sergio Mionetto. It is not so manicured like the first growths of Bordeaux, but the land here is more suitable for grapes than for great chateaux. The people on these steep hills are a simple, rustic folk. They don’t wear tuxedos or stiletto heels. The tree reminds me of a tree I saw on the freeway today. How is it decided that one tree gets to live in this beautiful hillside and another gets to live on the side of a freeway?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
