Remembering Dad, Dallas, JFK & a bottle of Thunderbird

Today would have been my dad’s 98th birthday. How the world has changed since he left us in 1985. I was thinking about that as I was driving past Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository yesterday, while in downtown Dallas on business. Dallas, the place where so many things happened that affected me, my family and ultimately our country.

A last supper with an old friend

The internets are rife with social media sites where folks post great wines they just had. This is not one of them. This is a story about an old friend who has been living with me for thirty years. We celebrated his passing with a meal fitting his life, his character and his destiny.

I first met Morello in a cellar in Florence in Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. It must have been 1984. I remember the area because years before I had spent three weeks above in a pensione. I remember we didn’t have the budget for warm water in the bathroom, but I found a way to turn on the water heater when we showered. We were traveling with our two children, one 8 and one 11 months. Wine was still a few years off in the distant horizon.

Miley Cyrus and Bob Dylan: Harmonic Convergence in an Alternate Universe of Orange Wine

♫ I’m just average, common too
I’m just like him, the same as you
I’m everybody’s brother and son
I ain’t different from anyone
It ain’t no use a-talking to me
It’s just the same as talking to you ♫

♫ I put you high up in the sky
And now, you're not coming down
It slowly turned, you let me burn
And now, we're ashes on the ground ♫

Bob Dylan and Miley Cyrus, now there’s a pair. It makes sense in a non-linear world. And so it was this week at FT33, which is one of the hottest restaurants in America.

Etna Harvest 2013 Report from Salvo Foti - Images from VignaBosco

The latest note from Salvo Foti on Mt. Etna is a series of images - They pulled fruit off the old vineyard the Vignabosco (elev 1300 mt.) on Nov 4. The Bosco vineyard is 100+ year old field blend of bush-trained Alicante, Grecanico, Minella and other minor varieties in the area of Bronte, where the great pistacchios come from. This is a grand-mother vineyard of Etna, in my estimation. Great fruit. Great farmers. Solemn and holy place for a Sicilian. The wine being made, as we witness, is the Vinudilice, a rosé beloved by the Etneans and those lucky enough to have tried it. According to the Quincunx site, “It is cultivated by hand and with the help of Ciccio the mule. No refrigeration, yeasts or filtration are used in the wine making process. Decanting and bottling follow the phases of the moon.”

Remember Me? I’m Your Brother

Grappling among the Offshoots ~ Gaglioppo and Nerello Mascalese

I’m the one who played tag with you and listened to you sing and play the piano. I’m the one who fell, more than once, sometimes just to the earth and sometimes out of sight. I’m your brother.

In the vineyards, when the grapes were full, you called from afar to pick the ripe ones for wine. You made pasta and poured red wine and gave shelter for the time. And when the harvest was over you bid adieu, until the next time you were in need. You paid just enough to make it through the winter.

Etna Harvest 2013 Report from Salvo Foti & "I Vigneri"

This just in from my winemaking friend Salvo Foti. Salvo is bringing in the last of the harvest from his Etna vineyards and this is a report, word for word, from his letter. Sharing it with you, dear reader.

An Italian Exodus

It seems wine isn’t the only thing that is trying to get out of Italy. Her people are looking outward again. All this while less fortunate ones risk their lives to get into Italy, many often dying in the process. What does this global diaspora mean for Italy, for America and for the world at large?

These are pretty big questions for a Sunday night. Earlier in the day I went to see my friend Mario. He just turned 97, and he’s slowing down. I wanted to talk to him about something he witnessed during World War II. He was in the battle of Hürtgen Forest, where over 60,000 soldiers perished. Mario was captured and taken prisoner by the Germans. He spent the rest of the war in a P.O.W. camp and lost 40 pounds. He never took food for granted after that.

But Mario didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to reminisce about his father and mother and my grandfather and grandmother; they had come over from Sicily about the same time, and they were friends. Their lives were intertwined and they looked out for each other. When I came to Dallas, my dad called Mario and he looked out after me, gave me a job and essentially helped to start me out on the path, this wine trail that has led me back to Italy so many times.

The Changing Face of Italian-American Food and Wine

After the seemingly endless exercise of packing on a Sunday night and heading out to the airport on a Monday morning, I found myself at home wondering what to eat. I’d been in restaurant after restaurant, been fed this Carbonara and that Carbonara. I’d narrowly escaped truffle oil but still had to deal with crappy balsamic vinegar and overly cooked malloreddus drowning in cream. My veins were crying out for simple; for sustenance, not recreation. I gathered up some fresh vegetables, a nice protein and a bottle of Chianti I knew wouldn’t disappoint.

Everything I know about America I learned from Sergio Leone

Some of the characters I encounter, ones who want to sell their wine to America, have some of the darndest ideas about this market. I get all kind of inquiries, probably enough to write a book about, or at the very least a textbook. But the one that intrigued me was when I met with a winemaker from Italy who thought America was more or less like the way it was portrayed in films like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “For a Fistful of Dollars.” Fascinated by this history-cultural slant and feeling like this deserved further elaboration, I have taken said interpretation to the edge and imagined what our world might have been if Italian wine had come west with the great expansion in the 1800’s.

The Death of Rosé

I remember my first time. It was summer. I was in Tuscany. Invited to dinner at the Villa San Michele in Fiesole. I drove my little car up the hill from Florence. Somewhere along the way I got a little lost and stepped out of the car to ask for directions. The town I stopped in was having a party. They were having some kind of Marxist celebration. Wine was flowing; someone pressed a glass of rough red wine into my hand and tried to get me to dance with them.

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.