You have a wine placed before you. You might be a judge in a competition. Or you might simply be ordering a wine in a restaurant. In either case the wine is poured. Then, what do you do?Most people look at the color and then move on to the aroma and the taste. But somewhere inside many of us is this little mental punch list. On it is memories, likes, dislikes, markers, highs and lows. Somewhere along the line many of us have gotten that punch list down to a narrow spectrum of what we like and are looking for in a wine. Just like people and foods and music.
With Italian wine, there is a fork in the road. One way says, stick to the tried and true (whatever that is for each person). The other way is this wild beach party where anything goes.A man walks into a bar and the bartender hands him a taste of Barbera. The man pulls up his mental punch list:
• deep red color with intense violet hue
• raspberries, blueberries, strawberries blackberry, black cherries
• good acid structure
• low astringency
• lower level of tannins
The wine cannot seduce him, taunt him or convince him that it will be different. If so, it might come off as a flaw. And the dance is over.
“Your brain seems bruised with numb surprise,” the ancient song goes.
Just once, try and approach a wine you think you know really well and imagine you have lost your memory of it. Maybe that is the essence of blind tasting. But instead of trying to find markers, imagine this is the first time any wine has ever passed your lips.Learn to forget.
It goes counter to what many Italian wine experts think they should do. They prefer to “speak in secret alphabets” as the same song continues. It’s the battle of the prefrontal cortex, memory vs. attention.
I’d love to know what someone like Roberto Paris might think about this. At this time Roberto is in the middle of a 10 day meditation retreat in India. I reckon it probably isn’t high on his punch list right now. But the clarity of his mind, after ten days, yes, I’d like to know his thoughts.Suggestion: Next time you open a bottle of Chianti or Valpolicella, any wine really, instead of trying to figure out what it is and how it fits into those neat little boxes inside your mind, turn your mind loose and let it wander over the wine. Imagine the experience that wine might be, if you could learn to forget.
Eight years ago, I spent several weeks in Pantelleria. I had once been invited to the island in 1971 but never made the trip. In 2001 I finally made it. I rented a dammuso, one of the thick stone houses that characterize the island. I had a motor scooter and a supply of wine from a friend who had a winery there. My wife had died a few months before and I was verklempt from the battle she waged for three years and the ultimate loss. She had the real MS, multiple sclerosis. I cannot tell you how much I despise that disease. More than anything.
I had wine to drink and a little kitchen to cook in. I spent the days tooling around the island looking at the vineyards and other natural sights. In all, it was as good a way of mourning Liz’s loss as I could muster. There was a funeral on the island when I was there; a young person had lost their life in the sea. We were all sad that day.
In the wine and food business we are a little like social anthropologists. There is something about the search for the best pizza, the ripest peaches, the home cured salumi and the perfect little café in the neighborhood. When it really gets down to it, the fancy wine list and the latest trend, from molecular gastronomy to collision cuisine, what I really want is a great bowl of pasta with a bottle of wine that I can enjoy and afford to drink regularly.
So where are we going? Everywhere you look, you see the words local and sustainable and organic and artisanal. Good ideas that have become buzz words to bandy about in building a brand that has no center. What good is it to get grass fed beef if the line cook over salts it? Organic peaches that find themselves in a perverse ménage à trois with blood oranges and jalapeno chutney? Why?
Talking with a couple of food journalists recently and the idea of the young chef came up. And the question was, “Does the young chef have anything to say with their food if they haven’t gotten enough life experience to be interesting with their creations?” Dining out wasn’t intended to be a reality show (unless it’s Hell’s Kitchen). The little CAFÉ sign I found on the street at midnight in Old East Dallas, oh how I would have loved to go back in time and see what was going on in that kitchen. This time, culinary archeology. And I find in the conversations around the table with friends, here and in Italy, we are looking for that wonderful Carbonara, that simply perfect Margherita, the espresso that one finds so easily in gas stations in Italy. Why is it so darn hard?
Wine lists. Working with several clients over the last few weeks, and really finding some very different opinions. But more and more I am seeing restaurant people rethinking the way they serve wine in their places. Less popular is buying a wine for $17 and reselling it for $65. The wave I have been seeing, in Houston, in Dallas and Austin, is that same wine on a blackboard for $39. You know at $39 a party of four will buy two bottles. At $65 they might nurse that bottle of wine. So the establishment sells one bottle and had $48 in gross profit. Selling two bottle for $39 and they have $44 to work with. A smaller profit? Yes. A happier clientele? Most assuredly. And most likely to return sooner. This is a wave that is coming from San Francisco, from Southern California, New York, and Texas is right there, too, with these ideas. This is exciting stuff for the wine producers back in Italy who have a storeroom full of wine right now.
Maybe that young couple who bought beer with their pizza or took it to-go to have with their Chianti at home can now have a reason to sit down in their neighborhood café and have wine instead of beer, dine-out instead of take-out. Maybe dining out might just come back in.
To celebrate the end of May, which was an hellacious month for the wine world, Paul and Annette DiCarlo graciously opened up their home in East Dallas for a Sunday afternoon of eating and drinking. Summer is bearing down upon us, a time which we find ourselves embroiled in heat and heated debate about almost anything. Tempers flare, lines are drawn in the sand, swords are sharpened, clocks are set. But not before one last meal. One last great meal.
We get there in time for a round of sparkling rose wine from the Veneto, all the rage now that they have saturated the market with Prosecco. I brought a bottle of Gruner just to be a contrarian. I figured after I blasted it in the last post, and some of the somms were chiding me for hating on the Gruner. Actually I like Gruner. And Zweigelt. But that’s another post.
Major Domo Adelmo was modeling his newly acquired seersucker shorts, which showed off his tanned and muscle-bound legs, gained from his early morning walks (stalks?) in the neighborhood. Adelmo is irreverent to anything that has been established as a custom. Wine in a wine glass? Why? When it is so much more fun to pour a rare Casa dei Bepi Amarone in a jelly glass? It was Sunday, these restaurant owners work, work, work all the time. Son of a gun never rests. Let him be.
The room was getting crowded what with the short ribs and the foie gras and the pasta course all heating up the kitchen, which is where everyone was congregating. The AC unit was on overload, set at 60. The room felt like 80+. Seersucker was a good idea, after all.
So after the foie gras apps and all the other salumi scattered around the room, we head straight into the pasta course, some funny looking maccherone with those wonderful baby tomatoes from the south. Simple and good food. Great with the Valpolicella lined up in pole position, waiting for their moment. Also waiting for those Amarones to chill down a little, nestled in the fridge with the dessert wine and the Dublin Dr. Pepper (after all, we are in Texas).
About the Amarones: Quintarelli '97 and '98, Dal Forno '01, Tedeschi '03, Masi '01, Viviani 'Casa dei Bepi' '01.
The 2001 Viviani “Casa dei Bepi” was among my faves. Maybe because the folks are familiar. But the wine had nice body, solid flavors, some elegance, the wood was subdued (thank God) and it complimented the food. Deelish.
And the twin vintages of Quintarelli, the ’97 and ’98. Now that was the moment of meditation for me. Everybody loves the ’97, the fruit, the power, the big balls. I get it. Or rather, I don’t get it for me. It was all that and a bag of chips, but the wine of the night, for me, was the 1998 from Quintarelli.
I’m in an Asian restaurant. On one side a party is drinking Gavi on another side Chilean Chardonnay. Across from me the couple is having a Chardonnay from California’s Central Coast. I’m trying a Sauvignon Blanc from Chile. There are no sommeliers to work the floor, but we all make it through the night, our palates intact.
With the market shrinking for wine stewards, economic slowdown, hours being cut, positions being eliminated, I have to imagine that there are not just a few sommeliers asking that question too. What am I doing? How do I support my family? Where is this leading? What have I gotten myself into?
I’d say that many of the ones I have been encountering lately suffer from the misperception that the world can’t live without them. Listen, the world will use every one of us in whatever way the fates decide. But to the young grasshoppers out there who really care to read to the end of this post, number 1 thing to note: The world doesn’t “need” you.
One of the cool things about the wine biz is how everyone talks to one another. Winemakers, reps, distribs, brokers, retailers, restaurateurs, export managers; it’s one extended cocktail party. Kind of like Twitter. It’s ongoing and there is no end to the conversation. And while there will be an occasional dominant thread, there will be no single person or wine who will or can dominate the room. It’s a party, remember?
The next big thing? Gruner, been there done that. Greek wine from Paros? Oh please. Biodynamic wine from Georgia? Yeah, tell that to the young couple who just came in for some spring rolls and a sashimi platter. Get real. Stop trying to discover wine and bleeding all over your customers with your new found close-out that you just “discovered”. And please, stop thinking this is just about you, don’t pout, there are many out there who are thinking this way. Which makes it comical, because here we have these guys and gals going out and thinking they have just found the next “it” wine and there about 20 of them who have just done the same exact thing.
Ok, you say I’m being hard on you? Wake up. Somms have so much more support to learn their trade these days. There are groups, there is the 
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested in new and esoteric wines that are flooding the markets. But let’s put it in perspective. These are not bread-and-butter wines. They cannot sustain a restaurant or a sommelier, indefinitely. And unless you are a place like 
And one of the main messages that young sommeliers never seem to get, is that they walk tall because of the shoulders they stand upon. And they stand high because the shoulders are those of giants. A friend and a colleague, someone who has carved out their very own niche in this business as a broker (not an easy place, always between a rock and a hard spot) said it best, and I quote: “I'm reminding buyers every single day that they better support the generations of winemakers who created a product for them to even have a 'career' these days.”
To even have a career these days, listen to those words, folks. We don’t need any more wine snobs; fortunately, that generation is dying off. And we don’t need any dilettantes. The god of Wine is clear about this; we are all soldiers, we are all one infinitesimal piece of a multi-millennial movement of the grape and humankind, working our way through earth, life and evolution to finer expressions of humanity and vinosity. There is no room for pomposity.
So the next time you think you are the first one to have this idea, feeling or inspiration, by all means, be excited. But don’t go putting your byline below it. Or you will have legions of centurions to contend with. Open the bottle, enjoy it, share it, but don’t go thinking you are the god of Wine. Scores of Ancients, from the Greeks to the Romans will attest that is a road which goes deeper than the seven layers of Hell our dear friend Dante wrote about.
A rosé by any other name is Leonardo. This little guy, who looks strikingly like his handsome dad, 
