Field report from the Italian-American delegation.In the past few days the happy warriors along the wine trail have been looking for opportunities to make something out the month of August. While our Italian counterparts are bronzing and eating bronzino, those who have not gotten furloughed from their platoon assignments have been skirmishing and planning counter-insurgent acts toward all things regarding Italian wine. Seminars, working with trainees, retail re-sets, reprinting wine lists, you name it, this is the month to plant the winter garden. And while we won’t see the fruits of our labors in the next few weeks, somewhere down the line, it will pay off. In the meantime, this week, several of us decided to go about reorganizing Italy.
Before month’s end, we’re all looking for any opportunities to sell something, even a close-out. Some folks might be waiting for their ship to finally arrive, though this month not much is moving. And if the transport company happens to take the route from Livorno to the New World via Marseilles, those at the end of the line might have a surprise in store. Dock strikes and port blockades will spiral costs for those wines sitting in (hopefully) refrigerated containers. But the clock is ticking. Then again, if you believe everything you read on the blogosphere, the world is coming to an end with the latest round of distributor consolidations. Now, anyone who has read On the Wine Trail in Italy probably knows I work in the industry, and for a large distributor at that. I have heard the company I work for, and the people in it, called scum-bags, evil-empire, dark-force and behemoths. Oh, and mad-wounded elephants, that’s one of my favorites.
We have read, on blogs, bloviated comments such as “consolidation is a sign of weakness,” and referring to consolidation as a byproduct of “fear and scarcity.” And usually this comes from some unspecified workstation in some condescending setting, far from the reality of the streets. More often than not, the blogger has never sold a bottle of wine. But to hear them, they know the ins and outs of the business; they’re better briefed than the bespoke suits on Stockton Street.
Blah-gers also commented recently about the amount wholesale alcohol distributors spend on political causes. A figure of $50 million has been put forth for spending by American wholesalers and their associations for state politicians from 2000 to 2006. What never seems to get mentioned by bloggers – is the charitable spending these companies do. For example, Larry Ruvo, Senior Managing Director of Southern Wine and Spirits of Nevada, is founder of the Keep Memory Alive Foundation and the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute. Since its inception, Keep Memory Alive has become one of Las Vegas’ most important charitable initiatives and a key player in the nation’s fight against Alzheimer’s disease. Larry has helped raise more than $50 million and recruited leading specialists to become part of this vital project. But what do we hear from bloggerdom? That worn out talking point mantra: large companies are anti-competitive scum-bags.
James Molesworth said this recently on a Wine Spectator forum, “This is the problem with the 'blogosphere'. It's a lazy person's journalism. No one does any real research, but rather they just slap some hyperlinks up and throw a little conjecture at the wall, and presto! you get some hits and traffic..."
Others trivialize by wondering how “the small wineries will fare with increasing competition for attention among the already over worked sales force with even greater expectations of delivery upon them.” Of course none of those bloggers who perform their armchair criticism will ever know how those barmy-mutilated pachyderms will break away from the psychosis of the wine industry, because they are safely ensconced in a bubble of protection from the reality of having to worry about reality.
For those of us who do sell actively, and selectively, whether it is for the Brobdingnagian or the niche companies, it boils down to this: You are a salesperson offering a product to a buyer. You are one person talking to another person, mano-a-mano. It is up to you to engage that person, the buyer, your client, sometimes your friend, into wanting what you have. It doesn’t matter how big and powerful or how small and terrified you are, you have to “sell” that person on you and what you will deliver. That is the great equalizer. This week I saw a young saleperson from a niche company attempt to enter into an exchange with a buyer and she had as much time and opportunity as I did. And was as challenged as the best of us.
Remember me? One of the guys who work for the “scumbags.” Me and my friends for the last quarter of a century, who have forged a family of wine, who take in the younger people like the trainee we had this week, who helped us reorganize Italy. Yeah, we’re really bad people doing bad things. Just ask our customers, our friends and all the families we help support. I have a challenge for those “nattering nabobs of negativity”: Come out of your protective shelters and walk around in the sun, in our shoes, if you have the cogliones. Which I doubt any of you do.
That would mean having to do real work, no business-class treatment, no free-run of the mouth. The road. The service portion of the exam.Reorganizing Italy Part 2: Next post.
The basil is in prime shape and so we will transform them into the sauce we will use all year long. Pine nuts are ready, olive oil from Liguria has been summoned to the dance, and the Reggiano-Parmigiano is resigned to its fate of joining forces with the other ingredients to give back joy all year round.
The Hoja Santa fills the whole yard, I never have to plant flowers again, for the towering plants fill the whole yards with a crop that goes to my friendly cheese maker in Deep Ellum and comes back to me in the form of year-round cheese. And there is never any poison or any kind of intervention, except by hand weeding and pulling off the critters that damage the plants. A compost bin is in the works and this little garden is my own way of letting the earth be the earth in its fundamentally perfect way – simply by letting it be and caring for it.
Over the past week I have traveled the equivalent of halfway across the country, never to set foot outside of Texas. In a car, in the heat, in thunderstorms that shook our windows and in the cool afterglow of a cold front.I have slept in different beds in different cities, some better than others, but none as good as the one back home. I have lost my voice, my temper and my way. We have found new friends, new wines and new opportunities. And all through this week the undercurrent has been that no matter how far you travel, you still must start out every morning as though the past never happened. Because that is the way of the street in the wine business. There is always some new buck who thinks you don’t know a thing, and there are the old sods who don’t give a damn. There are managers who are just trying to keep the lights on and could not be as concerned with how Cusumano is spelled or if a wayward Chianti slipped into the New World wine category on their list. They will hate you for pointing it out and fight you for wanting to help them look better if you don’t find a way to make it their idea. And along the way, when the day is done and you put your head on the pillow, when you sleep, these are some of the dreams that could inhabit your sleeping ways.
You’ve been traveling all day across the flatland of Texas going from Dallas to Houston and your mouth is dry. You stop to get a soda and a snack. The bathroom is flooded and a man with a harmonica points you to use the handicapped bathroom down the hall. Along the way a woman walks by with a fresh pie and winks at you. The aroma of the baked peaches stirs memories of a Riesling tasting you had earlier in the week in Austin. You walk into the bathroom and people are there with party hats and noisemakers and a sign that says “Happy 60th Joe.”
You are late for a flight and they take you to a special military plane to get you to your appointment. Along the way, someone tells you to don a parachute and tie a special belt to your waist. A man hands you a bunch of fliers, which look like wine list proposals. You look at them as the plane lunges 1000 feet downward. A young girl in ice skates asks you to hold her hand as she recites her grandmothers’ recipes for spaghetti and meatballs. You grab her and head for the exit looking to escape from the plane which is crashing. As the parachute opens you look up into the folds of it and it looks like the inside of a wicker bottle of Chianti.
You have been walking the streets of a large city all day, talking to customers, looking for sales. In your haste to come to the city you haven’t made a hotel reservation, so you take your suitcase with you. Along the way someone opens it up and buys a white shirt you had folded inside. They ask you if it is Egyptian cotton or American. You tell them “Shenandoah,” and a large African American man comes from the back of the building to escort you to an abandoned tarmac. About 100 yards away is a billboard in white with large black letters, in block print, with the word “Patton”.
You get a call to let you know your appointment will see you in two hours. You are 5 hours away, but you convince a pilot to slip you into his jet and get you there in 90 minutes.
Along the way he says he must fly in a formation for a local air show, but it shouldn’t be a problem as he will make up the time by going faster than the speed of light and going back in time. He does so but you get to the appointment 30 years too soon.
You are walking on a country road in the early morning. The ground is still dewy from a late night rain storm. A woman is cleaning the windows and turns to stare at you. She resembles a woman you once loved but who has aged 30 years beyond your age. She calls out your name and asks to you come over to her. But you just keep walking, picking up a stick and hitting rocks on the ground as the sun rises.
You have your first job as a waiter in a family style restaurant. The first customers are a family who resembles your uncle and aunt and cousins. They ask about vegetarian dishes and you tell them the burger and fries would be a good choice. They ask you if you have an Australian Merlot from Italy and you tell them you have a reserve with a llama on the label. They order the wine and ask you to serve it ala mode.
There never seems to be enough time for it all. Put a handful of master-somms and an ersatz Italian together and give them 90 minutes to talk about 8 wines? Not enough time for disambiguation. No time for the bang, not even for a whimper. Press on, press on.
There is something exhilarating about being in a room with a set of high energy wine gurus. Rising tide kind of thing. We had two sessions on Italian wines, Italy being a darling of the mutant set of somms currently working their way around the airports and boardrooms of the halls of power in the wine biz. Make no mistake about it folks, the big boys in the industry know what is at stake and they have lined up some of the best and the brightest to sell the message down to the platoon level.
In our sessions, day one (Northern and Central Italy) we had:
I would love to accompany a couple of these folks on a wine blast through Italy, or anywhere for that matter. Guys like Larry O’ Brian (above) always seem to be working through the wine, constant students of the grape. Brett Zimmerman, working for a small importer, his path on the Italian wine trail, treading and tasting, working his way up that insurmountable mountain we call Italy. How about that new salesperson in the audience looking at this and wondering how they’ll be able to get to base camp? I’m telling you, sons and daughters, we’re all trying to get to base camp. And on to the ascent.
Teaser: 
The Rampolla spoke to me in a simple, pure and direct way. The spirit of the place, Panzano, was erect and present. Wild horses tied to a wagon heading towards a sunset on the coast, in no particular hurry. Gorgeous, golden, wild, velvet, young-first-love-Michele-in-1965. Holy mother of God, how did they do this?
The Argiano, with those gypsy grapes of Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah (aren’t these the grapes that could get a winemaker in trouble in Montalcino?), preening and prancing about the glass. “Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain.” I’m at a loess for words. I don’t want to like this wine, want to prefer the Sangiovese in purezza. But the two wines have this astral thread that connects them. Is it the Dali Lama of Italy, Tachis, from his cave in Sardegna, sending out his influence over the waves, out-Milarepa-ing Milarepa?
Soil, servitude and the fortune of territoriality. Two wines, two apparently different styles. Our house is a very fine house, with two cats in the yard. Dottore Tachis, now everything is easy ‘cause of you.
Some time back, when I was invited to Sicily to evaluate several vineyard projects, a few of us were sitting around the midnight table with passito and amaro. Next thing you know, we grabbed a few hours of sleep and then piled in a large van and headed towards the volcano. It was our homage to Burning Man, and what was waiting for us wasn’t what we had expected.
Forget the Euro and the price of oil, the mergers and strategic joint adventures; let us plunge back through the pinhole of reality. Italy, vineyards, grapes, fresh food. The life you’ve dreamed.
Abruzzo in the summer of 2008 is looking like the archetypical pastoral Italy of the 1970’s, the 1740’s, of hundreds or thousands of years ago, or sometime in the future. It is timeless beauty. There’s no reason to shun it or criticize those who love it for its own sake. Look, even if you never make it to Italy, you can still reap the joys of the harvest of the heart. The fool in the corner is kicking a cat and spitting out blood, and then expects us to revere his bleak judgments, because it is contrary and has a gravitas that is attention seeking. But the blind old man is living alone in his tree house in a sunless country. Look around you, sunflowers don’t grow in hell.
Do you ever wonder, if you are somehow involved in the world of wine, whether it be in a restaurant or a wine store, or as a salesperson in a distributorship or as a rep for an importer, why sometimes the wine runs out?
The wine will come when it comes, just like the tomatoes and the figs. If not, there is a McDonald’s down the avenue. 
“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.” Another Thoreau insight. Italy is full of the meat of life, filled with the marrow of passion, grab a rib and hold on. There is only one life; there is no time left to kill.
