After spending a week in Napa Valley, we headed over the hill to Sonoma. Destination: Occidental, California. The sun that had been our companion for two days headed back behind the clouds. Driving, I was reminded of the John Mayall song, California.Going back to California
So many good things around
Don't wanna leave California
The sun seems to never go down
I remember that song playing in the eight track player of my Fiat sport coupe as I discovered the California of my youth. The saxophone solo, the guitar, the flute, the raspy, bluesy voice of Mayall.
There is something about the way the air of California caresses me. I grew up with it in southern California, but on a good day in the north, there was only one thing better for a California youth. I have never felt it in New York or Texas or Italy. It is unique for me in California. The place is a huge visceral caress.
Maybe that was why my son asked me to come visit him in Occidental. He was looking into a possible position with the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. What was once, in my time, the Farralones Institute, is now what I call a “think-farm”.California - that is a good place for home
California - I'll be back there before long
As we drove through the hills from Sebastopol to Occidental, getting a little lost along the way, there were signs of the early Italian immigrant. With names like Piezzi Road and Rossi Road, Mancini Road and Cuneo Court, I could feel the souls who had passed through Ellis Island and ended up eight miles from the Pacific Ocean. They had found their Paradise. Grapes, figs, apples, nuts, land, mud, sun, salvation.
“I don’t think I can live in a city right now, Pop.” My son is searching for his place in the sun, somewhere away from the big tree, so he can grow in his own right. There was no arguing, this was a beautiful place. Organic gardens filled with the most wonderful and edible plants. Tradition born from the dawning of the new age. I recognized what he was looking for was something our Italian ancestors had been looking for all the way back to Columbus.California - there is a good place to be
California - that's where I'm feeling so free
After a week in the high concept of Napa, which I admit openly that I love, here we were in this little pocket, this vortex of a place that is an original part of California. Grapes are everywhere, as are young women with long hair and long dresses. Such a departure from the day before, when we went to a special tasting of new releases on Howell Mountain. The new ultra-modern green building, a state of the art facility, a Leed certified winery on its way to becoming Leed Gold. The winemaker, from an Italian family that settled in Lodi.Lodi, where in a week I will find my way from an airport, via a rental car, back on the road for this journey, retracing the steps of the Italian immigrant.
Some people may treat you ugly
Some treat you beautiful too
That's the way life is all over
So look for the good things for you
Later that night in the City at a little eight table café, Weird Fish, with my son and his sister (ladies, visit her great fashion site, Cutiemus), we rediscovered a little wine we first had in Paris, bought from our local wine store in the 14th where our apartment was. Domaine de la Garreliere Cendrillon, a Savignon Blanc and Chenin, bio-dynamic and a fair $36. A thrilling match with the buffalo girls - seitan with buffalo sauce and veganaise and a sustainable harvested steelhead with a lemon-caper tapenade.
The next morning, Sunday, as we headed out of Sebastopol on our way to catch a plane in San Francisco that never showed up, I silently wondered if I would ever get back to the garden.California - I'll be back there before long
I'll be back there before long
I'll be back there before long
I'll be back there before long
It is like the first love. Young and beautiful. Desirable. Meant often for another. She has a solar gaze that shines over we trembling ones and we all want to be loved by her. But she cannot love just one; she has been created to break hearts with her beauty. And she does, often.
Saturday, during a barrel tasting of probably 200 wines - after about 20 my tongue felt like I had just taken a razor to it. It was finished. So I walked over to the dining area at Greystone, which is the kitchen for the Culinary Institute of America. There I found rigatoni Bolognese, gnocchi and polenta. There was also baccala, wonderful green salads with frisee and avocado. Cioppino in little cups had shrimp floating on the surface. Dutch ovens of risotto Milanese, done properly. It could have been Italy, easily. The sensibility in the kitchen was overwhelmingly Italian.
Italy is a force, even for California. I’m don’t see the wines where the food definitely is. When will the winemakers realize what has happened to the cuisine of California? The marriage of the Italian sensibility, so long ago, among others, cultivated by the Italian women of Napa. Could it be that the food has been under the influence of the female energy, that California recognizes so readily, but the wine is still be held hostage by the masculine vigor? Taste many of the rich and powerful red wines of Napa valley. It begs the question of who they are making these wines for. An $80-300 bottle of wine made for a blood-rich chunk of meat, whose California does that belong to anymore?
Last Friday I was sitting, parked in front of a beauty salon in St. Helena. Parades of elderly Italian-American women were coming out of the shop, their grey hairs all arranged in perfect order. My 94 year old mom and 92 year old aunts also have this ritual. It’s a little rite they perform, to strike a balance with their well being and the way they present themselves to the world.
I’m taking a few days in Napa for the 
Earlier in the day one of the seminars was about breaking the news with 
Speaking of treats, the chickpea fries with Romesco sauce at 
While we're schlepping our Best Of’s, the hanging duck and bacon at 
We mommy blogged our way through the City on Sunday, stopping in Japan town for some tea and chimes and then finally to 
What are the 
In December, Dr. Zaia said,” We must launch the pineapple strike and of all those products that have nothing to do with the Italian agriculture. Yes, therefore, to zampone and cotechino. And no, instead, to the non seasonal products, that do not belong to our tradition and that, often, are cultivated in countries where it is still possible to use insecticides."
And a month later the Italians were banging the drums that they were the 
America has a new president, elected by a large margin, some would say overwhelmingly. His childhood home is Hawaii, and Zaia is throwing down on the national fruit of our president’s homeland. Meanwhile kiwi - which is native to China – is being sent from Italy to China. Whose carbon footprints are all over that?
Or they could all go back to riding horses in Italy, like we all do in Texas. Then Dr. Zaia could show off his horse-whispering mind-meld talents. Another 60 million horses in Italy wouldn’t have too serious an impact on global warming. It’s only 60 million methane producing mini-factories. Maybe they could feed espresso beans to the horses and the Italians could harvest them after they passed through the horses digestive systems, like the civets in Indonesia. Then it could be considered truly Italian.
Why am I so angry? It’s because I see politicians not understanding the way the world is going and not wanting to lose their power - their gravy train - so they work to keep people down by fear and ignorance. Don’t buy pineapples because they are not local, but let’s sell a non-indigenous kiwi to a country where the kiwi originated from, which just happens to be halfway across the globe. Then the rest of us have to clean up the politician's messes.
Do we ask too much from any wine? With the grapes long ascent through time, asking nothing from man, except to be held and loved and partnered in a glass, maybe with a little cheese and bread. But we want to triangulated it and take it apart, stem by stem. Both camps, the terroirists and the wine-stylists, want wine to be what they think it should be. But what does a grape made into wine really want? Maybe it just wants to be your man.
So I took the last thirty years in the service of the Old Country and her wines. Along the way, fashion led Italy to take on the mantle of the New World, only to cast it off as the fashions change. And those of us who never went to med school, but were expected to perform surgery in the field, without anesthetics, what was in store for one whose life took them in that direction?
The cycles, the trends, the oak, the concrete, and every autumn the grapes would ripen and souls would pick them and squeeze them and let the fateful mystery cling to those rotten bunches and make diamonds appear. In the New World, a master of wine and war would fantasize in the darkness of the sunset, thinking about his Old World home and the maidens in the field busy with the grapes being born and dying. Planting by the cycles of the ocean and harvesting by the fullness of the moon. Grab a horn and blow the walls down. Dig a hole and drop the precious liquid inside it. And wait. Three months, six months, nine months or more.
And to what end? To end up on a wine list in some rotating bento box 600 feet in the sky, waiting for someone to pay $195 for a meal? Or $120 for a bottle of wine? And we send our best and our brightest up to man those stylites, fending off diners pleas for white zinfandel as if they were the advances of Satan?
AC: I cut down to two posts a week, and proceeded to get some of my life back. I really don’t know how I did three essay length posts a week for almost three years. But now with only two a week, it seems like a walk in the park. Readership is still strong, my posts are still those non-linear stream of consciousness genre-bending rants, but I’m ok with them now. Many of my friends and readers are thanking me for that too. They were telling me they couldn't keep up with the posts and were getting frustrated with my proclivity for providing posts so prodigiously.
AC: I was looking for a way to make money with this blogging thing, so I proposed to my work that I get together a team and start a blog, one for the industry and corporate types along with all the rest of the folks who surf on by.
AC: I see the Latin language is suited to your temperament, young bumble bee. Let me elucidate. Our industry is changing rapidly. Companies are merging; wineries are shifting their allegiance to other forms of delivery, whether it be outside of the three-tier system or by incorporating new ways to lure folks to try their products. I think the world I live in has been successful to a point. But now those existing frameworks are being challenged and folks are storming the castle, in a manner of speaking. Look at what someone like Gary V has done to bring new wine drinkers into the fold. Well, I’m not looking so much at the new folks, in this case, as in giving the established people in the conventional networks an opportunity to peer through their window and see where the change will be taking them, and all of us. That said, if I can make the folks aware, those who built the industry into such a large behemoth, perhaps they can get on the Change Train and help move our industry forward. In other words, be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
BR: So you want to play God in the wine business.
AC: I never went that far, but you’re on to something. Our business must develop sustainable sales programs that don’t rely on the few wine drinkers to keep it propped up. The era of rampant consumerism is over. Over. Now we must expand the bench, widen the field and bring more wine drinkers, drinking a little bit more wine everyday.
That and the reality that a lot of the larger company salespeople have so much on their plates lately, along with just not being into wine and the career of wine. All these cool and groovy wines that we search out for our customers, those customers never hear about them from our people on the streets because they are too busy doing other things. It’s not a secret; I had this conversation with a sommelier the other day. I told him that when I look at a wine-by-the-glass list or the sommelier special wine selection list, I rarely see products from the company I work for, even though I know we have the same level of products. Organic? We have ‘em. Biodynamic? We have them, too. Small farmer, small production, no oak, no ML, not plastered all over retail? We have them. In fact they are so not available in any retail that it is a punishment to see a list and not have one or two of the really wonderful wines that we all go nuts over. I don’t want to go into a restaurant and only drink our products, but I'd sure like to see the ones that we have offered as well. And that ain't happening enough.
BR: Didn’t mean to raise your hackles, AC. Remember your shingles. So where you off to lately?
BR: AC, you're like a dad to me, so I don’t want you as a Facebook friend or anything like that, but you’d be more than welcome to join us south of the border. But I don’t think you have to worry. Just keep stirring the cauldron, you’ll be fine. What else, any last thoughts?
When I saw him last night, in his brown pinstripe suit and his certified sommelier pin on the lapel it really did my heart good. He is following his dream and getting to his promised land. And that’s not an easy thing in today’s world. Looking around the room at 9:00 PM, there were few guests dining on this night, I could see his disappointment that he couldn’t offer his services to the people in the seats because the seats were empty. And who knows when they will fill up again? 
I could see from the inner glow that the young somm was pleased that someone had noticed that he tried very hard to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. I was looking at his brown suit and flashed back to a day thirty years ago when I donned a brown suit and went to work as a sommelier in the same city. It was one of those restaurants which rotate high above the city. I digress for a moment, excuse me. I remember going into the wine room to get the umpteenth bottle of white zinfandel (it was a destination restaurant for tourists) and upon coming out of the room I lost my table. Of course they were just twenty or so feet from where they were when I went in to get the wine. But it so disoriented me (and I have a little fear of heights anyway) that after a few weeks of that I took off my brown suit and went on to my next job. Now that restaurant has also been renovated and there is another young somm up there, which is another story. All this to say, we have come a long way, but the situation still requires diligence and devotion. We still have to get them in the seats and make them feel good.
Maybe it was the glow from the wines, or the homemade limoncello or the Madeira, but when I left that dining room I really wished that these young people, chefs, servers, sommelier, will be able to get everything they want from their livelihood in that dining room. If you are in the wine business you know what I am talking about. We need the business to once again flourish and thrive. OK, I've gotten schmaltzy, I’ll stop now.
Go find a sommelier and help them keep their fires burning.
After most of the week in NY for Italian events, and coming home to make a Bordeaux tasting, which I missed, I meditated over the relationship between the French and the Italians. Over and over, during the Italian events, I kept hearing the mantra, “We’re #1” as if making and selling more wine would automatically put any country over the top.
And I am not writing here to beat up on the French farmers or winemakers. Or wine lovers. But the argument that positions one great country against another, to me is just meaningless. I am a bit surprised that professionals in the Italian wine trade get worked up over such matters, unless it is just some form of argument they use when trying to justify the Italians ascendancy on the world wine stage.
But lately, as if to coax myself out of my stubborn preconceptions, I have been popping red and white wines from California. Last night we opened a 2005 Chateau St. Jean Les Cinq Cépages. Out of the bottle into a quick decanting, and straight into the glass. I was drawn into the seductive quality of the wine. Fleshy, woven with aromatic ripeness. I was 15 again and looking more at the young girls in bikini’s on the beach than the waves.
Not that France or Italy doesn’t have similar wines that seem to be overpriced for the current state of the world. But in agriculture, the planning of these wines is made in advance of any economic downturn. And once we get into these waters, what are the wine growers supposed to do?
One thing that doesn’t seem to be working: The overpriced wine dinner. When a restaurant tries to sell, let’s say, an Opus One dinner for $395 per person, I'm thinking the message is: We have too much inventory let’s make an “elite” wine dinner up and get our best customers (and investors) in to help us clear some of this stuff out. It’s an out-of-touch idea that suggests the establishment has run out of ideas. Makes me wonder about their food, too.
So, here we meet. A producer in the Côte d'Or, or Rabajà, over these cold dark nights, must consider how they are going to approach not only their land, but their clients across the world. Does one lower their price and compromise their stature? Does one march on ahead leaving their loyal supporters in search of newer and maybe more elusive ones? Or does one do nothing and hope the economic cycle moves eventually upward?
