What has become of our land?

Tonight in front of a sold-out crowd in the back room at my favorite Italian store I led the group through a tasting of Italian wines. There were a lot of new folks there so I told them my story. And for the first time I realized how tied I am not to one, but three places. First is California, which is where I was born and grew up. Next is Italy, which is my wellspring for inspiration. And lastly, there’s Texas, which in its basic natural state, can affect a gravitational pull. All three of these places share a commonality – they are being altered radically from the vision I have of them inside my heart of hearts.

A Fine Line

An Italian Wine Blog

It doesn’t happen that often. You’re planning a meal at home and choose a wine. The wine turns out to be the wrong choice. No big deal. You find another and move on. That happened to us recently.

The problem? The initial wine wasn’t one I would normally select. A 15.1% Santa Rita Hills Chardonnay. The wine aged exclusively in French Oak (75% New Barrels) is not available to the public. It is only available, as a gift, to select members, restaurants and fine wine shops.

I was intrigued. So I opened a bottle and tried it. Within minutes I was repulsed by the imbalance of the wine. I am a California native – there are Californian wines I like. The other night I opened a 2006 Rafanelli Cabernet with a steak. It was perfect with the food. The wine was rich and oaky and delicious with the meat.

The Ultimate Wine

That by which you can taste, but that which you can never taste

As with all things, there is always the Unobtainable. No wealth, no power, no amount of influence matters. Race as we may, looking to try this bottle or that rare vintage, some things cannot be held. Sometimes it is just beyond the human experience.

Sound odd to you? "What is that you are claiming?" you might ask? Less of a claim than a reality. The reality of the Ultimate Wine.

The Ultimate Wine doesn’t exist. Not for mere earthlings. Or at least for the tainted adults on the planet. The wine is possible, even probable. But no one has ever tasted it and reported back. No score, not 100 points. That would be bringing it down quite a ways out of its higher range. No lofty purple prose to describe it. Words, really? Again, that would be a pity to cut it down that way.

At best a wine like that could be an aspiration for a wine lover. But a destination? Sure tragedy. For to achieve an appreciation of something like the Ultimate Wine one must have Higher Powers. And wings not secured by wax.

The Summer of Zibibbo

In June of 2001 I went to Pantelleria for two weeks by myself. My wife had died four months earlier and I was grieving her loss. It was summer and I just wanted to go away. Thirty years earlier I had passed on an invite to go to the island. This time I just went, alone.

I ran a lot and swam and rode a scooter around the little island. I went down to the market and bought fresh vegetables and fish and cheese and cured meats. And wine. Being not far off from Sicily there were few choices. But one of the wines I bought, a dry Moscato Zibibbo, was one I still remember fondly.

Carrying water, waiting for the wine

Wine, frozen in time, that’s what all those bottles in the cellar turned out to be. And like our friends and family and life in general they are subject to a constant barrage of elements resulting in a permanent state of change. Think of a wine cellar (or closet) as a laboratory of change in which the wines stored will surprise, delight, disappoint and occasionally be opened at the very perfect moment they were meant to be.

Like my fig tree outside in the back. Three days ago some of the figs were ready. Now some other ones are. But the ones that were ready three days ago and didn’t get picked, now are suffering, oxidized and cooked from sitting under high temps for days. Then under a leaf in the blazing noon day a little fig will poke their head out and you will pick it and it will be cool inside. Much like wine.

The Sign of a Great Wine

Sometime ago I remember reading about a person who was learning to do an activity and the teacher was emphasizing that to really arrive at mastery one had to stop trying, thinking and hoping and then when all that happened the person and the activity would fuse seamlessly. Maybe it was a Castaneda book or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Or some other book. It doesn’t matter. But last night after a long day of scrubbing windows and cleaning up a place to ready it to sell, we gathered around the grape-picking table with some Texas BBQ and all the accoutrements of a meal in that genre - potato salad, coleslaw, some fries, pickles and hot peppers - and we went after it. Tagged the two meat, two potato platter. And along with that the wine.

A Land of Giants

Last week we got off the grid. Back to nature. No phones, no email, no blogging. Took hikes, cooked, read three books (analog), shot pictures, cooked, drank wine and looked at the United States from the other side of the Juan de Fuca Strait. And did a mess of thinking.

And while I did a lot of thinking about the country I was born and live in, my thoughts also were in Piedmont. In fact when I came back I posted that little one about the Cannubi matter.

In my research, I read and pored over maps, old catalogs, pictures, all kinds of ephemera I have saved over the decades.

To Cannubi or not to Cannubi?

I am writing this as an outsider; one who loves the wines of the Langhe. And as an outsider I am blinded by distance but clarified by the perspective that distance gives. As well, there are many on site and around the world that are infinitely more qualified to give the definitive argument. As with my character I will not sing into that microphone, but will point myself more towards an existential viewpoint. But first, some basic information.

The Last Leg

From the archives - posted 12/27/09

from the "uchronic meanderings" department

Thursday Aug 4
The trip out of Rustic Tuscany was bumpy. After a week of cloudless days, it started to rain in Pisa. And rain it did, all the way to New York. The rains must have rusted the cargo bay doors at JFK, because we waited over two hours for our luggage. Really funny to be with several score of Italians, coming to America for holiday, and to hear them talk of the situation like we do about Fiumicino or Malpensa.

New York was wet, but not unbearably so. It actually cooled the city down. I stopped to crash a night at a friend’s house, seeing as I lost my connection to Providence. We walked to a local pizzeria, and had a bite. And while I had beer, I did notice there were plenty of cool wines to sample, including some of Angiolino Maule’s wine and also an interesting Gragnano.

Odd that Maule’s wines come through Dressner, what with the yeast thing and all. Such a nice guy. Maule, that is.

Lament for an Old Giant

from the archives - posted 7/2/09

It seems like everyday we get another headline announcing the passing of someone who was part of the larger American family. I have been thinking about this iconic Tuscan wine, one that grew up with America. And as America developed, so this wine also expanded in the marketplace and on tables across America. For many people this wine came to symbolize Italian wine. In restaurants, surely, in its day, the top tier had more swagger than Brunello.

Le avventure di Ginocchio

"Canta pure, Grillo mio, come ti pare e piace"

Dining out the other night, we ordered a wine, a simple Rosso di Montepulciano. The server tussled with the cork, but eventually expunged it. On first sniffing the wine and then sampling it, I thought it had an ever-so-slight trace of corkiness. But it was so minute I chalked it up to watching the server struggle with the cork and imagined some sort of transference.

A few minutes into it though, the funk appeared to be magnifying. And then it vanished, only to pop up and disappear a few times. It wasn’t that the wine was bad, but the wine was making itself a larger part of the meal than it needed to be. All of this going through my head as other things were going on around the table. Little monkey-brain chatter, “This wine isn’t right.” “Stop griping and enjoy the experience.” “But something’s wrong.” “Shut up and let me enjoy the meal and company.” This mad little dialogue endured until the cloud drifted away sometime before desserts appeared.

Bank On It

"The wise man does at once what the fool does finally."- Niccolo Machiavelli

Money seems to be on everyone’s mind. The European Community is striving to pull Greece and Spain away from the ledge. In America, people are still spending money they don’t have. Last night I witnessed weekend millionaires spending money in ways that I could never bring myself to do. And I am more likely able to afford to spend the way I saw these folks spending. Not that I ever would. It’s highly predictable that they do this every Friday and Saturday night, if not Thursday as well as Sunday brunch. Their debts add up. Until no shovel will be able to dig them out.

Did the “millionaire weekend” contagion pass from the local party-goers to Spain and Greece? Is there something about the thrill of getting something without having to earn it, save for it and then pay for it? Is it human nature? Wiring? Greed? Impatience? Or just a lack of imagination?

The Curative Dose

"There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on.”― Rod Serling

Yesterday on NPR’s Marketplace Kai Ryssdal interviewed Marco Bardazzi of the newspaper La Stampa in Turin, Italy. Mr. Bardazzi had some interesting observations. Read for yourself:

Ryssdal: How's the mood in Italy these days with all the turmoil around you in Spain and Greece?

Bardazzi: Well the mood is bad because we see that the situation is not improving and there are a lot of problems all around Europe. We are really looking forward for a European meeting that is scheduled on June 28 in Brussels. We are looking at that as the possible turning point in the crisis, but we are not sure that this will happen.

Ryssdal: Haven't we been at the turning point many times before though?

Bardazzi: Yes, you are right. We have hoped for several other turning points so we don't know if this will be another hope for Europe, but really it comes down to this meeting on June 28 that could decide what will happen to the euro and the European Union.

Ryssdal: Do Italians ever look at the United States and say to themselves, man you guys think you have troubles, but you don't know what you're talking about -- this is really rough over here.

Bardazzi: Yes, there's a strange feeling right now toward the United States. Some people think that the U.S. are those that have put us in trouble right now. At the same time there are many others who think that from the United States we can see some signs of recovery and we don't have those signs here.

Under the Tuscan Scum

Il Prezzo del Potere

“What do you think of Gaja’s Brunello?” a wine enthusiast sidled up behind me and asked. It’s the kind of question I have been getting more often. Folks who are getting into Italian wines or who have just come back from two weeks in Tuscany. You know the kind where they find a villa outside of San Gimignano and share it with two or three other couples and their scadload of kids. Private chef, day trips in and out of the compound (“Just make sure you get back before it gets dark”). Insulated from the scary Italy. Safe for the American kids. Under (but not among) the Tuscan Sun.

What do they want me to say? Of course I've had the wine, had it before Gaja bought it, back when I was poor but could still afford it.

The Battle for Brunello

There are many more qualified to offer their thoughts on the subject, but for some reason as I was jogging I couldn’t get these ideas out of my head. I started to go down the line of all the Brunellos I had had since I tried the first one I’d ever had, the 1964 Costanti. That wine, a memory that seared my impression of Brunello, was as good as I could have hoped for. It was 16 years old when I tried it and an unexpected treat. I was working at an Italian restaurant and the owner was sitting with his wife having dinner. It was a Saturday night and the evening was winding down. The sommelier, an older (35-ish) lady in short shorts and full sommelier regalia took a liking to me and called me over to the cellar, where she was decanting a wine. “Take a sip of this,” she offered. The color was medium-light ruby with a slight tinge of tan on the edges. The aromas were flowery, salty, cherry, a wild herbal note like oregano/rosemary, but less obvious than those. And then I took a sip. In the flavors I tasted the warm afterglow of love, a sunset on the Pacific, a deeply wooded vale, a bowl of bitter-sweet cherries and a rush of mellow alcohol slightly rubbed with the oxidative caress of soft wood.