The Province of Fine Wine in Today’s Disrupted World

Writing about wine is at a turning point. If the writing is well done, it can serve to lift us out of the constant sea of disruption, of all we see that has become the new normal, and give us a moment for fresh air and hope that the cosmic fireball truly isn’t hurtling towards us at breakneck speed. “No guarantees on that one,” said the seer in the desert, who tracks the midnight sky with her trained eye.

This past week, some fine wine writing has appeared to give me hope. Even if our celestial rendezvous with kinetic bombardment is inevitable, until then, we can cherish and celebrate that which is good about being human, even if it merely seems like building a cathedral with toothpicks.

Selling Your Italian Wine to the US Market - My 15 Minute Talk

I’m going to take off my citizen blogger hat and don my work cap for this post. Read this as if it were a (TED) talk I would be giving to a group of Italian winemakers, hopeful exporters and importers, and young people looking to get into the Italian wine business in the United States.

Good morning,

As I look around the room, I see all manner of folks who are either devoting their life to Italian wine or who aspire to do so as a career. As one who had spent the last forty years doing just that, let me share some thoughts with you regarding the future and how you place your piece of the puzzle into it.

Nine Reasons to Give Thanks for Italian Wine

Italy and Italian wine, during my professional life, has been an arduus ad solem. It has so possessed me that I fear that I am like the Japanese soldier holding up in the Philippines who continued to fight 29 years after the end of WWII. At other times, more recently, I have felt the task to be more arare litus, in that the waves would come and wash away much of the hard work. It could be very simple to just walk into that ocean and keep walking, to disappear in time and space. But that will inevitably happen anyway, to all of us. Better to retreat to my highland post and keep fighting, even if the war has been won (or lost). And to the homeland, for which I have been fighting: look upon all these years, where thousands of men and women have been laboring and pursuing Italian wine’s ascension as some of the great wines of the world. How not so long ago it seemed we were all fighting for our place on the stage as a legitimate wine. That battle has been won. Let us give thanks.