Oh, The People You’ll Meet! (At a Wine Trade Tasting)

Oops!... I did it again - Went to a wine trade tasting and seminar. Something I used to do, lots and lots of, when I was visible. But now, it is a rare appearance I make for these things. In any event, it stirred up memories of the kind of folks you might meet at an event like that – let’s call them prototypes of  folks who attend such events, classic exemplars:

• The know-it-all
• The late arriver
• The button-downed
• The always curious, always hungry, always thirsty.
• The odd man out
• The perpetual student
• The true believer

Let’s dig in!

The Depthless Abyss

Somewhere in time - when you remember another time - things were deeper, truer, bluer, more connected to a believable reality. But here we are, with this pitiful excuse for a genuine moment. We’ve come all this way through time, through epochs, millennia, and for this to be the current crowning glory of acceptable existence? This is a dark, but thin comedy. This is a poor replica of the future, an even poorer byproduct of the past. This is a stretch that should be wiped away, for all time. And some day, I pray it will be. This is a travesty.

I’d just opened a bottle of red wine. Lest we think it was a commentary on contemporary happenings in the world, well, you might just have been misdirected. The wine was a washout, it displayed no redeeming features. It was foul smelling, sour, rotten flavored and reeked of spray on tan and mimeograph paper. What were they thinking when they brought this one out into the open?

It had been days since I’d tasted wine, as a cold prevented me from imbibing. Standing up, it had been a bottle I snagged back in 2016 and just let it rest in the cellar. It went through a tumultuous historical period lying there in the darkness. So, I thought it was time. Little did I know, if it was time, it was of another time. Not any time that I’d like to be associated with or in. And yet, here we were.

I put it aside and disregarded it. Hoping the next time I’d have a better experience. And just like that I decided not to pick up another one, nor just yet. “Just leave it be,” a voice inside said. “This is not the time. Let it pass.” So, I did.

There are times when one cannot step into the abyss. Yes, I know it’s there. And every time I open one up, there is the possibility that it could be paradise or perdition. I’m just not ready for the gamble. Let ‘em all rest. I’ll come back later.

 

 

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

wine blog +  Italian wine blog + Italy W

The Sunset Trip

It seems, more and more lately, that aging folks just can’t step away from the dais. Whether it is confined to the wine and spirits trade (and that includes those who write about it) all the way down the spectrum, to the political animals who assume that they are in charge of all of our lives. Once you turn 70, the light just doesn’t burn as brightly. I thought we were going to get a break from the gerontocracy last year, but the old ways, and the illusions about what it is we’re entitled to in this life, burned bright enough to carry them over for another cycle.

The End of the Golden Age of Wine

Wine, associated with appreciation and enjoyment and part of a cultural and culinary movement that was defined by the freewheeling social and economic post-World War II era, succumbed in America today at the age of 79. Wine was pronounced dead by Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States.

“Wine was the quintessential Boomer, having risen up in a time which we will look back at as the golden age of wine,” remarked one longstanding wine lover, who was seen wiping a tear from his eye, among the crowd that formed upon hearing of wine’s demise.

Destroying Memories with Invisible Eyes

Temporarily shut in by the arrival of snow (and winter), I was remanded to a nostalgic dream space that has been annexed by an external calamity of Biblical proportions. It’s a strange land, this Gulf of America, I find myself in. At once I’m excavating images from the past to rework them for a photo project. Yet I can’t help feeling somehow, I am destroying memories. It seems that is the price of art, so I have recently been reminded, by a master in the field.

A French Gladiator on Italian Soil

A young wine friend texted me a photo of a bottle he had in his presence, a 2013 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Pucelles. In the secondary market that wine sells for about $350 today.

In the last month I have been craving a bottle of Puligny Montrachet. I don’t know why. When I was working in Hollywood in the 1970’s, I was introduced to Puligny, and it stuck with me. I loved everything about the wine. So, when my young friend dangled that bottle in front of me, I was both salivating with desire and foaming at the mouth with envy. Alas, it was not to be. The wine was out of my reach.

At Long Last – A Prescription for Uncertainty

This week I cleared out the RSS feeds for wine writing links. Since I’m not following the wine news anymore, and not part of the wine news-making claque, why track it? There’s this unspoken “rule” in photography that I learned from one of the masters that I followed: “When you don’t know what to shoot, turn around and go the other way. After a minute, turn left. In another minute, turn right. That should get you back on track.” So it is with wine, and especially about writing about it.

What I’ve  found from doing this blog since 2005 is that my interests lie not in the latest trends or the buzz around things like that. Just like photographs, my yardstick is, how will it age in 20 years?

Onward Through the Fog ~ A Treatise on Montepulciano d’Abruzzo

At long last, the red wine known as Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is having its day in the sun, basking in the glory from the newly anointed acolytes in the world of wine writing and wine influencers. I say both, because now it is that an influencer has much more sway than a journalist, a blogger or simply, a poster (that is, one who posts). This is not a lamentation as much as it is a tract on how we got here, and why it took so long for us to get to the Promised Land of Abruzzo.

Strange Bedfellows ~ Non-Traditional Wine and Food Matches

Photo by Louis Cevola

In my life, there have been those occasions when a seemingly odd wine and food combination made perfect sense. Far from traditional, these moments offered insight into the arcane mechanism of wine and food pairings. As I add up my revolutions around the sun, I find things like absolutes to be more of a roadblock than a thruway. Viva la revolución!

Dispatch from the wine cellar: Is there a place for Italian wine in 2025?

After Thanksgiving I started a project: reducing, eliminating, paring down and finely tuning my wine collection. After 40+ years of amassing wines, I realized there were wines that were: 1) too old, 2) already dead, 3) not interesting, 4) too many and 5) I’ll never live long enough to drink all of them.

Now, we’re not talking about thousands of bottles. I’m not that kind of collector. But it has gotten up into the hundreds. And my wine closet, where I kept most of them over that past 30 years, just didn’t seem to be a good usage of space and energy. I bought a small unit, holding about 160 of the top wines I wanted to keep. And I had an older unit, which could hold the larger format bottles, the port and some additional wines that didn’t make it to the larger cooler, but I just couldn’t part with them yet. That left me with 150 or so bottles that just needed to go.

Everything I Know About Wine I learned in Ballet Class ~ A Revision

Well here we are December 1^st! Wow, what a year it’s been. For me, it started off with surgery and a knee replacement. And then, like a snowball – on a one-way road down to hell - it just kept accelerating towards chaos. I’d share more about the trials and tribulations of yours truly, but quite frankly, I’m fed up with them. So, I’m going to pivot, now that my leg is much better.

When I was in university, the arts department chairman and his wife, who ran the dance department, “recruited” me to join the ballet class. They “needed” men, and I was low hanging fruit for the picking. I “volunteered” at first reluctantly, and then after I realized I would be in a close setting with 35 women, just them and me sweating to the oldies, I thought again. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

The epiphany moment I had was when we were doing this “opening of the flower to the sunrise” choreography. I was the “pistil” and the women were the “petals.” They all laid their hands on me and did some movement and their pressure held me in place while I held them up, in a manner of speaking. It was then that I realized that not only was ballet an amazing discipline, both physical and cerebral, but it was a model for things to come in my future life in wine. Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch. But so was the all the stuff I learned about wine from the nuns and Catholic school. So, here goes:

End of harvest notes: "So, where we at?"

“Are you still doing your wine blog?” I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard that lately. Usually followed by “For some reason, I haven’t been getting them.” Which was news to me, as I hadn’t realized that I was “sending” them to anyone. Maybe once upon a time, Blogger had a process by which that happened, But if they did, long ago they stopped that. And seeing as I am not invested in technologically figuring out how to deliver my weekly blog to folks, I’m a bit bewildered. Actually, it doesn’t really matter to me. It is a web-log, after all. It is something I do as a weekly exercise, for myself. Anything beyond that is gravy.

From the archives: Remembering Dad, Dallas, JFK & a bottle of Thunderbird

Friday would have been my dad’s 98th 109th 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 the other day, while in downtown Dallas. Dallas, the place where so many things happened that affected me, my family and ultimately our country.

What Does the Future Hold for Wine in Sicily? A Sicilian Sojourn Pt. II

“You’ve got it all wrong, Alfonso,” a young influencer tells me. “You have to get yourself in front of the camera, show your face, strut your stuff!” Yeah, that might have been OK for me 30 or 40 years ago, but now? I don’t think so.

That was part of a conversation regarding one’s place in the world of wine and how to explode one’s brand online, as recommended by someone who is very successful at it. They also happen to be young, good-looking and affluent. None of which I purport to be, ever again.

Always Coming Home: A Sicilian Sojourn Pt.I

Imagining cultural difference that sheds light on the limitations of one’s own culture.

Riding on a bus, from Catania to Palermo, my time on Etna was done. I had apprehensions about coming back to Sicily, almost cancelled coming. The last time I’d been here, someone, or some thing,  tried to kill me. They failed, but not without leaving scars. With the passage of the last eight years, and all that we have been through, what with Covid and the ensuing chaos that surrounded that time, I didn’t know if getting on a plane to come to Sicily would be a wise thing.

Fortunately, last year, my experience in Venice allayed larger misgivings about travel. Look, Italy is a very easy place to be in, for many people. Even if one isn’t the most fluent in the Italian language or knowledgeable about the quirky regional customs, with a little humility and the faintest hint of awareness, one can navigate across Italy, and it can be a most pleasant experience.