After a few days in the rarified air of Marfa, Texas, I have had a few moments to do a little navel gazing. Take this one or leave it, as it applies to you. Or doesn’t. That being said, don’t we all have, at one time or another, moments where we look around our environment and notice the world that we have landed in and ask ourselves if this is what we intended to do? 
Mind you, this isn’t a crisis post. I’m not telegraphing back to home base that I won’t be returning. Well, maybe a part of me won’t ever be back. But every time I get on the wine trail a part of me is left behind and a newer segment grows in its place.
One of the fascinating aspects of being in Marfa during the run up to the Chinati Foundation annual hoe-down, is this congregating of intellectual and artistic energy that appears to have broken away from the bubble of the everyday reality we all seem to get trapped in. The Dow drops to 8500? Where is the wine for the governor’s dinner? 159,000 jobs lost? An installation for an artist is previewing in the desert today. The G7 is meeting in emergency session with the IMF? Artist Eugene Binder on the main street is moving his three vintage Porsche Speedsters out of his gallery so he can make room for the folks coming to town.After a visit to a handful of accounts ( El Cheapo, Pizza Foundation and the Thunderbird Lounge) we headed out to Alpine, Marathon and Midland. In Marfa I had been invited to “curate” a wine list for one of the local patrons, who also are big wine fans. They are also looking at a property in Montalcino to invest in, land and a winery. The wine trail winds and turns and points towards many destinations.
This week I had a Carbonara that folks anywhere would be proud of. Pizza that merited a second piece. Restaurants like Cochineal and Maiya's, with a passion for food and wine. And saw a love for Italian wine from the artists and intellectuals of a small west Texas town that I could only wish larger urban areas would aspire to. Go figure.
Maybe it is something about the confluence of a zone that attracts art and intellect that also is amenable to things Italian? I know this to be the case all over Italy, maybe Marfa is a vortex that squeezes a drop of Italy onto the canvas and exposes the native energy to the ancient? Or maybe I am just a kook?Lesson learned this week: Do what you love, even if you don’t sometimes know why you do it or even what it is.
Repeat as needed.
Repeat as needed.
Repeat as needed.
I’ll keep this one short, the sun is rising, and we have many miles to cover in these next few days.
The terroir of Marfa.
There is an oasis of chefs and food lovers, from Marathon to Terlingua to Marfa, and this is my annual check-up to make sure they get all the Italian wine they will need for the winter months.
As with many places in Texas there is a recognizable effect of the terroir on the people who live and come to live in these places. There is a concentration of energy that is brought to the surface slowly, like the thousands of oil wells that populate the territory. Pumping slowly, constantly, until every last drop is captured.
I like the mixing of terroir, from a bottle of wine, to a bowl of garden fresh vegetables, to a table of folks from all over the world, sharing wine and food and ideas. Terroir as a global force, uniting. Ok, so I’m getting pensive.
I feel soiled. I was just going in to break bread with old and new colleagues, nothing too earth shattering.
I was sitting with the CEO of a major import company, with his managers arranged around the table with our people. The CEO, in the business for 40 or so years, told a story of a mid-western retailer that they had opted-out of doing business with. Seemed it was cheaper to not do business with them than to bow to their unusual demands and slotting fees. After a few years the retailer wanted the CEO to take a meeting with him so they could discuss their future business. Now, the CEO can tell a pretty good story and he told it like this.
“So I go into this office with this big shot retailer, who thinks he’s the only game in town, and it was a big town. And these guys were used to getting their way. This was a city that had very few rules, and the way to do business in this place hadn’t changed since before prohibition. Someone always had their hand in your pocket, it was just a matter of how deep you’d let them go. I look at this retailer and I ask him why he called this meeting. He looks me over, a cigar in the corner of his mouth, and tells me it was time for my company to make retribution and restitution. He figures he lost so much money not doing business with us and he has it figured out to the dime. This galumph wants me to hand him a wad of money, thousands and thousands of dollars, to be able to get back in the ring. That was the retribution part. Then, if I go along with that he would be expecting me to come up with, in addition to that, more dough to sweeten the pot on going forward in the future with him on the deals. That was the restitution part. I gotta tell you, I was flabbergasted that this guy had the stones to think he could dictate the terms to me. After all, I come from a big city too, bigger than his g
All that and a crappy plate of spaghetti al pomodoro? Say, it ain’t so, Joe.
It’s not that hard. Last month, all over Italy, we didn’t have a bad meal. From the little buco of an osteria in Rome to the one star Michelin in the Maremma. People in Italy have a higher regard for their palates and they have developed a higher sense of taste and more specifically, the quality of taste, and have higher expectations.
Perhaps one of the reasons is that cooking at home in Italy is at a very high level, and for the restaurant in Italy to survive, they have to meet or exceed the standards of the home kitchen. Here in the US, while it is changing, the home kitchen still hasn’t developed so evenly. In recent years, it has slid backwards in many households with pre-made foods invading the freezer and the microwave substituting for the range and the hearth.
But a simple bowl of pasta, how in the name of Mary can they screw it up here so often?
About ten years ago in another city I had a winemaker and his family in town. We were supposed to do a winemaker dinner, but the restaurant didn’t promote it. So the owner, said, no problem, he’d invite a few friends and we’d all have dinner. And we did, about 12 of us. At the end of the night they presented to the winemaker a bill for $1700, including the meal of the owner, his wife and their friends. Even charged them full mark-up for the wine, which was “donated”. Or maybe that was restitution for all these years of supplying well made, honest wine to the restaurateur? I haven’t spent a penny in that place since then.
Looking around at America and the Western World, I have to wonder if this economic crisis doesn’t stem from a personal vacuity that seeks to fill the void with things; money, fame; recognition, or just being the one on the top of the dunghill. It’s too simple to just call it greed, because it is also ignorance, and lack of respect for one’s livelihood and one’s community.
And then we wonder why the young ones walk around with their cell phones, texting invisible friends instead of interacting with the world in front of them. Or maybe, is it just an instinctual repudiation of an industry that no longer has a valid place in their, or our, world?
There are so many things that we all take for granted, from our jobs and our place in life, to our health and our age. When you’re 20, you’ve been young all your life and there is nothing to tell you that it won’t be like that all your days. When you’re 40, you begin to feel little pains, and start getting some of those big-life experiences that reshape what was once recognizable and predictable. Sixty comes close and, who knows what is coming? One thing for sure, change will come.
20 years ago on a trip to Genoa, outside my hotel was a spot where young kids would go to shoot up heroin. I was staying at a four star hotel and it wasn’t in a bad part of town. That was just what was on the menu in those days for young folks living in a port. I would see hundreds of used needles on the ground, and the hollowed out faces of kids, their expressions blown out from the intensity of the drug they had just injected.
Driving in the countryside on the way to one of the wineries, we joke about the highway being the United Nations for hookers, because you see women from many countries standing on the side of the road at all hours of the day, soliciting for sex. A few years ago there were more Ukrainians and Albanians. Now there are all manner of African women. Years and years ago it was home grown Italian women from the south.
What does this have to do with wine? Or at least a wine blog? I cannot answer that. And while I am at it, I have been thinking about wine blogging. I am not all that interested in wine blogging. Folks stare out into their screens with their tasting notes and their wishes and their hopes and they pour them out and we are all supposed to drop everything we are doing to read someone’s blog? I have had too many people tell me lately that they can’t and they don’t care to keep up with wine blogs. I understand. For sure, I am not interested in mommy blogs about wine; don’t care what they ate during their trip to Cancun. And those existential quandaries that I have been sent lately by friends of bloggers, people who think I’d like to know about their crisis in Chieti. And so it probably goes with many of my ramblings as well.
I have been thinking for some time about cutting back or at least giving folks a breather, time to catch up with all these posts. But that would assume there are all kinds of folks laboring through these thrice weekly posts as though it were the NY Times or the BBC. They better not be.
Italy has been that way with travelers, letting them establish their own pace when exploring all that the country has. There is always that next village on the hill, the remote vineyard in a faraway region, a dish made at a little unmarked osteria near a seaside that draws one back.
There are those magical places that make a wonderful wine weekend destinations. The combination of 
The ride from L’Andana in Castiglione della Pescaia to the Petra estate near Suvereto is a pleasant 45 minute saunter up the coast. My travel companion and I easily slipped into a California state of mind. And this is not to diminish anything that Tuscany and the Maremma has to offer; it is simply lagniappe for the wine traveler.
We are in a time when the fruits are all ripe and dripping their honey. Fig trees droop from the weight of their bounty and the grapes weigh the vines down, waiting for their appointment with the portable guillotines, those hand held harvesters that pick the clusters and send them to their miracle moments.
Much has been 
Beautiful land, olives and grapes, wheat and figs. Merlot has a wonderful summer home here. As we arrived in mid September, the Merlot had already been brought in at Petra. What we sampled was still fruit juice, but it was bright and rich and healthy. Like we all want to be, no?
Petra has a cellar and sometimes dining area that has been hewn out of the rock underneath the vineyards. It reminds me of Sinsky or many other Silverado Trail showcase wineries. Still a fairly small production, at this point just about 25,000 cases of wine. Smaller than Chateau Lafite. I hesitate to put down my tasting notes here, as they will be needed for an article in Sommelier Journal. In any event, most folks don’t come to On The Wine Trail in Italy for tasting notes. Or gossip. I’ll leave that to those who are better and more interested in those things.
I am pretty knocked out about the mineraly-stony thing going on under the vines at Petra. Some pictures show an other-worldly aspect to this ancient craft.
We had been told to expect lunch. What I hadn’t expected was this wonderful woman who prepared a simple meal with many fresh vegetables from the Petra garden. As we ate we could look out onto the garden where much of our lunch came from. Zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, grapes. A little porchetta, not too much, just enough to show off the wines. Especially the Merlot.
Folks who know me are aware that Merlot, like Chardonnay, doesn’t thrill me. Except when it comes from areas that I think they should come from. Merlot from the right bank, Chardonnay from the Côte d'Or. That kind of thing.
I am intrigued by the interest by French winemakers in this area. And Merlot, while resembling more their California cousins than their Pomerol ones, still has a liveliness and an appealing quality. Ok, so I can learn to love Merlot from Italy too.
Just as long as I also get to enjoy it in a rustic pie at the end of a meal during the 2008 harvest, on the wine trail in Italy.
Sunday was a quiet time on the SS1 and once we passed Montalto di Castro my partner in crime started getting hunger pains. The night before we had gone to a little trattoria and had our second on many Last Suppers, but it was a new day, a little rain was starting to fall and there you have it, time for pranzo.
We took a table opposite a large picture window and watched the rain float, then strike the outer world. But we were safe inside the little lunch room, and thirsty. I asked the waiter for a good local wine and he recommended a fresh white from nearby Pitigliano. It had been years since I had thought about the Bianco from Pitigliano, when I once brought in a 20 foot container of the stuff for a Jewish client who had an Italian café and retail store. He loved the stuff and sold the hell out of it. I remember it was light and dry and crisp and it reminded me of the Trebbiano from Abruzzo that we drank so much of in those days.
For now, it was Sunday afternoon and the Pitigliano was still cheap and cheerful. The owner had opened the picture window and a cool,fresh salty-rain breeze washed over us. And with a platter of fresh fritto misto from the nearby waters, maybe a little plate of fresh tomatoes and mozzarella, a small dish or two of zucchini and patate, was there a more wonderful way to spend an afternoon anywhere on earth?
As we neared Castiglione della Pescaia, our she-devil navigator steered us onto a side road towards La Badiola, where L’Andana was waiting for the fortunate ones who were destined to stay within here pampered walls. It was just like we had seen on the website, except that Alain Ducasse had long left the place to his trusted surrogates.
