Vercelli ~ early 1980's
Where have all the great Italian wine experts gone? Over the weekend I have been thinking about who represents the best of expertise in Italian wine. Who is putting the Italian wines out in front? Who isn’t first looking at their margins or how much money or fame they can garner? Who isn’t devising a strategy that includes a book as a vehicle to propel their celebrity before those who still toil in the service of the vines?
Sure there are a lot of self-proclaimed experts who would like you and me to think they have remade Italian wine, and because of their singular efforts, all is well. Well, balderdash. Living large and taking a handsome fee to regale willing participants aboard a cruise ship of their love for Italian wines, I don’t buy it.
This all comes as a result of my procrastinating this afternoon over a shelf
cleaning assignment. Instead of doing that and making room for more books I ran across an old Rolodex. A card popped out, and it was as if the person whose name was on that card was trying to reach out from the other side. The card belonged to Lou Iacucci, a crusty fellow from the 1980’s, who was a real expert in Italian wine at the time. He was brash and had a healthy ego, but he also worked the floor of his store and turned many a young person, myself included, on to Italian wine. He didn’t filter me through one of his handlers and then make a 10 minute appearance to regale me with fabricated sorties from his soon to be released best seller and definitive tome on Italian wine.No, Lou could care less about that kind of crap. He was a noodler; he was always on the lookout to hook another fish on his line. It was through Lou that I was introduced to the wonderful dessert wine Torcolato, from a young Fausto Maculan. He also pressed bottles of Mastroberardino and Hauner upon me.
Toscana ~ Porchetta Stand 1980's
I had just returned from a three month stay in Italy and had worked the harvest. I was ripe for the picking. Lou was patient with me, and he encouraged me to develop my interest in Italian wine. Through Lou I felt that I could someday begin to approach his level of understanding about Italian wines. Yes, he was a shameless self-promoter, but he made space for the rest of us to gather some of the air in the room. Today, east coast or west, there are too many self-nominated authorities who don’t see the possibility of the rest of us wanting to contribute.
Armando de Rham and Luciano Degiacomi
Last spring in San Francisco, I sat next to a young lady, who was so proud that she had been nominated for membership in the Ordine dei Cavalieri del Tartufo e dei Vini di Alba. I mentioned to her how I knew the man who founded the order and gave her my card, suggesting to her that we stay in touch; you know, synergy and all that. She never returned an e-mail.
San Benedetto del Tronto, 1984, with IWG, Toto Rao,
Charles Petronella and Guy Stout, now a Master Sommelier
I met a fellow in New York, an up and coming Italian wine expert. In what has seemed like too many emails to remember, in which he has never responded, I have finally deleted his address from my virtual Rolodex. I hear from Lou Iacucci more often than I do from some of the young lions. They don't realize we were all young lions at one time.
Pietro Berutti of La Spinona in Barbaresco with Armando de Rham
A fellow in L.A., another self-declared master of all things in relation to wines Italian, was so rude the last time after I went into his store. It seems he couldn’t understand how one of “his best customers” would know me. One of his best customers, a film studio head, just “happened” to be a friend of mine from childhood. That’s how it was possible. But these arrogant young brats all want to think that they have the exclusivity on expertise. They don’t want anyone else playing in their sandbox. Ma va'.
New York has a couple more. I get a kick out of the ones who claim they don't remember the handful of times we met, had dinner, or sat on a panel somewhere. I’m not talking about the older ones with short or long term memory issues, but again the young lions who think the trail just started up when they got on it. They self-proclaim they’re a flame when they’re but moths in search of their fame.
I have a pile of books from one of my mentors, who like Lou, has passed on. His stories were like guideposts to me. I treasure those stories, for they truly set me on the course. And while I view all this from a serene eddy in flyover country, it offers me the perspective of one who can see all this from a distance. And that puts it into focus.All those years Lou took the road from Firenze to Siena, were constant pilgrimages back to the source of the energy. One of those trips the wine gods called him back. He didn’t take one or two trips and write a book. He drove those roads till they wore down with his incessant search for this or that little producer.
Paolo de Rham, IWG and Franceso Guintini of Selvapiana in 1984
He didn’t conspire with importer B or C to prevent restaurateurs from having access to their wines. Sure, he wanted the lions share and he often got it. In those days not many folks clamored for wines like Montevertine or Selvapiana, let alone knew about it. But if they did, he didn’t do his damnedest to prevent others from taking pleasure in them. He didn’t hog the great wines just for the sake of a bunch more money.
So as I continue to roam about the world of wine, whether it be in Italy or America, I see that some of the most important things in my cellar are my relationships with people who will understand that we are not in competition with each other, we are only in competition with that person we can become. And that becoming is in a constant state of change and refinement. But the wines and the friends make the journey so much more rewarding than any pile of money or book deal could ever promise.
Piemonte ~ 1980's
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?”
