You bought a couple of cases of that special Barolo, Amarone or Brunello several years ago. Maybe it was some highly rated wine, or maybe it was something you found by chance encounter. Perhaps you grew up with the wine in your family, drinking it during holidays and special occasions. When you became independent and were on your own and started to settle down, perhaps you made the plunge and committed to a couple of cases or in any event an ample supply of the wine. You knew the wine and wanted to grow old with it. And then, something happened after 10 -15- 20 years. The old spark, that magic that attracted you to that wine was harder to find. That, my friends, was the beginning of eight signs that your wine is going through midlife crisis.
• Makes a dramatic change in style or appearance and is suddenly harder to get to open up. All of a sudden you find pamphlets in the cellar about organic and biodynamic interventions. Catalogs arrive in the mail for preparations and there is a smell of incense in the wine cellar that you never smelled before.
• Displaying the classic signs of depression – dry cork, loss of fruit, imbalanced flavors.Every time you take the cork out of the bottle it shatters. The wine is cloudy and won’t settle. The flavors are muddled and dissonant
• Has severe quality swings and is inconsistent every time you open up a bottle.One in 4 or 5 times you bring the bottle out to open it is happy and merry the other times it is all over the place- corked - no fruit – Brett – Mercaptin.
• Expressively detached and restless with whatever glass or decanter presented in.No Reidel, no Spiegelau, no Schott; No vessel seems to be the right fit.
• Has this empty feeling inside and seems to be uneven for no apparent reason.In the middle the fruit has dried out and the wine sags, is excessively hot, and is overly alcoholic.
• Seems to only care about laying down in the dark and not being disturbed - distant and unresponsive.Hard to find in the cellar, often misplaced or missing, like is has been moved or taken to another location. When found, it lies there stuck in the rack, not wanting to move or be moved.
• No longer seems satisfied with what food you're able to provide to match up with.
All the classic dishes that went with it no longer seem to match up – the old combinations no longer work. Family members seem as strangers.
• Seems the wine’s manner has changed - it still loves you, but it's "not in love with you."Not that the wine can say it, but after all these years one can sense that something is wrong, something is over. No matter how hard you try to coax the wine out of the vessel, it comes unwillingly and with trepidation. The taste, the fruit, the flavor, screams “we’re over.”
Eugenio - bon anima -Sept 7 2005
The next day she apologized to me, saying she had been drunk and didn’t mean what she said, whatever it was. She couldn’t remember what she had said. Which made it better. And worse. But by then I had already taken her down off the pedestal and was looking to replace her with another equally indescribable idol.
I can’t help but wonder if we do that with wine. I say this not to make wine into some more-than-it-is kind of deal. It isn’t. But in the daily doings of life and business and food and wine, sometimes I think we glorify this stuff beyond imagining. Wine has become Hollywood-ized and glamorized to be this larger than life product.
Roaming the halls this week at work, as I peered into offices and listened to conversations managers were having with winemakers, with importers, with salespeople, with accountants, I realized that the Golden Age is a little tarnished. The love affair with wine is ebbing.
I look to Italy right now and see confusion. I look to France, to Australia, to California and see an unimaginable scenario. Allocations? How about tossing that word into the waist bin of the past? Expectations? How about packing a bag and hitting the stores and restaurants? I know, in the trade it looks a little like Berlin or Nagasaki after the bombs dropped. Not to diminish those horrific moments with a comparison that is a reach, at best. But talk past the middle-man and go to the end-user. It is more like being a priest in a confessional. That is to say, it isn’t pretty. But it isn’t impossible.
As I look through the wines in my closet, or study a wine collection from a deceased doctor or lawyer that the widow is trying to make sense of, I wonder about the nature of one’s relationship with wine. Odd to say it that way, as wine isn’t a person, how can one have a relationship with it?
Loads of people write me and ask me to tell them where to go eat and visit when they head to Italy. Often they are going to Tuscany. And I have a list of places I and others have found that are off the touristic path. So I send some of these folks a note with ideas. I usually end with something like this: “No matter where you go in Italy, you are in Italy, and there is sure to be a wonderful place right under your nose, just waiting for you to step in with an open heart and a sense of adventure.”
The other night I went into the wine closet and pulled out a bottle of Chianti Classico. I had been needling a newspaper friend who was twittering about what kind of wine he should take to a B.Y.O.B. We got to talking about Chianti and he mentioned one he recently had that was lovely. Good old Chianti, in good times and in lean times, it is a staple. And this one I opened, a 1988, was still lively and vibrant and kicking. I had gathered a case of the wine and was going through it slowly. In the time since this wine had been made, the family had lost one of the elder brothers and the grand nephew and niece were now in the wine business. Kids when I first met them, the boy played soccer in the field with my son while we toured the vineyards. Now the son is married, is having his own children. And the daughter keeps in touch on Facebook. I don’t just love the wine; I love the people and the greater story of the wine.
If the farmer doesn’t use pesticides and fertilizers and makes a wine that is wholesome, all the better. But better the farmer take their cues from a higher authority than us city folk, trying to tell the country folk how to live and grow and farm. Who do we think we are, really?
I keep going back to the farmers I met, in Puglia or Liguria, Sicily or the Marche, and their stories are what I collect. I connect with the people and then, their wines. If a man runs his winery by the biodynamic principles so in vogue these days, but is rude and callous to his neighbors or his clients, what good are the wines to any of us? I have stopped putting these stories in my closet. They have been given away to be opened, drunk and forgotten.
Yesterday I had to get up early to catch a plane for a wine dinner down south. The restaurant had asked me over a month ago, they were new and needed a little love, Italian style. So I agreed to catch a plane and stay in a hotel to help them promote their new place with an Italian wine dinner.
Last week I did a wine showcase at my local Italian store, 
Years ago I was scheduled to do a wine dinner in New Orleans at a restaurant near Lake Ponchartrain. I had never been there and went blindly into the event. The hotel room I had reserved (over the internet, also never seen) was a shambles. I couldn’t stay there, so I headed straight to the restaurant. When I got there I was told that they only had 6 people for the dinner. Of the six one was the owner and two were myself and my local representative. So we had three people. But next door I found a great little bed and breakfast, the Rose Manor, that I called home whenever I went to New Orleans. When Katrina hit, the B&B was flooded even though it was on high ground. It was also near the broken levees. An acquaintance, Herman Leonard, the great jazz photographer, lived nearby and his place was ravaged. Many of the photographs he made and collected were lost. And Leonard moved away, forever.
Yesterday when I landed, my representative let me know that the restaurant hadn’t been able to get anyone to the dinner. It was priced right (under $60) and there was a great lineup of wines. And yes it is the beginning of the school year and everyone is getting back and settled into their routines. I chalk it up to inexperience on the part of the restaurant and hopefully in the future they will learn how to promote an event to better showcase their food, their wine and the available talent. After all, I killed them last week in Dallas. I was suited up and ready to knock another out of the park. They just weren’t able to get the butts in the seat.
But it got me to thinking about my Italian colleagues, who are just packing up their beach gear and getting ready to leave their seaside places and head back to the vineyards. They have had a month in the sun. We have too, out here in flyover country. The difference is that we have stayed in our vineyards and worked through a hellatious summer of changes. If our work is in any way successful it will further insure that when the Italians pack their bags to come to America to work in September (and to show off their tans and buy clothes at the outlets and sales) they won’t be booking their planes to nowhere.
I was warned about her by my pop. “She’ll break your heart if you let her. But you gotta let her try.” I was new in this town and Dallas was bright and glitzy and new. I was rebuilding my life, coming from California, where things were in bad shape. Unemployment was high, housing was expensive, taxpayers were revolting against the government. Déjà vu.
Years later, in the present, I am standing in this huge ballroom in a downtown hotel, filled with all manner of wine and spirits vendors showing their products. A young wine salesman comes up to me. “Do you think there’s one in here that isn’t adulterated in one form or another?” I assumed he was talking about wine. Looking around, I couldn’t answer, I was surrounded by scantily clad women with jello shots and vodka drinks trying to get me to take one from their tray. “Maybe in the wine room, you can find something you will like,” I told him. I must have walked that room 4 or 5 times, stopping to talk to old friends and battle mates, bosses, best men and anyone who came up to me to say hello. It is like any business; pick one, jewelry, news, entertainment, pharma, pretty much the same characters, just different products.
In our business the products must be sampled and when too many are, places like the one I am in will be a madhouse by 10PM. I’ll be gone by then, on to other things. Vinitaly is similar, except the men dress better and the women aren’t all blondes. But the same m.o.
Another young salesman and I walk the room, talking about where he is going in the business. He isn’t as connected to it, has a life outside of the job. Chances are he won’t be walking the room 20 years from now like some of the folks I have seen doing this for the last 25.
I run into a very lucky character, he’s made a lot of money being in the right place at the right time and having a good line of b.s. that the right folks bought into. He was miserable. All the wealth and success meant nothing to him, he said he wanted out. The disease of the newly wealthy. I thank my lucky stars I am not him.
So who is going to take this business over and run it into the future? Well, there are some bright young rising stars and I also ran into them today. One young man is raising a family in South Texas and is a hard worker, is honest and is smart. I told him today that he is the future. Another man, a little older, from far West Texas, a happy person who always has a smile and something good to say. All he has to do is look across the border and see the war being waged in Mexico to know how fortunate he is to have an opportunity to make a difference for his family and for the people who work for him.
This weekend during the 
Do you live in an urban area? How natural is that? Do you take vitamins or supplements, or use deodorant or makeup? Do you buy food from the market or grow it all yourself? Do you walk everywhere you go? Do you fly on planes, ride around in cars? When you get sick do you take medicine? Do you still think you are living a natural life? Have you been made to feel you might be living a lie?
There were a number of Master Sommeliers and a Master of Wine or two as well, along with PhD’s and folks with decades of experience. I asked many of them about this "natural" question, as I am interested in their perceptions of such things. After all, they are probably more influential than many, or most bloggers. Funny, because there are so many interpretations. I find our world extremely manufactured on so many levels, but then I have the memory of that little conversation I had when I was barely 21 with a larger than life person, Buckminster Fuller. I was no more than six feet from him when I heard him say this: “Anything that Nature lets you do is natural.”
Another friend of mine, a doctor, we met while working together in a vegetarian restaurant in Pasadena, California in the mid 1970’s. He once remarked to me about sausage (I was a vegetarian), “Consecrate the sausage as you eat it, don’t let the devil of doubt poison your body. Give thanks for it allowing you to receive sustenance from it and be grateful.”
So if your Barbera isn’t biodynamic or your Yarra Valley Riesling isn’t made with native yeast, does it really matter all that much in the scale of things universal? If it does to you and it is worth losing friendships or jeopardizing civility, might you want to ask yourself if you aren’t taking all of this just a little too seriously?
And we all know what happens to those larger-than-life types.
Here in Big D, 
Live music was performed by the Austin band 
The house has been furnished with all sorts of “Dallas” paraphernalia, complete with the J’R and Sue Ellen bedroom suite. The sunken bathtub was supplied with the rarest of all wines the 1984 Ch Mouton Rothschild Blanc. Master of Wine Charles Curtis, who now heads up the Wine Department for Christie’s in North America, pointed out the extremely “rare” wine. And he should know.
When I would travel to Italy in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when the Italian winemakers found out I lived in Dallas, their mom or aunt would always ask me how Sue Ellen was or if I knew J.R. So real was that show to them, especially in Sicily and Calabria, that I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I never met them. But I told the aunts and the moms that the Ewings were doing just fine. “Well, you tell J.R. to treat Sue Ellen better,” one would say, or another would comment, “Sue Ellen, she needs to drink less whiskey and more wine, we worry about her.” I kid you not.
Funny that the longhorn steer share the environment with the urban sprawl, not unlike Chateau Haut Brion must with their growing urbanization. One ranch grows cows, the other grapes, but city life pushes the plants and animals further out.
Before the night was finished, the photographer herded all the masters together for one happy group shot. Of course with beer, BBQ and country music playing a few of them got frisky and cut up for the camera. The somms rarely get together in these numbers when there isn’t a test or some task involved and to just share the pleasure of each other’s company is as rare as that white Mouton. So, good for them, they all seemed to enjoy cutting up with each other and kicking back on a warm Ferragosto night deep in the heart of Texas..
We are now officially in the dog days of summer around these parts. Italians are flocking to one vacation or another, cell phones are not working, email is down, fax machines have melted into the past. The Italians never forget August.
In the room where the healer works on the energy patterns of folks who come in with back pains and such, there was quite a psychic stirring. I was off to the side in a private room, really his office with a low table. I fell asleep. When I awoke I heard a women weeping. My healer friend is leaving today go overseas, where he conducts seminars. He came into my room and looked spent. I could feel it. It drew me out too. There is a lot of pain and suffering and anger in the world right now. There is also a tremendous amount of connected emotions. Tielhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist hinted at that connectedness with his theory of the 
This wine (and life) thing distills to these two coin ends, anticipation and consummation. We want to try this Soave or that Barolo; we want the ’68 or the ’07. We want the orange wine and then the older rosé wine and then the sparkly wine and then the ancient red wine. We want the young girl in the second row with the long flowing hair, and then the red haired mat cutter in the frame shop and then the long haired blond in the restaurant and then the dark eyed beauty in the jeans. We want, we want, we want. Anticipating some immeasurable pleasure or revelation. Desire, desire, desire. We are all hungry little wolves prowling the grasslands looking, hunting, needing.
When I was a young boy, the town I lived in, a resort, filled up for a holiday, I remember lying in my bed on a Saturday night. I was all of 10 or 11. I swore then I could hear people making love, I could hear their collective screams of pleasure on those spring nights when the world was blossoming in my head.
It is energized and fed by the anticipation of something special. Wine, like passion, when bottled up, can only wait so long. Knowing when to open it up is the key. Waiting can be as much fun as what it is one is waiting for. If you buy that bottle of 1985 Sassicaia and hold on to it for 20 years, the pleasure of anticipation might be as rewarding as the consummation. It might even be better. If the wine is corked, isn’t the last 20 years of thinking about that wine all the reward one could expect? At that point it would. But how bad would that be? Has any one wine really made a critical difference in one’s life?
I still have a few bottles in my wine closet. Some of them have aged with me. I am not sure I want to open them up and end our long journey together. I have more recently and the final act has been wonderful, don’t get me wrong. But then what? Le commedia finite? O comincia?
