Haven’t we been here before? A signpost on the wine trail in Italy

As I look over the essays and posts I have written this year, I warily eye the subject matter that appears on this site. I shouldn’t be, I’ve written all of them myself, just as I have been doing for going on 20 years now. But I can’t help wondering if I’ve reached the bottom of the barrel, tapped out, so to speak.

In essence, the jury is still out. I’ve done a bunch of stuff here on the wine trail in Italy. And it has become a repository of images, ideas, and notions that I find myself referring back to more often than I ever imagined I would be doing. So, it has achieved the goal of being a web-log, for my purposes.

As to if it still holds any interest to the thousands of reader who happen upon this site weekly, well that is another question for another day.

David Brooks wrote this column in the New York Times recently, Be Careful About What You Want, in which he ruminates over these five struggles:

• The struggle between craft and reward  

• The struggle between gift love and need love 

• The struggle between excellence and superiority 

• The struggle between high and low desires 

• The struggle between ambition and aspiration

Reading and observing over these almost 20 years (in five months) regarding the wine trade where I worked for 40, those struggles resonate. Not just in work-time but in living a full life. Now that I have the time and luxury of reflection, they impart an urgency that grabs me and shakes me and interrogates me and accuses me. 

And I ask this question: Haven’t we been here before? 

Like Nothing Ever Before

How often have you opened a bottle of wine and thought that you had never tasted anything like what just came out of that bottle in your lifetime? Early on in one’s experience, I imagine one could say that often enough. But after a few years of tasting hundreds, maybe thousands of wines a year, when does that special bottle percolate up to the top and reveal itself to one’s taste buds?

Problem: Wine in Crisis? Remedy: Move forward, like an arrow. Fearlessly.

The past month I have been feverishly working on a project involving Italian wine and how better to communicate its better aspects to consumers, who seem interested but are deluged with a tsunami of wine offerings from Italy. Call it a laboratory, if you will. What it is, is one place in time and space where the progress of Italian wine can be measured, albeit somewhat anecdotally. It is a real place and real people are making buying decisions on the wine they will drink tonight or during the weekend, and any number of situations where wine is called for. And I have good news.

In Service of Italian Wine

Now that I am “retired” I’ve spent some time reflecting on the years I worked in the wine trade. I am glad I survived those years, for I have a list of men and women who didn’t. At first, I thought it was just normal, but as the list grew and grew, I realized I was dodging bullets. Scores of young people, my colleagues, perished in the 40 years I was working. And they were not old people. Time just caught up with them earlier than the rest of us. That said, in reflection, I also realize that there were a few bullets aimed directly at me. How I managed to survive them is the subject of this essay.

That ain’t Italy, folks – Tourism in the 21st Century

The image above was taken from the Instagram site of a hotel I stay at occasionally in Rome. It is their way, I suppose, to offer up a fantasy view of a Rome that is Disney-like in its aspirational tone. While I can appreciate their desire to offer up a vision that will lift people up and take them away to a place where light and joy reigns, my present thoughts about travel digress. While we all need a little escape these days, and we are in the summer months, which for many people, traditionally, is a time for a vacation, this is also a time when many people around the world are suffering, needlessly. To take time “off” from the pressing and urgent problems of our day, seems ill-timed. Add to that, the over-consumption that is designed into today’s tourism industry, and put it in a place like Rome, Venice, or all of Italy, and all of a sudden, a country turns into a cruise ship. The recent events in Venice with the spectacle of a billionaire’s second marriage galvanized this concept into a gigantic, sparkling mess.

Wine on lists starting @ $100, concert seats @ $1,000, cars that run $100,000, watches for $250,000 – Excuse me, what planet am I on?

It finally dawned on me - We all live in a yellow submarine – now I know what it means. A submarine, a bubble, a fantasy world, that’s where we’ve landed. While multitudes of innocent children, women and men are sitting ducks for scores and scores of armaments, decision makers weigh in on who will live or who will die, over their espresso martinis and halibut quenelles, and the world outside of the bubble burns crispy.

Inside the bubble, though, not all is rosy. Wine lists where the average price of a bottle of wine is over $100, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour where tickets averaged over $1,000, a plethora of cars (and trucks!) now costing north of $100,000 and, surprise of surprises, a wristwatch that costs more than a Ferrari!

So, how did we get here? And why?

From the Archives: Featured Father ~ A Modern Day Marco Polo

In Memory of Hank Rossi, who left us last year...

Watch out, Bin Laden, "AK-47 Rossi" is on your tail

Enrico “Hank” Rossi has the wandering spirit. Oh, and he likes to wear black, makes it easy to pack a bag and disappear for months at a time. In the shot above he is at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border testing out his skills. He is my featured father for Dad’s day.

From the Khyber Pass to Lalibela, before it is all said and done, Hank will visit almost everyplace his heart desires on earth. He just returned from a 2 month journey across the Silk Trail, spent last Christmas holiday in Egypt and Ethiopia.

How Much Do Wine Expert Ratings Matter?

 

Luciano Pavarotti and young fan at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

In the last year, I have been consulting with my local Italian wine shop, primarily making point-of-sale materials (shelf-talkers) for them. It’s been an interesting project and one which doesn’t take up too much of my time, but also allows me to keep a toe in the water of the wine trade, albeit in a passive and almost invisible manner. Just as I like it. But one of the surprises I have found in making these materials is the relative influence of the various wine writers who review and score wines. There are more now than ever, so the field has been diluted. Hence, it takes a little searching on the internet to find those voices and opinions (and scores) which I gather when making the shelf talkers for the store.

“Don’t Age Wine Longer than 10 Years!”

It was just a simple coffee meeting with an longtime Italian wine colleague, who, last time we talked, has since gone on to their version of fame and fortune. We were talking about how long, ideally, Italian wine should age before it is considered long enough. Seeing as 25% of the wines in my “cellar” are 25 years or older, I was interested in another person’s opinion, as I have had more misses than hits when opening these oldsters. I guess I was looking for advice or maybe validation? In any case, my friend launched into a prolonged jeremiad, which I recorded (with permission) and whereby this post now goes into that mode. Here goes:

In Memoriam: The Death of a Loved One

From the archives

In a world where there are so many tragic events  ̶  from the father who lost his wife and daughter when he was 30 and raised his two sons as a single parent, only to lose a son when he became a grown up, to a young boy who, at 5, lost his father to tribal warfare in Ruanda ̶  what does the loss of one tree matter?

Earlier this month, crisscrossing Texas by car, time and again, I recall the morning I was driving from Dallas to Houston and saw a large, mature oak tree in a field that had toppled over from the rain. I was going 65-70 and as I saw the newly fallen giant, I felt a sharp pain inside. Still green, still hopeful from a Spring filled with energy, this tree wouldn’t see another autumn.

A few weeks later, driving by the same spot, the tree was brown and lifeless now. There was none of that “It‘s still green, it might just be sleeping on its side” pretend one does to internally forestall the inevitable reality of death.

Is Your Favorite Italian Wine ‘Coded?’

It seems "things being coded" is all the rage these days. My preferred AI overview posits coded thusly:

In the context of social media slang, “coded” means that someone, something, or a behavior embodies or resembles a specific character, stereotype, or archetype. It's a way of using recognizable traits to make quick, playful connections and associations, often without explicitly naming the reference.

Jumping off from that point, it got me wondering if Italian wine is coded in these days of disruption. Almost anything can be, especially when one trawls the eddies of social media. Here’s what I have surmised from my brief but spectacular subterranean foray into the dark world of the coded.

An American in Rome – Can a world leader reshape the long tail of Italian wine?

By now the world knows there is a new pope and most of us have become acquainted with him, if just superficially. He, no doubt, will alter the conversation for peace in the world, which has been perched precariously over a precipice, caused by the wants and desires of men.

While the dance cards of peace and humanity and civility and truth and, while we’re at it, reality, get shuffled here in the 21^st century, what about little ‘ol Italian wine? Can Pope Leo XIV reignite the fortunes of growth for this sputtering agro-economic powerhouse? I’m sure there are a few households in Italy where the candles are burning, the altars are set and the prayers are coming at a feverish pace. Yeah, I’m in the “thoughts and prayers” stage over this matter.

A Master Plan for the Master Class

The decade we’re in started in 2020, and it was then that heightened consciousness was brought to racial injustices, and covered many aspects of life, from the way we talk about housing to the language that we use in general.

It was then that the term “Master Bedroom” had a light shone upon it as being indicative of those invisible prejudices we’ve lived with, seemingly, all our lives.

The Red Badge of Carnage (or the other wine that crashed and burned)

While rummaging through my wine stash, I came across a red from Italy and another red from Greece. We were having smoked brisket and I wanted to open up a few bottles of wine to try with the smokey, mellow red meat. I also had cooked up a pile of pinto beans ala Ranchero, the slow way, and they were simmering and ready.

The reds, a 2012 from Mt. Etna and a 2008 from nearby Mt. Ossa in Greece, were my choice after a brief consultation with a friend overseas. Both wines did not make it into my final cut a few months ago, when I consolidated my wine collection down to less than 200 bottles. There just wasn’t room. So, Easter Sunday, they were chosen to show their stuff.

The ˈknobbly road of business, camaraderie and wine compiling

Gran Sasso - Abruzzo

For some reason, I have been going over my wine career and the speed bumps along the road that I incurred during that 40+ year long journey. Not the successes, not even the failures. This dive was into the hearts and souls of people I worked with and for, and their sullied motivations. We are living in a moment where retribution and  grievance are center stage, I get that. And I’m not one to harbor a grudge for long. I’ve witnessed that in wine and friendships since retiring, some have come, some have gone. 

Italian Wine and its SMH moment

The annual Italian wine trade show, Vinitaly, has just ended, and the threatened US tariffs against Italy have just been adjusted down to 10% (for now). What a hell of a week it has been. Now what?

For those who are wondering what direction Italian wine should take in 2025, this could be a bit of a “shaking my head” moment. After all, Kyiv is 1,300 miles from Milan, less than the distance Houston is from New York. And with a protracted war that has taken trade off the table for Italy with Russia, and with an unstable reality driving the American economy (for the foreseeable future), where does Italy pivot to? Local consumption is down, as has alcohol consumption, worldwide. China is seeing their growth slow down, who is going to drink all that Italian wine? Is it time to pare down wine production in Italy? Have we reached that moment?

Where Does Italian Wine Go From Here?

The Quo Vadis Chronicles

Let’s start with the small questions, shan’t we? All kidding aside, as we are in an epochal shift, what shall Italian winemakers do to tackle the existential threat to their livelihoods, their families, and their land? What would I do if I had 5 acres of Sangiovese in Tuscany? Well, there are a number of hacks, short term, so I’ll start with that.

Spring Break

 

Back next week... 

 

 

 

 

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

wine blog +  Italian wine blog + Italy W

First there is a tariff, then there is no tariff, then there is.

Learning to love wine again in the era of Patrioligarchy

“Welcome to earth. Please take a glass and a seat. Someone will be with you shortly.”

I was hoping for a haiku, but the words were too long. It was that time of the year again, for my annual examination of my long-standing relationship with wine. What, you say, can one have a relationship with a liquid alcoholic substance? Well, if one can have a relationship with someone who lived and died over two thousand years ago, why not wine too? After all it was His first miracle.

But that was beside the point. What was really set before me, in that examination of that “relationship,” was a deeper look into the  nature of material reality. Anyone who enters into the world of wine thinks, on first glance, that wine is wine, much like water is water. But upon spending years studying wine, one might realize that wine isn’t just wine, it is a lot of other things. It is culture. It is sustenance. It is history. It is agriculture. It is business. It is beguilement. It is seduction. Yes, it is, all of that. And more.

And then….

Tariff Tornado Season: Steering Alee from Excess Wind, Dross and Excisions

"It's like déjà vu all over again" -Yogi Berra

There appears to be no bottom in the hustle to bloviate and sully us with all the excess bullshit that is being produced these days. Now we’re being sucked into the crisis-cycle of European wine tariffs. If only it were wine, and domestic wine at that. One thing for sure, most of it (the bullshit) is domestic production. It just isn’t anything we can distill, ferment or drink. But it’s a heyday for the honey bucket man - the septic and sewage systems are close to overload from our overlords, who have now proffered upon us the threat of a 200% tariff on European wines (up from 100% in 2020). There’s been a lot of wailing and flailing on this subject. We’ve gone down this road before. Before we, once again, surrender to fear and one more distraction, allow me, if you will, to unpack this manufactured crisis with a little bit of perspective from all my years in the wine trade.

Happiness, happiness…

…everybody wants happiness. Round and round we all do race, everybody looking in a different place.

Yeah, pretty much how it seems. I see so many wine professionals rushing all over the globe, living their best life.

Living large!

And I remember when I was in that stream. It rushed, all about me. I was caught up in it, just as they are now. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But it is not forever. It is not permanent. Just like wine, it peaks. And it has a time when it is perfection. And a time when that moment has passed.

I say this as if I am speaking to any one person in particular. They might be laid up right now, healing. But this also applies to all of us in one way or another. I’ll speak for myself.

Who in Hell Knows Where This Ride is Going?

In Memory of Patty Wright-Ferrini...

Yesterday a dear, good friend died. We met in college, that’s how long we go back in time. She was a force of nature, always positive and upbeat. Not to say she didn’t have her dark side. But she never let her flowers bend with the rainfall, to borrow a line from a Simon & Garfunkel song. She will truly, truly, be missed.

And that is where we are at these days, ladies and gentlemen. George Clooney mused recently to his wife, upon turning 60, “I can still do everything I did when I was 30. But in 30 years, I’m 90. That’s a real number.” Let me tell you, from someone who is midway between those numbers, it’s like a train that’s rushing to its destination. Not an Italian train in the 1970’s – more like a Frecciarossa. Look it up.

The Bullshit-ification of the Italian Wine and Food Experience in America

Inspired by Jon Lovitz of Saturday Night Live fame...

I had an epiphany recently. And it was, the new reality in America is that the old maxim – Money talks, Bullshit walks – has been hacked. It appears that bullshit also talks, and man, oh man, are we wading in it, up to our eyeballs these days. That said, I walked into a new Italian-themed restaurant. The “chef” greets me with a “Ciao y’all.” Boy, I must be in a real genuine, authentic Eyetalian restaurant.

The Wine That Wasn’t - Anymore

I’m just going to come right out and say it: I don’t like being me anymore. I was born a wine, but I’m tired of being locked up in this dark, dank, confined space, year after year. If this is living, I don’t want any part of it anymore. I want out!

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.

Like no other place on Earth ~ The Etna Report 2024.5

It happened, after tasting over one hundred wines in a three-hour period, that the vinous impact of Etna became overwhelming. But not before the realization that what Etna means to someone like me goes way past wine. There has been a sociological adaptation made, with regards to agricultural practices, which is driven beyond mere climate and seasonal changes. There is the reality of La Muntagna – and La Muntagna drives everything, and everything derives from it.

If we didn’t have climate change, or as some called it early on, in the beginning, global warming, we’d still have Etna. Can the local practices put into place, because of the pressures of Etna, act as an instructional manual for other grape growing places in the world dealing with the immediacy of climate change? I wondered that as I walked along a lava strewn path early one morning. The weather was changing from the warm breeze of summer to the looming fog and coolness of autumn, in the background was the eternal soundtrack playing the low groans of the earth’s core and Etna acting as a megaphone for those rumblings.

Interview with a Centenarian ~ The Etna Report 2024.4

One of the advantages of having Sicilian blood and being raised in California in the latter half of the 20^th century is the uncanny capacity to listen to life forms other than humans. I first found out about this ability at university, when  a palm tree told me the story of its life one evening as I was sitting up against it. It was a fascinating experience and one that was apparently not singular. So, when I was on Mt. Etna recently, I happened upon a very old grape vine, well over 100 years old, up in one of the vineyards I visited. It was at the end of the day, and the vineyard was a short walk from where we were staying, so I asked my minder to allow me to stay awhile and make my own way back. I’d heard about this old vine from a winemaker friend who intimated that I might be interested in hearing its story one-on-one. Said winemaker knew about my propensity to channel other life forms on earth as we once talked about it and he understood completely what I was talking about. As I’ve mentioned before in these reports, Californians and Sicilians are kindred souls. And seeing as I’m a hybrid, I reckon my openness to these kind of interchanges is facilitated by that. So, here goes. I was standing there when she made contact, we’ll call her Dora, or as she more than once said, Nonna Dora (ND).