For Us, There is Only the Trying

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate —but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

                                                                                 -T.S. Eliot

Unable to post on Thursday; travel, work, distraction, exhaustion. Sometimes it happens. It’s only a blog, not some heraldic solution to the world’s problems. Life gets in the way, princess.

Five Hot Italian Wines to Bag for Autumn

Someone turned off the summer switch and turned on the autumn one. To celebrate these cooler days and our procession to the holidays, I have found five wines from Italy that I’m bagging up and taking to the celebrations. They are:

2007 – The Second Tuscan Coming

How many times has it happened to you? You’re in some place where you are just backed up against a wall and have nowhere to go but straight on through it? In the wine business, we’re in the “O” of O-N-D and already it seems like we’ve been at this for a while. We’re backed up against a wall and we still have three months to go.

I’ll Have What She’s Drinking

Imagining the perfect wine

In our everyday world, at the end of a day, many of us go home, change into something more comfortable, look in the kitchen for something to cook and pop a bottle of wine. Like breathing, we do it often. And as is often the case, we don’t think too much about it. And for all intents and purposes that is usually more than adequate.

This morning I read an article in the NY Times, I'll Have What She's Thinking, about scientific inquiry into the nature of spontaneous orgasm. In the haze of an endorphin high and while eating a delicious breakfast, I poured over the article. One graph caught my attention:

“The finding was significant in that it challenged a common stereotype — that men achieve orgasm more readily than women. Now science was suggesting that, at least for some women, all it took was a vivid imagination.”

An Italian Sommelier’s Diary: The Nightmare Table

The scene is an urban setting somewhere in the Western half of the United States. A wine waiter is working a large party of folks who are celebrating. Maybe they have just come from the Emmys. Or perhaps the stars aligned to have all these people in a room at the same time, partying. Our sommelier is called over to a table of seven, four women and three men. At which point I will yield to the wine steward, who will relate the following events in his own voice.

Obsessed with Eggplant - by way of Israel - via Calabria, Sicily and New Orleans

Most of the past week was spent in New Orleans. It’s the closest I can get to Sicily, and the food culture there is somewhat of a recharge for me. The people are relationship driven and the wine and cocktail scene there is bristling with life. It’s my kind of place and it’s in my back yard, so I am very happy to go there.

The Future of Italian Wine in America

If there is one thing in our American’s DNA, it’s our tendency to look forward. We had a brief fling in the 1960’s with being here and now but that passed. And though now we are obsessed with our yoga-ramen- food truck pageant of life; that too will pass. What will never pass is that which we can never have – the stuff out there in front of us that we constantly reach for. And that, dear readers, is where Italian wine is sitting at a little table in a busy piazza, having a caffè macchiato and waiting patiently for us to show up.

One Last Harvest

They told me I’ve been here long enough. Time to make room for new growth. Told me to prepare for my last harvest.

It used to be that an old-vine vineyard was prized, revered. Something in it had the depth of meaning more profound than just terroir. Dirt plus wisdom. Now, those attributes are no longer prized. The owners want bigger numbers. And their analysts tell them they need new and shiny.

Finally! A Refosco to Love

It was a late night and looked to be an even earlier morning. Shutting down the evening with a wine dinner, singing Neapolitan songs with my pal Luciano, I scurried home to pack and sleep for a few hours. 4:30AM arrived sooner than I had hoped. It was Sept. 11 and I was getting on a plane, this time to Houston.

Arriving at the first account at 10:00 AM, my colleague opened up two bags with Italian wine, Barolo, Barbaresco, Sauvignon, Tuscan, rosato, you name it, we had it. And there in the middle of the pack was the Refosco.

I’m not one you can count as a fan of Refosco. I find them too nervous, too blue. They remind me of the dead finger trick, where you put your finger next to a friends and then rub them with your other hand, one finger on each side, to give one the sensation of touching a dead finger.

Little Tony of Italy, Bressan of Friuli and the chasm of cultural chauvinism

A woman ventures out from her familiar surroundings with her daughter and her camera. The era is the 1930’s. An unusual act in those days. Or so the story goes. A series of books ensued, covering stories of children in different countries, from Mexico to Canada, Sweden to Italy, comprising the "Children of America" and "Children of All Lands" series. A friend and a mentor left me a copy of one of the books when he died, one “Little Tony of Italy.”

I put “Little Tony of Italy” on the bookshelf and there it sat. And then last month when the mess in Friuli with Fulvio Bressan hit the internets this book fell into my lap. I thumbed through it and started thinking about racism.

An introvert’s guide to Italian wine

I’m a devout introvert. Ten minutes in a NY subway and I can’t wait to get upstairs, where there are even more people. Naturally shy as a kid, I spent a lot of time by myself. It was easy, living in the desert. But when I went to Italy the first time, and landed in Rome, I had no choice. I had to earn to live with the others.

Back home, in the span of a week, I've come across a lot of people looking for wine. It is my job to try and make that wine Italian.

The “Other” Italian Wine Guy

Joe Piccola just landed in Rome. This will be the first of two trips in the same month to Italy. Joe just became a grandpa, his personal life has gotten reinvigorated, he’s lost 50 pounds and he’s spending more time in the vineyards of Italy. And those of us at home couldn’t be any happier for him.

Alessandro Masnaghetti's Mission to Chart the Greatest Barolo Vineyards

The hierarchies of the great wines of the Langhe are still a mystery to me. After 40+ years, I look over the panorama and am baffled over the process of how specific wines of Barolo and Barbaresco came to be regarded by experts, enthusiasts and Italian wine lovers. I posed this quandary earlier this week on Antonio Galloni’s Vinous site and there ensued some lively discussions. But as I pushed away from the table, I felt unsatiated. How is it after all these years, I still struggle to understand what is arguably the greatest red wine region in Italy, if not the world? I’ve been there countless times, walked the hills, met the players, and still I cannot explain, in a simple manner, what is going on in the Langhe to a young wine lover. As one in the industry there is a whole new classroom of students and salespeople thirsting for guidance. I feel we must find some way to point them in a direction. The next generation deserves that, at the very least.

In the past, people have tried to map the great vineyards of the Langhe. Renato Ratti’s was the one we used for many years. Burton Anderson gave it a try as well. And countless regional Italian pamphlets and booklets tried to organize the vineyards of the Langhe. One of the best one in recent times is A Wine Atlas of the Langhe. Still,  the concentration of the area and the Italian sensibility to endlessly discuss things has mired the process.

You Can't Go Home Again

“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”  -Thomas Wolfe

The past few days in New York, walking paths I used to walk when I was 23 and New York was a much older place. Bleeker Street in January, it couldn’t get any direr for me. Walking past the Chelsea Hotel on my way to work, looking at the plaques of the dead writers, many who never made it to 40. At 23, that was almost half a lifetime away, but the winter of ’75 was a bitter halfway point.

Today on Bleeker Street, it was bright and breezy, a perfect 80°F, just the day for the last of the rosé wines, a Donnas from the Valle d’Aoste and a Rossese Rosé from Liguria. Add two glasses of Trebbiano Spoletino to go with the artichokes alla giudia for good measure. Almost 40 years later, New York is manageable. But as Thomas Wolfe said all those years ago, you can’t go home again. Not to New York. Not to California.

Canaiolo’s tale of love lost

From the dies canulares storybook

It had been a brutally hot summer. Sangiovese came up to me and announced, “I can’t take it here anymore with you. There’s too much tradition, it’s too provincial and it’s just too damn hot. I’m heading to the coast to live with Cabernet. I need someone strong and vibrant, and I need to feel the cool sea breeze between my leaves.” And just like that, she was out of my life.