Arghh, it's drivin' me nuts
This week I've been in Austinopoli setting up future wine events and working around a few sale calls. John Roegnik and the Austin Wine Merchant folks hosted an Italian wine event, which gave me the opportunity to chat with the local wine lovers about some wines near and dear to me. Along the way I picked up a couple of wines to taste. French wines. When John asked the next day after I had had the wines (Chignard Fleurie Les Moriers 2006 and Domaine du Grand Montmirail Gigondas 2006) how I liked them, my answer, most innocently, was “John, I liked them so much when I was drinking them I didn’t remember to think they were French.” My way of saying they fit so well into what I like to drink (normally, but not always, Italian) I wasn’t distracted by where they came from and thoroughly enjoyed them with the family. And yes, Alice, we had them with a meatless meal of fresh ravioli with an impromptu pesto sauce (made by yours truly) and a whopping good salad by the young lion(Ace's son). Anna ( the S.O.'s daughter) prepared the ravioli and the bruschetta. So anyone who says you need to eat meat to enjoy red wine is deluded.
TLJ, Bubba'ing up for some Bubbly
Yesterday there was a Big Reds and Bubbles wine geek event at the Driskill Hotel. I was red wined out, so I went into the P.Diddy room to try some of the grand marques. We quickly renamed it the Tommy Lee Jones room, as SJ declined to show and TLJ did make a very low-key appearance, sans bodyguards. Austin is like that.
Some of the wines tasted this week:
• Donna Marzia Malvasia Bianca
• Cusumano Benuara
• Rampolla Chianti Classico 2004
• Giacosa Dolcetto 2007
• Mastroberardino Taurasi Radici 2004
• Chignard Fleurie Les Moriers 2006
• Domaine du Grand Montmirail Gigondas 2006
• Krug Brut
• Roederer Cristal 2002
• Dom Perignon 1999
• Dom Ruinart Blanc des Blancs
• Pommery Cuvee Louise 1998
• Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 1998
Wines on the docket for the weekend
• Jacques Selosse Initial
• Movia Puro
The cellar has just been reorganized, so...
• Mouton 1990
• Monfortino 1968
...and we shall see.
There you have it, my weekend mamma mia blog update.
One more thing. On the wine trail in Italy, after almost three years of posting, religiously, every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, will soon go to every Thursday and Sunday. Three new projects will need time, so the only way to juggle it will be to post twice a week instead of three times. Most folks tell me they can’t keep up anyway.
I am starting a new project with some Asian producers of sake that I’d like to spend more time getting into. We have a new blog getting ready to blast open, of which I will be driving around the corporate universe. Imagine, getting paid to blog, after only three years. Anyway this is going to be huge and will cover wines and spirits from all over. More on that when we go online. It will have an easy to remember killer-name.
And lastly, more time to spend on book projects. So thanks to all who liked the three day a week posts. There are always the archives, if you really start having withdrawal symptoms (not).
Thanks for stopping by. Back on Sunday.
Not some of the wines enjoyed this week
Not good news from the front lines of the selling game. From what I am seeing, getting to the end of the year unscathed will be highly uncertain. We’re in the thick of things now, the deep trough, the slog through the sludge. Forget about keeping your mukluks sparkly clean, we’re going into the uncharted terroir of the slime. And it ain’t autochthonous. Or archetypical.
Funny how wine geeks love to talk about the feel of the soil. But when it gets soggy and tracks through the house, folks be singing another tune. Until the end of the year, the wine business is joining the rest of the economy in just getting through these days.
I feel for a friend, who has recently taken the leap to import and self distribute, with containers just showing up. Unknown wines in a time when even things known have slowed down. This is not a good time to be exposed to the elements of the downturn. It’s going to take a lot of street beating, wearing out some of the old shoe leather. Forget about chasing maidens around the primordial ooze.
So the fancy Beatle boots of the dandy salesman, like the three martini lunch, is a sullied white elephant in today’s climate.
Maybe a drill sergeant’s pair of boots would be more suitable for the combat in the streets, Main or Wall. The situation on the ground calls for a little less speculation (and editing of the fantasy-dream sequence) and a little more real time pounding of the concrete. What some of the old bull elephants in the selling game call getting out of the mud bath and trudging into the village. Stay tuned.
When did the search for the Shangri-La of wine go so off track? The history of Italian wine shows us that it was built up over the ages by the monastics, who took care to keep the light burning through some dark and dreary days. Nothing so glamorous then, working the fields in the dark, at 4:00 AM in the biting cold. Year after year. With no love, save the Divine Love, to keep the solitary worker in the field, hopeful for a better day. Hope and faith. Not arrogance.
I went through a wine collection yesterday, one that has been in the works for 30 years. In it many of the bottles were created by people that are long gone. Some of the newer wines, one in particular, A Super Tuscan from a producer in Montalcino, struck me. I don’t know what the owner will do with the wine. It has too much power to be enjoyed. It’s too noisy, wants to lead but doesn’t really need a partner to dance with. I’d say to put it in the ‘drink now’ bin, but I’m not sure it will ever be ready to drink.
Whether it is Tuscany or Campania, Sicily or Friuli, Italian wines are at a crossroads. They have fashioned themselves to be these worldly wines in a universe of other worldly wines, all competing for the attention of the same buyer. And those buyers are looking for the next big thing, whether it is an Ovid from Napa or a Mollydooker or God knows what. Why? When did Ferrari seek to emulate General Motors? Or Ducati chase after Harley Davidson? Still, Italian wine chases after the Shangri La wine crowd.
And if the Italian wine succeeds in becoming the king pin of all wines, then what? Defending a territory that for all purposes doesn’t exist in Italy? That would be the fitting punishment for succeeding in looking away from all that is unique and indigenously wonderful in many of the wines of Italy. It’s not too late to turn back, some of the young winemakers have looked beyond marketing and their Upper West Side flats to embrace their soil. Not glam, but sans arrogance. We can only hope. And work to help those who see this as a time to return to their winemaking as an act of selflessness and true vocation. Sounds almost ecclesiastic. Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?
My friend Hank Rossi and his wife Phillissa just returned from a two month nomadic trip across Europe, their 
Years ago I had a sculpture teacher in Silicon Valley whose father-in-law was Carlo Rossi. We used to go up to the prof’s house in San Francisco because his wife cooked for us (and she was real pretty), and we always had an endless supply of wine. It was cool.
The Cabernet Couch, just the spot to do some vertical (or horizontal) tastings
So here we are again, the harvest is completed and the new wine is in the barrel. Once more the cycle begins anew, a sequence which we in the wine business live to develop and enjoy. Already we are hearing talk about the miraculous victory of the return, the gathering of the century, the harvest of hope. The bringing in of a new dawn, the hope of a new age.
Today in a little trattoria; a rather immense man, with an even larger ego, walks in and proceeds to sit in the table next to me and my lunch companion, an old pro who has seen it all. This large man is a small distributor and he knows not of the code of professional regard. All the wine in his beat up 30' by 70' stockroom is a small insignificant corner of a warehouse somewhere in the Midwest, forgotten by time or care. But as he has not trodden the path of the ancients, his malfeasance is to ignore the history of his trade and mock those who have paved the Via Appia so that he may pretend to be in the company of those who really give a crap.
Today I saw a group of college students as they were being taken on a tour of one of the big warehouses, in for a little recruitment into our multi-thousand year old trade. How I’d love to have five minutes with them. But since I haven’t been asked, wait, this is my wine blog, I can take five minutes. Or ten.
If you are looking for a place to get a free drink on a Friday morning, you’ve come to the right place. But if you have alcoholic tendencies, this place could be worse than Gitmo for you.
Well, let me tell you. Because I was once there on the outside-looking in. I really didn’t know what to do with my life. I had graduated from a private university and the economy was in the tank. Gas prices were high, home values were crashing, the stock market was a mess and American cars were the pits. But I remember the times I’d drive up Highway 29 in Napa and think what a wonderful little place that was. Or I’d think about the grapes I had picked in Calabria and thought how special it was to sit in a cellar at night with a bunch of cousins who I didn’t understand and they surely didn’t understand me. But after a bottle or two of wine in that musty, balmy old place, a miracle occurred. We started understanding each other. Our global village was born there and to this day I have been under the influence of a power greater than anything I could ever imagine or take credit for creating. In a phrase, I found my place. I belonged. And that gave my life meaning. Greater than the $100 million bucks one of my sad relatives probably just lost. Greater than the fame my college friend Tony once had, a friend who can no longer find it in him to return a phone call from one of his friends before he became famous ( him, not his friend). I am having a Lou Gehrig moment, and I have it often in this crazy old wine business.
Oh, one other thing – find a specialty, be it Port or Bordeaux or naturally made wine or the wines of Campania, just find a way to be seen as having a special niche. And don’t forget to love all the other wines too, for they are all part of the same energy and deserve your respect and honor.
Do that and your “career” will take you anywhere you want to go. And before you know it, you will have been in it for some time and you’ll be walking down a corridor and pass by a group of young folks on the outside looking to get in. And then the large cycle will have made its rounds and you’ll be part of the elite group of folks, from Chaldea in 1000 B.C to Suvereto in 2008.
Yesterday, at an event for the local farmers and winemakers, there were a few Texas wines at the tables. One particularly appealed, insofar as it corresponded with what I have been thinking about in terms of what American terroir is.
It started with thoughts about California terroir (where I lived for half my life, growing up there) and feeling something in my environment before I knew the terms. In those many trips from Southern to Northern California going back to school and stopping in Templeton or Paso Robles, Gilroy or the many little vineyard plots along the way, I would taste a Zinfandel or a Charbono and note something that seemed oddly familiar. Something I couldn’t quite pinpoint. But it was concrete. Real.
I know there are critics who think "California wine" is big and bold and ripe and, well, immense. And other than those creeping levels of alcohol, I really am having a hard time understanding what their frame of reference is. Certainly not from growing up drinking the wines of Italy. Or France. Or Virginia, for that matter.
Yesterday, I also went into a natural foods café and ordered a glass of carrot and celery juice. As I was drinking it, I was really enjoying the earthiness of the carrots, the nervous edge of the celery. It was a perfect drink, and it had tons of terroir from the organically grown produce. A chap behind the counter said I should try it next time with a little apple juice. As I was walking outside in what seemed like a perfect California day (in Texas) I thought to myself, “That would make it fruity.” I didn’t want more fruit. I enjoyed the balance of the fruit with the muddiness of the carrots and the salty-spicy green quality of the celery. It didn’t need to be manipulated with sugar from the apples to make it more pleasurable.
Take a handsome woman. Or man. Lets say someone from Croatia. Or Louisiana. In their natural state, some of us prefer that to a more enhanced look. Some like breasts that aren’t enormously out of proportion. Or lips that don’t look like that got into a fight with Sugar Ray Leonard. Muscles that look healthy, but not menacing. Many of us like wine like that.
I think California gets a bad rap. From folks who think they know what California wine is. And from winemakers who have mistaken their winemaking hats with their deity hats. I know when I talk to some of my winemaker friends like Robert Pellegrini, how they seethe when people try to reinvent "California wine", as if with one swipe of the sword it can all be commandeered. In the meantime, folks like him have their wines downgraded by the critics in favor of more voluptuous wines with a hedonistic bent. Pave paradise to put up a parking lot. And a tram.
I hear you, Bob. I too, remember the promise of California. And that seems to be a forgotten promise in today’s menagerie of players along the coast, from the numb and number corporate-crunching wine machines to the post-mid-life crisis wine lifestyle gazillionares.
And as America seems to be at a turning point, wouldn’t it be a great time for all of us to put down our preconceptions about what we think California wine is, or should be, and just “let the sunshine in?”
It doesn’t seem like eight years has passed since we entered the new millennium in 2001, but it has. It was the beginning of a very difficult time; my wife Liz passed away in Feb 2001, the political process started to change and the world changed with it. September 11 showed up on the world’s doorstep, and many of us have been taking it one day at a time, hoping for better days to come.
Ever since the time I attempted to simultaneously sell a Tuscan Novello and a Vernaccia di Serrapatrona, that would have been about this time in 1984, I have wondered why Italian wines chose me. Not just me, but for some of the hard stuff, I sure have had my share of those assignments. Driving around with a delivery van full of baby Sangiovese alongside a quirky, dry, foamy red wine made by a madman in the hills of the Marche. What was I thinking then? Even now it sounds bizarre. Don Quixote, only this time we weren’t looking for windmills. We were looking for space stations for these special travelers. And in honor of those two wines, in the 2001 of our little story here, we have an homage: Novello Di Ascoli, a modern wine about 
Chianti: 2001 was a little project that went beyond Chianti 2000. I’m not sure if people realize the first Italian in space was Sangiovese. A little known experiment resulted in growing and harvesting the grapes aboard the International space station. Limited release, only about 20 cases, hydroponically grown. It was intended to test the ideas of extra-terroirestrial winegrowing. It is an amazing red wine, without the pull of gravity and ratings. No, only the influence of the astro-agronomist-winemaker, an American of Italian descent. It challenges the limitations of the Italian wine trail that we terrestrials put on it. Buckminster Fuller said, “Whatever nature lets you do is natural.” I wish all of you could have tried it with me. But alas, a quick trip to Washington D.C., some time ago, was the only opportunity any of us will have. But there will be more. Watch for a sparkling wine to come, made in zero gravity, called Zero-Zero. No dirt on their space-boots, but lots of ardent advances orbiting above us.
Down in the Cilento National Park, there is a colony of Italians who speak Esperanto. They escaped the area around Vesuvius many years ago and decided to leave behind their dialect. But they took their grapes with them and started making a red wine for the new millennium, to coalesce their past with their future. It is a cult wine on the islands around Naples and further south. I have only seen and had it once, from a private cellar in Panarea. The wine reminded me of the reds made by Galardi. I have heard people say they have traded two bottles of Le Pin for one bottle of “Vulkano” Campania Ruga. I have tried both wines. I would say two bottles of Le Pin for one from the Esperantani’s is a fair deal.
About 11 years ago, in a place near Colfiorito, there was a terrible earthquake. When they got to digging out some of the buildings, rescue workers found a lab book from a vineyardist, describing a project code-named “Il Grifi”. The project, like its name, had as its goal to combine three grapes to make a new wine. Here the vineyardist had been researching, via recombinant DNA, the creation of a wine that had as its parents, Sangiovese, Sagrantino and Montepulciano. And yes, for many years in Umbria and the Marche, winemakers have blended these grapes together to make various wines. William Sylvester, who starred in the Stanley Kubrick film, had made a film in Italy and was fascinated with this area and with wine. So he funded this little known experimentalist. Italy loves to resuscitate ancient things: statues, grapes, legends. In this case, as we headed back to 2001, we discovered that the wine had finally been made, in minute quantities. An amazing wine, combining the ephemeral verve of Sangiovese, the tannic and alcoholic power of the Sagrantino and the lubriciousness of the Montepulciano. Joy upon joy, an almost perfect wine in time for the new age. But alas, only one year was made and only 1113 bottles. They were mostly served at an autumn Sagra in Colfiorito for the special red potato named after the area, which makes the most wonderful base for the local gnocchi. The wine disappeared into memory, along with the best gnocchi I had ever had. The wine? Sangrapulciano.
Two wines, Navicella and Passeggiata, were “good soul” efforts to make right the promise to reach the moon before the end of the decade. In the Italian’s efforts, though, it managed to arrive about 30 years later. End of decade, end of century, end of millennium, hey it’s only time, no?
Navicella was the wine intended for the first course, something from the aquaculture tanks. Passeggiata was created for the second stage, more experimental than the first wine. It was a sci-fi way of twinning tradition (Navicella) with innovation (Passeggiata) and for those who experienced the wine, I've been told it was a magical. Again, this was eight years ago when the Italians were embracing the next big thing. Now we are earthbound again, arguing this time over tradition vs. innovation. There are a few of these wines available on the auction circuits. A large enological school in Northeastern Italy was in incubating site for these wines. The Lega Nord, and a then unknown party operative, put an end to it. That little known operative would someday, in the future, join with Berlusconi and attempt to influence events in a larger and more important wine producing region, with near cataclysmic results.
Out last find caused a little flap among the retro-futurists in the room. Paraspruzzi was proposed to bridge the workers in the fields, those who tromp through the primal slime in their waders, with the elevated shapers of fashion. Originally the marketers wanted to call it “Chiaccerone”. Another on the board wanted to name it “Lo Scroccone”. But it was felt that normal wine lovers wouldn’t know how to pronounce it. Not that Paraspruzzi is that easy, but it sounded like the celebrity photographers who were known to frequent all the “in” places looking for those same nine beautiful people to snap up.
