I had to laugh, to keep from crying. The local restaurant critic revisited an old landmark restaurant that had been, in its day, the hallmark of dining and wine service. Sadly the place seems to be in its “old age” phase of its life. Reviewer Leslie Brenner in the Dallas Morning News wrote a tragically uproarious piece about the wine service. You should read the whole review, to get a feel for Ms. Brenner’s style. Folks have also chimed in on the Eats blog here (it has gotten pretty hairy). Her comments about the wine service, after the break:We asked for the sommelier, told him what we had ordered and inquired about a Bordeaux: a Sociando Mallet 1997, for $45. I love Sociando Mallet but didn't know how '97 was. He didn't answer, just flipped a few pages back and pointed to a Spanish wine I'd never heard of, priced at $100.
"What region is it from?" I asked.
"Spain," he said.
"OK, but what region in Spain?"
"Spain."
"There are many regions in Spain," I reminded him. "Is it from Ribera? Rioja?"
"It's from Spain," he said.
"OK," I said. "We'd like to stay in France." I flipped back to the Sociando Mallet, asking him again about it.
"Médoc doesn't go with what you're having," he said. That was quite funny, as one of us had ordered a rib-eye steak – known in the Médoc as entrecôte, and paired famously with, you know, Médoc.
I gave up, though, and tried getting his opinion about a Guigal Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He didn't think they had it. So I asked him about a Guigal Hermitage that was listed under Burgundy. What year is it? I wondered.
"That's not a very good Burgundy," he said.
"It's not a Burgundy," I pointed out. "It's listed under Burgundy, but it's not a Burgundy; it's a northern Rhône."
He looked at me as if I were insane.
"Is there someone here who knows the wine list?" I asked him.
He laughed. "No one knows the list better than me," he said.
We settled on a 1995 Château Gloria Bordeaux, and before long, the food started coming.
Who's on First?
Many years ago, I called on a man by the name of Victor Wdowiak. At the time he was a wine buyer for a large retail chain, but he often took pity on this “young Turk” as he liked to call me. He knew wine well. He was very intimidating. But he was the real deal. And it was he who set up the original wine service at the restaurant that is now in the autumn of its years. Mr. Victor passed away a while back and it is probably better, for if he read this interchange he would most likely pass out and die from shame, exhaustion and sheer frustration that all his years of hard work, his legacy, has now been so perverted and misinterpreted.
Restaurants are struggling so much without having to endure these self inflicted wounds, some of them mortal. My experiences this week have shown me that we have a lot of work to do. Even with a lifetime of work, the legacy might not be so deeply etched, in the fields we have toiled all these years.
P.S. I promise to be more uplifting on the next post. It's not all doom and gloom. But it ain't exactly a walk in the park, either. But we shall overcome. Yes we can!
Images flash across the screen of my inner all night movie show. Prone, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the wine or the tequila or the sleeping pill to take one away for a few hours. The stuff that the waking hours produce seems like the dream; the dream seems like the reality. And then the phone call comes.
All across the world, the Italians who settled in new lands shared their customs. Meals with the family, picnics, baptisms, first communions, it didn’t matter if it were Pittsburgh, Cucamonga, Sidney, Australia or Maracaibo, Venezuela. Maybe we didn’t have the best wine in the world, surely not like the rare vintages we were sipping last night, but what we had, it took. And deep inside we kept stretching, trying to find it in this new world we planted ourselves in.
More and more, it seems like folks are parading around in their fine new clothes, and nobody can get through to these insulated emperors that they just aren’t quite ready for the big tent. And so we go through the dance, trying to lead, but always picking partners who want to go in their own direction at their own speed. People who don’t listen, tone deaf to the new reality that has plopped down right in front of their empty valet stand.
The pace of life after Vinitaly has been brisk. The Italians have been flooding the landscape to work with us in our hand-to-hand combat. Welcome to my weekly round-up. Alfonso has gone from ranting to mommy-blogging today.
Lionello worked one whole week across Texas, week before last. Dinners in Dallas and Houston, showing his Chianti, Morellino and Brunello and telling his riveting rags-to-riches story. Lionello understands American marketing and he is, at 72, one hard working son-of-a-gun. Lufthansa had to create a new category of frequent flier as he smashed all records for accumulating miles. By the way, did you know that Lufthansa frequent flyers can trade miles for wine through 
In one of those seemingly all too often après-wine dinner moments at Adelmo’s, Lionello hosted Paul and some of the local guys for a lunch. Adelmo made his famous steak tartare, which went exceedingly well with Lionello’s Morellino di Scansano.
This week wine luminaries were lining up to work like jets at DFW airport. Monday, Seth Allen, the founder of 
Paolo 
Wednesday Pio Boffa from 
Pio spoke to a throng of fans at the 
Thursday - Daily-Double. 
Later that evening we had to “gear up” for another sold-out dinner at Jimmy’s, this time with 
The lineup of wines was eclectic, from Franciacorta by 
One of my favorite gals who I like to talk wine with brought her beau. I snapped this shot of them and told him not to screw up or he’d be dealing with the Italians if he broke her heart. I think he got the message.
Red wines? Teroldego, Brunello, Barolo and Amarone, followed by a late harvest Moscato from Sicily. We ran out of wine, sold so much Mike Di Carlo ran out of register tape. More good times!
Guy and Paul, now here are two fellows I’d like to have with me in the dark alleys of life. Nobody’s gonna mess with these boyz. That night we broke records for wine sales, as Jimmy’s is a retail store and we made everybody a deal they couldn't refuse.
Speaking of swinging, the weekend brought me my afternoon meeting with my Italian guru, the iconic 
What does one do if they think the Italian wine industry is going in the wrong direction? And if one has a rather large interest in the success of the Italian wine industry, how does one go about letting one’s thoughts, opinions and feelings be known?
Still, I wasn’t sure he really wanted the truth. Something from the last twenty years gnaws at me, a little voice on my shoulder that whispers in my ear, “Don’t show it all, just show ‘em a little. Let them guess what is underneath.”
A week later, I am talking to a producer from Piedmont. Over the phone it can be easier to convince winemakers to change. But now I have an anecdote. And over the phone they don’t see my face, so it is my little voice inside of their head this time.
It’s been one long 
You’d think these folks would want to know. After all the business I follow in America represents 8% of all Italian wine coming from Italy to the USA. That’s a fact. But often I feel more like I am the Invisible Man.
No, the key is to plant the idea, water it occasionally and then let ‘er grow. If it grows, then we all win. If it dies, hey, it’s a big wine world out there. Someone will get it. Every dog has his day.
I’d had it. One more over-oaked, alcohol soaked Tuscan wine and I was going to go bonkers.
Bava sat me down and showed me his latest sparkling wines, 
A plate of crackers with fois gras appear. No heavy cheese or home made salumi. This was my tongue's Betty Ford mini-clinic moment. I was feeling better. The depth of the Toto Corde with the snack was one of the perfect matches I had during Vinitaly.
Bava is passionate about cacao and chocolate. He has a 
So many crazy things happened during Vinitaly this year that there is no place to turn to but sophomoric humor. I can’t change the way the Italians think about the current “crisi” but I can change the way they look. So to lighten things up a bit on these pages (something folks have been telling me I “need” to do lately) I thought I’d call on my Hollywood make-up artist friends (actually they are friends with Bea) and see what we could do to update the look of some famous Italian wine personalities that are instrumental for turning the ship around. After all, modern wines call for modern looks; that is the essence of bella figura, no?
Dino Illuminati and long time client Adelmo Banchetti, from Dallas, Texas, are always clowning around. These guys know how to have a good time. And while both of these gents have made huge strides in their wines and their food over the years, their “look” has gotten old. So if Adelmo and Dino aren’t going to Twitter and Text, they can be at least entertaining to the young folks who are. For the makeover, we have given Adelmo his fondest wish, to be the clown with the funny nose, the flaming red hair and a hickey. Kind of a mixed message, but Adelmo likes edgy. For Dino, we have gone a little mad professor with the hair and the beard, but with the cool edge that only Jackie-O Ray-Bans can transmit. So we have fun and edge and cool and now they’re ready to embrace further modernity and the future. Avanti ragazzi!
We’re going Western with the next two gents. Think Westworld. Riccardo Cotarella had done traded in his Porsche Cayenne for a Vintage American pickup. Along with that he is ordering a slew of American oak barrels to make the complete transition for one of his special wines from the Maremma. The man is a cowboy and a driver at heart and now the vision is complete. Bravo, Riccardo.
Piero Antinori is going a little more raffinato on us. Maybe it’s the time he has been spending with his Franciacorta project and the proximity to George Clooney’s lakeside manse. In any event, Piero is kicking back, enjoying his status as the Marshall of the Maremma. Nothing gets by Piero, nothing. He sees everything and knows where all the bodies are buried. He is a Superior Tuscan.
Romano dal Forno has been talking to his son. Time to spruce up the place. Done. Now, what to do about all those years that have passed, how to upgrade the look? How about a little bad boy rocker, a cross between liev Schreiber and Sammy Hagar. Red hair is all the rage in Italy for men these days, and Romano isn’t immune to the lure of the fiery red. Yes, he has capitulated to the pressure of fashion, but with that Jim Croce ‘stache, he makes for a dashing vision of the modern winemaker in the modern times.
And finally, this wouldn’t be complete without a chime in from dear old Luca Zaia, the dashing Minister of Agriculture. Some think we don’t like Luca on this blog, by au contraire, we love Luca. And he loves us. Keeping with the musical theme, our fashionistas have chosen to give Luca a modified Beatle look, in homage to Ringo, the underappreciated one. Instead of drumsticks we have given Luca farm implements in which he can drum home his message. Doesn’t he look fab? How do we get his autograph? He is saving Italy from pineapple and kebab and giving Prosecco its rightful place alongside Champagne as one of the greatest bubblies the world has even known. And he does it all by acting naturally. Auguri, Doctor Zaia.
Dream fragment: A great hall filled with people. Two men who must pass through the crowd to the other side of the long, narrow hall. From a distance above this appears to be set in a Gothic cathedral. Is this a ceremony? As the men make their way, they walk directly through the people, who have become formless but not invisible. They have no presence, no corpus, they are all ghosts. Except for the two men, who advance towards the other side of this great passageway.
As I walk the great halls of Vinitaly, I see people I know. Sometimes I don’t recognize them, sometimes they don’t recognize me. Some of these folk I have known now for almost thirty years. Some I have just gotten to know in the last few years. All of us, living our lives, how much this collective honey gathering has been done for the sake of making Italian wine a greater expression of the culture and people and land of Italy?
Over the years I have had passionate, lively and sometimes explosive polemics over the direction Italian wine is going. I remember in 1985 talking to a producer of Barolo about his exclusive use of French barrique for the aging of his wines. I told him then that I thought the wine would suffer under all the weight of the wood, not to mention how much more it would raise the price of the wine. He responded by telling me that I was a young American and that the world is a large place, larger than the way I learned about it in school in America. Yes, I was young and inexperienced and an American, all sins which I was guilty as charged by my more learned and experienced farmer colleague in Castiglione Falletto.
I have had more than my share of passionate discussion about Italian labels. I was an art major at the university, design was my background, coupled with an intimate feel for American marketing. Over the years, I have seen labels that had as much appeal as a mullet haircut. But as we have recently seen, in Italy the mullet is enjoying a renaissance. Wonderful step forward for all of humanity. Why is it a label is so important? I imagine Caravaggio or Simone Martini looking forward several centuries from their time to see their work and how it had survived the fashions of time and wonder why the label designers don’t understand this. But it is after all a product, to be opened and consumed and then to be sent to the trash bin. It isn’t art, no matter how much we want to imbue it with nobility and grandeur. It is sustenance; it is a measure by which we get through the day. Art? Art is not essential for survival of the species. Nourishment is. And perhaps it is because our farmer knows that we will ultimately need the fruits from his harvest, that a misplaced label, or too much wood won’t really matter all that much in the greater scheme of things.
When I was younger the older wine producers would listen to my thoughts, about their wine, about their labels, about their expensive barrels and they would make this barely perceptible grimace on their foreheads. The tell on their face was that I was young and inexperienced and that they were Europe, they were Italy. They knew what would be better for all of us, especially gli Americani. So I would pack my luggage and head back to America to spread the word as they so ordered.
A generation later, the younger wine producers hear an older man rant, about their wine, about their labels, about their expensive barrels, and this time the frown on their forehead is more pronounced. What it tells, without words, but without doubt, is that they know better. They are young and this is a different world, and one must be positive about all of these changes. Or else. So I pack my luggage and head back to my post, the one from which I will never be called back, and ponder on all these “changes”.
