There never seems to be enough time for it all. Put a handful of master-somms and an ersatz Italian together and give them 90 minutes to talk about 8 wines? Not enough time for disambiguation. No time for the bang, not even for a whimper. Press on, press on.
There is something exhilarating about being in a room with a set of high energy wine gurus. Rising tide kind of thing. We had two sessions on Italian wines, Italy being a darling of the mutant set of somms currently working their way around the airports and boardrooms of the halls of power in the wine biz. Make no mistake about it folks, the big boys in the industry know what is at stake and they have lined up some of the best and the brightest to sell the message down to the platoon level.
In our sessions, day one (Northern and Central Italy) we had:Moderator: Brian Cronin MS
Panel:
Laura DePasquale MS
Brett Zimmerman MS
Larry O'Brien MS
Joe Spellman MS
Alfonso Cevola CSW
Day two (Southern Italy and the islands) we had:
Moderator David Glancy MS
Panel:
Laura DePasquale MS
Reggie Narito MS
Larry O'Brien MS
Brett Zimmerman MS
Alfonso Cevola CSW
I would love to accompany a couple of these folks on a wine blast through Italy, or anywhere for that matter. Guys like Larry O’ Brian (above) always seem to be working through the wine, constant students of the grape. Brett Zimmerman, working for a small importer, his path on the Italian wine trail, treading and tasting, working his way up that insurmountable mountain we call Italy. How about that new salesperson in the audience looking at this and wondering how they’ll be able to get to base camp? I’m telling you, sons and daughters, we’re all trying to get to base camp. And on to the ascent.
Teaser: The article in the latest Sommelier Journal from my last trip to Piemonte just a little avvinare (taste). Subscribe and support David Vogels valiant effort to bring intelligent writing about wine to the young sommeliers and all the rest of us.On one of our sessions, The Central Italy part, we had two wines from Tuscany. I hadn’t realized it until I tasted the wines but there was some thread of similarity, even though the two wines were as different as concrete and balsa wood. The wines, Castello dei Rampolla’s Chianti Classico 2004 and the Argiano Solengo 2004, both had the imprimatur of Giacomo Tachis, albeit from a now historical whisper. Time, time, bang, bang, whimper, whimper.
The Rampolla spoke to me in a simple, pure and direct way. The spirit of the place, Panzano, was erect and present. Wild horses tied to a wagon heading towards a sunset on the coast, in no particular hurry. Gorgeous, golden, wild, velvet, young-first-love-Michele-in-1965. Holy mother of God, how did they do this?
The Argiano, with those gypsy grapes of Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah (aren’t these the grapes that could get a winemaker in trouble in Montalcino?), preening and prancing about the glass. “Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain.” I’m at a loess for words. I don’t want to like this wine, want to prefer the Sangiovese in purezza. But the two wines have this astral thread that connects them. Is it the Dali Lama of Italy, Tachis, from his cave in Sardegna, sending out his influence over the waves, out-Milarepa-ing Milarepa?
Soil, servitude and the fortune of territoriality. Two wines, two apparently different styles. Our house is a very fine house, with two cats in the yard. Dottore Tachis, now everything is easy ‘cause of you.And this is the way the week ends. Not with a bang, but a conga line.
written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy
Photos courtesy of Texas Sommelier Conference 2008
Some time back, when I was invited to Sicily to evaluate several vineyard projects, a few of us were sitting around the midnight table with passito and amaro. Next thing you know, we grabbed a few hours of sleep and then piled in a large van and headed towards the volcano. It was our homage to Burning Man, and what was waiting for us wasn’t what we had expected.
Forget the Euro and the price of oil, the mergers and strategic joint adventures; let us plunge back through the pinhole of reality. Italy, vineyards, grapes, fresh food. The life you’ve dreamed.
Abruzzo in the summer of 2008 is looking like the archetypical pastoral Italy of the 1970’s, the 1740’s, of hundreds or thousands of years ago, or sometime in the future. It is timeless beauty. There’s no reason to shun it or criticize those who love it for its own sake. Look, even if you never make it to Italy, you can still reap the joys of the harvest of the heart. The fool in the corner is kicking a cat and spitting out blood, and then expects us to revere his bleak judgments, because it is contrary and has a gravitas that is attention seeking. But the blind old man is living alone in his tree house in a sunless country. Look around you, sunflowers don’t grow in hell.
Do you ever wonder, if you are somehow involved in the world of wine, whether it be in a restaurant or a wine store, or as a salesperson in a distributorship or as a rep for an importer, why sometimes the wine runs out?
The wine will come when it comes, just like the tomatoes and the figs. If not, there is a McDonald’s down the avenue. 
“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.” Another Thoreau insight. Italy is full of the meat of life, filled with the marrow of passion, grab a rib and hold on. There is only one life; there is no time left to kill.
August 10, 2008
It started last week as I visited a group of restaurants. Here in North Texas it is restaurant week, a two to three week period in which selected restaurants dream up a three to four course menu, some of the proceeds going to a charity. Diners flock to these places, in the hope of getting a taste of a life they don’t normally frequent. Salespeople for distributors have been scrambling to print special food menus and to also reprint wine lists. Some of the wine lists will show higher wine prices.
But does it really matter? We have countries going to war with each other, does it really mean anything if some poor slug in a bedroom community spends a little more than he should for a bottle of wine? So he pays $20 more than he should. He drives 30 miles less than he would if he drove into town with his gas-hog SUV, which gets 12mpg. Which works out, at $4 a gallon, to saving him about $10 in gas. And then there’s the time factor. So when countries across the planet are sending their citizens out and away from targeted urban areas to escape destruction of life, it really isn’t that big of a deal.
I mention this to a friend and colleague, who is also a mid-level manager. Forget about talking to the bar manager about this; they do not want to hear about anything that has to do with them making lesser margins, in percentage points. Bean counters don't want to hear it. Forget about the argument that you take dollars to the bank, not percentages. Forget the concept of getting good press for marking up your wine and then having the word spread. Forget about taking more money to the bank. And then folk wonder why so many places across the country are closing? Ask Charles Darwin.
The feel good part to this story? When you go to Italy and buy that same bottle of wine in a trattoria, you’ll probably pay somewhere around €12, which is under $20. See, the dollar doesn’t really suck as bad in Italy as it does in the US. And you’ll probably get charged somewhere around €50 (US $75) for dinner for two. So you get out for under $100. In a similar situation in Anytown, USA with the wine costing $66 and two people eating for around $50 each plus tip, you’re looking at almost $200. And the food will probably better fresher, simpler and better at the place in Italy. Now doesn’t that make you feel better?
It almost makes taking a vacation a cheaper thing to do than to just stay home. But then, home is where the work is, and the family, the life, etc.
And when another Italian restaurant closes in my town, I will not mourn its loss. All the more if they never listened to me about which wines to use and whether or not to employ fair pricing. Natural selection, the survival of the fittest.
But googootz thrives in the old Italian neighborhoods, one the East coast, up in Chicago, down here in Texas, and especially in 
Women love to grow and pick googootz. The older ones even know how to cook it. My Nonna’s knew how to. My mom used to cook it for my dad and us kids. My mom’s recipe was good. It seems that everybody’s mom has a special recipe.
Some of those old Italians just loved to see how long it could get. They have contests in Canada to grow them at unbelievable lengths.
The plants take over the yard. And then they produce the fruit and they really go to town. I mean, before it’s over everybody is giving the stuff away. A little goes a long way.
The Northern Italians sometimes make fun of the Southerners love for cucuzza. I don’t know why, I think they just like to find anything they can to make fun of them. Kind of the way the old schoolers from the East Coast would taunt those who lived in the Southern states of the USA. Just plain ‘ol ignorance, manifestations of archetypical pathology. Probably don’t like accordions either.
I have been thinking about pain lately. Pain as pleasure. Pain as remembrance. Pain as ennoblement. It can double one over on a regular basis if it is sharp enough. It can recall moments from the past that never go away, never heal. It can remind one that all this is fleeting and transitory, this earthly shell, this carnal cage. And yet, we press on, we scrape and bite and scratch our way toward making sense of some thing in order to give these few moments a sense of meaning, a reason for being.
What ever one finds on the trail, wine will never be enough. But without wine, the pain could be unbearable. Sounds like something one might find in the writing of a desperate visionary from the late 1800’s? Perhaps. Maybe from a solitary soul sitting at his favorite restaurant in Palermo after WWII, working on his only book. Never to be published in his lifetime.
First of all he would see his children, and many others’ children, scarring themselves with elaborate decoration. His precious glass of wine, the one that he drinks everyday, that un quarto of vino bianco, might be a little brighter, a little lighter, a little merrier. Not so morosely introspective, so muddled, so flaccid. Pain as release from burdensome memory. Grillo gone girly.
His beloved trio of reds, Barolo, Brunello and Amarone, might appear a bit different after their last Crusade. Barolo will be leaner, more erect and youthful. Brunello would now pose as the standard bearer, the model of virtuous deportment. And Amarone will have lost his baby fat, not so sweet and lovable now, the campaigns have leaned him out and made him self aware and solemn.
One bright light in his fairy tree might be the white wines of the Northeast. Lithe and hopeful, not without having lost a little of their youthful innocence, but still hopeful in the anticipation of purity and promise. Fifty years have wrestled the fairy princess from the shackles of the grave Teutonic sentinel. Fifty years have produced lightness and a Lolita-like twinge from a high acid and sharp fruit profile.
Over in Barbarossa land, he might witness a still brooding range of reds, from Basilicata to Puglia, but he would also see that the lord of the manor had been wrestled to the ground and is now a servant prince. The price to pay for dominance can often be to serve. While wines to the north queue up for tankers filled with the golden rich sunshine of the red wines from the South, no one bothers to accuse those in the South of adulterating their wine with the thinner, weaker reds from Tuscany or Piemonte. And why bother? Barbarossa knew where to conquer and to be conquered in like. The pain of domination and a region ascends into a world that for thousands of years thought little of their Southern cousins.
Not one to gamble, except in matters of the heart, the old writer peered once again over his glass of wine and looks into the abyss. Staring back in a vacuous manner was an unkempt little tramp, Soave. Back in the day, the little white wine from the Veneto would be seen in a few restaurants in Palermo and would be seen with the various antipasti making their way in the bars of the Charleston. Nowadays, how would he feel about the stylish little osteria near his home, I Vespri, in the Palazzo Cagni of his family homestead? Instead of a solitary offering of Bolla, he could find the various bottlings of Tamellini, Inama and Pieropan. Not a huge gamble, no big stakes, but something gained, something won from the last fifty years.
