Unforgettable in Every Way

And forever more that’s how you’ll stay

Lately at wine dinners and talks, people ask me how I got into the wine business. I tell them it was an accident, and a damn lucky one at that. Often we talk over certain wines, maybe they were epiphanies, maybe they were special wines along the trail of a lifetime. I am a label saver. These are the stories about twelve of the unforgettable ones.

I was working in an Italian restaurant and we must have had ten cases of this wine, the 1970 Vino Nobile di Montepulciano from Melini. It was a good wine, a good year and the stars aligned around this wine. I think the wholesaler was selling it at the time for $5 a bottle. I bought a case for my house. This was the wine that made me fall, in a big way, for Vino Nobile.

The same wholesaler also had a bunch of Calissano 1969 Barolo and Barbaresco Riserva Speciale. They were asking about $10 a bottle then, around 1980. I had a little wine bar that I was running at the time, and we had it on the list for about $20. I still have a bottle of the Barbaresco in the wine closet. This was my entry into the wines of the Langa, one that endures for going on 30 years now.

When I started working in wholesale, the company I worked for had some eclectic wines. One of them was the Scanavino Barolo, also a Riserva Speciale 1969. We sold the wine for about $8 and often discounted it lower to move multiple cases. It was a “value” wine, meaning that it filled a category on a wine list or in a wine shop for a Barolo that folks wouldn’t get scared off by the price. I liked the wine enough, much better than the cheaper Orsolani wines that were really rock-bottom priced. At least Scanavino looked official with the label and the bottle (what we did in those days to interest people in Italian wine). It was far from making the world safe for (or from) Italian wine.

The company also dealt directly with Angelo Gaja. We had a bunch of his 1976 Barbaresco and 1978 Barbera. The 76 Barbaresco was a funny wine. Hot year, the fruit was fleeting and the acids were searing. But the juiciness of the Nebbiolo grape, especially from the kinder and gentler Barbaresco appellation, made a wine of interest. It was expensive, selling for over $20 wholesale. Somewhere I have a file with Telex communications I had with Gaja about ordering the wines. I will dig it out and blog about it sometime.

When I moved on to another company I came into contact with Armando de Rham and his company in Florence. Armando had an office in the Piazza Annunciata, where I once stayed for a month in a hostel run by nuns. One of his wines was this 1971 Barbaresco from La Spinona. I still see Pietro Berutti at Vinitaly. He is very old now and bent over. Sometimes I walk by his booth and he is napping. Like his little dog on the label, he has earned his rest. I loved this wine and the people who made it and we made a lot, a lot, of friends with this wine. We sold it for about $11-12.

The wines of the Maremma, in 1982, were unknown to America. But the Le Pupille 1978 was a groundbreaking wine. Tachis oversaw winemaking there and the 1978 vintage, another year of 13 moons (like 2009) produced a rich, fruity, grainy, delicious wine. We sold it for $5, and it was an uphill struggle with the Italian restaurateurs. Now Morellino is more fashionable, but I am not sure I have ever had one as good as the way I remember that 1978.

Villa di Capezzana is an old favorite of mine. This week, the grandson of Count Ugo Bonacossi, Leone, was in town and we worked the market for a day together. Leone is half Tuscan and half Sicilian and he is an old soul. His first love is art, but the winery and family called. And so Leone is in America for six weeks. The 1978 Carmignano was a revelation, as was the 1975 we also offered. My colleague, Guy Stout, fell in love over a bottle of Carmignano. His first two sons are here, partially thanks to the Villa di Capezzana. The current wine, the 2004, is as good as the 1978 was. I remember the 1937, when Armando got us a couple of cases and I sold them to an Italian restaurateur in Fort Worth, Texas. Unfortunately his wife and he went through a messy divorce and I fear some of the wine went missing. Or so the story goes.

When I went to visit Lou Iacucci in Queens in 1983, he turned me on to Maculan and Torcolato. I remember what passion Lou had about this wine and wine in general. But thanks to Lou I became infused with a love for the tropical dessert wines from the Veneto. Ciao, Capo.

The Selvapiana 1977 Chianti Rufina Riserva was a wine l loved to sell and to drink. We sold it for $7, a steal. And the wine aged very well. I drank my last bottle of 1977 in 1997 and it was velvet. Francesco Giuntini, a relation to the Antinori family, looked after this property. They made a wonderful olive oil which we had many cases of and by which I learned to love Tuscan olive oil, made all the more dear from the deep freezes in the 1980’s that decimated the olive trees in Tuscany.

I have had a love affair with Vernaccia. On again, off again, that kind of affair. But when it was good it was really good. The Strozzi 1982 was a spot on specimen and it brought a lot of pleasure to the people whose hands (and mouths) I put it into. Remember, this was in a time when Italian white wines, as a rule, were pretty dismal, oxidized, yellow to brown wines that barely made the ocean voyage. The Vernaccia was a tough old bird and loved to travel. I have fond memories of the happiness this wine gave to many scores of people.

Vietti was a winery that set Piedmont on its side. The proto-critter labels, the modern winemaking approach, these were difficult wines to sell in 1984. But the Dolcetto was one of my faves and I loved to put this in the hands of willing Italian restaurant owners. My restaurateur friend Alessio was one who understood my passion and supported it with his loyalty. The wealthy and influential, the cream of Dallas society, drank these wines at his little restaurant, and they loved the experience. Those days have changed, but the memories stoke the fire of my passion today.

Finally, the 1975 Cavallotto Barolo. Another Riserva Speciale, from Castiglione Falletto. 1975 wasn’t a vintage that many people knew too much about, but the wine had great fruit and balance. It was a big wine that was a gateway for folks sticking their toes into the greater Italian wine pond. I have great fondness for this wine and for all of these wines, as they were some of the wines that have defined my life in wine. And when people ask how I got into this wine business I have wines like these to offer up as evidence of the miraculous little accident that is my life, here on the wine trail in Italy.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Eight signs that your wine is going through midlife crisis

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.”

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Eugenio - bon anima -Sept 7 2005

The Italian Lover

Back in my youthful past, I was always falling in love. My obsessions with women, or cars or wine, or art, were often one sided. I would worship a woman from afar, never to talk to her or even approach her. One woman I pined over for a year before I realized that it was going nowhere, except in my head. I had put her so far up on a pedestal that she became an unimaginable goddess. One night, after I had broken the barrier and actually gotten up the nerve to talk to her, I saw her in a lounge. She had been drinking and was getting quite drunk. I didn’t realize it until she asked me over to join her. I was fresh out of a dark room, printing photos. I was hungry and thirsty but here was the woman of my dreams beckoning me over to sit with her. I forgot my hunger and my fatigue. But a funny thing happened. She confessed to me that she had a crush on me for a year or so and wanted me to come back with her to her room. I didn’t know what to say. I was sober and she was blitzed and right then and there she didn’t seem so desirable. I made an excuse about working late and being tired and got the hell out of that lounge.

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.

Some of this is circumstances. The economy. But some of it is also the expectation that things will return to the way they once were. Does that ever happen? How could it? In the ever present moment of now, there is no returning to another simpler and sweeter time. Not to say that we can’t approach a new epoch of sweetness and desire, like the young lovers who are enthralled with the passion they are newly generating among themselves.

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.

All you need is love, Italian style. And an active list of targets where you can go find orders and move some of this wine out into the world. After all, without vino veritas, I wouldn’t have known my goddess was just a human like me. And she wouldn’t have scared off her potential Italian lover.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Are You Collecting or Connecting?

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?

What one can examine, though, is one’s way of relating to wine and the people and places that make up the story of wine.

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.”

And more often than not, that is what I have been doing. Sure, I take my guides and notes, but the real find is the one I haven’t found before. And the palimpsest that is Italy, when you scratch beneath the surface, will emerge and something wonderful will happen.

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.

To go into a store only to find what one is looking for, whether it be a best value or the most natural wine, is to limit oneself to one’s own story. It is to go in with pre-conceived notions, and that is really all they are, notions, about what and how and why a wine should be. It doesn’t take into account anything outside of one’s own bubble. And that isn’t natural, to me.

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.

That is what I am interested in these days. The whole story, not just some technique popular with urban enophiliacs.

Just like the bees in my tree that have grown and out grown their home or the crazy parrots who escaped their cages and now zoom across the sky with their shrieks of joy, or the lone coyote that has everyone on the neighborhood nervous for their cats, or the little lizards that sit on the large Hoja Santa leaves and sun themselves before they grow too large for the leaves to support their weight. These are my local markers; these are the reasons to connect with the good things on earth. And like that, if it just so happens that some of those good things end up inside a bottle and compel me to gather one or more, I now want it for the connection; not some meaningless collection that someone’s widow or orphan child will have to figure out how to get rid of, long after they're gone.

Written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Photos by Daniele Giuntini

Flying to Nowhere

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.

They don’t know me and I don’t know them. But that’s what we do in the channel I work in. A lot of it is on faith. I don’t charge for it, although the restaurant agrees to buy the wines for the dinner. But it is a service I cheerfully offer. And hopefully there will be 20-30 or more people there.

Last week I did a wine showcase at my local Italian store, Jimmy’s. I love doing events there, because people know they will come and have a good time. And Paul, the beloved owner, will buy a stack of wine and often when the show is good, people will head home with 3,6 or even a dozen bottles. Last week we knocked ‘em dead. The stars were aligned and everybody had a good time. And it makes all those no-show moments disappear.

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.

The point I was trying to make was that even though you set out to do something, it doesn’t always work out like you intend. But that doesn’t mean the opportunities are lost. It’s all a matter of perception.

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.

I write this not to complain about the situation, although when I first was told I wasn’t a happy camper. I’m over that now. It’s August and this is the time to plant the fall garden. The harvest will be in December if things move forward in these times.

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.

Because no one likes to till in barren fields.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Qui Non Si Gode Asilo

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.

But Dallas had hope. Still does. It’s just hard to see with all the bright shiny things floating around.

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.

Another one, a woman in her forties, she battled cancer and won, has taken back to the streets and is running a sales company. I could tell she was excited, to be alive and to have a challenge that seems easy compared to the fight for her life she just went through. So, there are willing participants in this business who want good things for them and their family and the profession. And I imagine we will see this played out on the streets in the next few years in a way that has deeper meaning for the players who will weather the hard times and learn how to get through it successfully. Because as the Italian saying goes, “Qui Non Si Gode Asilo,” Here there is no refuge. Sink or swim.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Make Wine Mine Natural Real

This weekend during the Drink Local Wine and the Texsom events there was a lot of wine tasted; some for learning and some for pleasure. During the three days a number of people with experience and expertise flooded the panels and parties. Not once do I remember anyone getting into an argument over natural wine.

Here on the most unnatural of all soap boxes, the blogosphere, one would think the world was ending and we were all going to hell because some of us, most of us, are actually enjoying the wines we are drinking. This weekend there were no lines drawn in the sand, no scabbards vacated, no friendships ended over the matter of what a natural wine is. I find it all a bit mystifying and hyper-critical, these exaggerated Greek choruses singing their dirges over what is and isn’t natural.

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.”

Bucky Fuller was a god to me. I thought of him as the 20th century Leonardo da Vinci. My son wants to build domes and live in them. We are as close to being his secular disciples as anyone can be in America. What he said to me is like a koan that I have thought about for decades now.

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.”

Once, when I was spending time at a Zen monastery in Northern California, the Roshi went to the local Safeway and bought food to be prepared. Often she would bring back vegetables and rice and fresh foods. But this time she brought back a load of ground meat. I remember when she had it brought into the kitchen some of the cooks were astonished and didn’t know what to do. One of them asked her what she wanted them to do with all of this ground meat. She answered. “Cook it. And don’t get too attached to being a vegetarian. Lose the desire.”

These three episodes have formed some of the ways in which I think about things. Wine, like any other part of life, has its place. But it is not the most important thing for me in life.

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?

This is just my manufactured perception, but to risk losing something real, like love or collegiality or a place in the circle of life, over some concocted opinion about what is natural or not is just an immane assumption.

And we all know what happens to those larger-than-life types.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy