The skin-contact Ribolla of Radikon first came to my attention in the late 1990s in New York in an era long before the terms “orange wine” or “natural wine” were in vogue. Stanislao Radikon (above with wife Suzana) was the first to experiment with skin-contact starting in the mid-90s. (I highly recommend this profile from the recent Raw Wine fair in London devoted to the Radikon family and story.)

The village of Oslavia lies literally on the edge of the western world, just across the border from Slovenia in the province of Gorizia (in the Collio appellation).

One of the first things that Stanko (Stanislao) wanted to show me was the hill where then Colonel (later General) Badoglio fought the battle of Oslavia, one of the last and most bloody assaults of the First World War (just Google Badoglio and Oslavia to get a sense of the horror evoked by the toponym for a generation that came before us).

Today it is a place of immeasurable beauty, although many of the battle scars remain — topographical and emotional.

Stanko was perhaps the first to recognize the immense tannic potential of Ribolla (above), which, until that time, was used only to make light, white quaffing wine (in much of wine-making Friuli and Slovenia, it is still applied as such, although sparkling wine from Ribolla is becoming increasingly popular).

Stanko’s dense, cloudy, tannic, salty expressions of Ribolla changed the way the world viewed the variety and opened many’s eyes to the potential of “orange” (skin-contact) and “natural” wines ante litteram.

Open vat fermentation and extended skin contact are among the techniques applied to create Radikon’s long-lived, powerful, yet delicately nuanced bottlings of Ribolla.

Note the unexploded bomb from the First World War in the abandoned farmhouse where Stanko built his new cellar in 2002.

One of the things that impressed me the most was the contrast between ineffable rural beauty and the memory of carnage and senseless sacrifice that linger there. Stanko is a quietly intense man whose soulful winemaking is as much an expression of ideology as it is a pure and natural product of his land.

I’ll be meeting with Saša and his group tonight for dinner and I’m sure I’ll have much to report tomorrow… Stay tuned…

*****

Romeo, doff thy name!

Above: Valter Fissore of Elvio Cogno (Novello) single-handedly delivered the Nascetta grape from oblivion after he tasted a wine made using this once highly praised grape in 1991. The wine had been bottled in 1986.

It’s regrettable that when I tasted the Nascetta grape for the first time last year, it was served to me ice cold and was described as a “light-bodied white wine.”

While in Piedmont in March of this year, I happily learned that Nascetta is actually a noble white grape variety that can produce long-lived, structured wines. And I had the great fortune to taste Valter Fissore’s excellent 2001 bottling — a nearly decade-old expression of this grape. In my notes, I wrote “rosemary, sage, petrol,” and was blown away by the structure of the wine, its lively acidity, and most of all its gorgeous, unctuous mouthfeel.

Yesterday, in a wonderful post on drinking the last extant bottling of a vintage, Cory nudged me to fulfill a promise to explore the origins of the name. And so here it is.

First of all, a little history.

The name Nascetta was coined by 19th-century Piedmontese enologist Giovanni Gagna (left, 1833-1881), who believed erroneously that the grape was related to the Sardinian grape Nasco (from the Sardinian nuscu, from the Latin muscus, meaning moss). Remember: for the better part of the 18th and 19th centuries, Sardinia, Nice, Savoy, and Piedmont were ruled by the House of Savoy (the Kingdom of Sardinia), with its court in Turin and so commerce between Sardinia and Piedmont was fluid during that period.

In 1877, Count Giovanni di Rovasenda listed the grape using its dialectal name, Anascetta, in his landmark Saggio di una ampelografia universale (Essay on Universal Ampelography). The fact that he uses the dialectal inflection of Gagna’s name for the grape is an indication of how popular the grape was in Piedmont at that time, when it was commonly blended with Favorita (Vermentino) and Moscato. (In Piedmontese dialect, an initial a is added to certain words to compensate for syncopated, i.e., lost vowels; in this case, the acquisition of the initial a would appear hypercorrective, a phenomenon not uncommon in the morphology of Piedmontese.)

Here’s where it gets a little complicated.

Above: The confusion regarding the name of this grape was created in part by Valter’s frustration with labeling requirements. In 2001, he bottled the wine as a non-vintage vino da tavola (table wine) because the grape was not yet authorized for the Langhe Bianco DOC appellation.

Let’s start with some chronology:

1991 – Valter tastes a bottling of 1986 by farmer Francesco Marengo (Novello).
1994 – Valter produces 800 bottles from his own planting of the grape, labeled as Nas-cetta; following this vintage, Valter is forced to stop labeling the wine as Nas-cetta after he is fined for listing an unauthorized grape variety name on the label.
2000 – Nascetta (the grape) is added to the catalog of authorized grape varieties for Langhe.
2004 – Valter bottles the wine as Langhe Bianco DOC but cannot list the grape variety on the label; he labels the wine “Anas-cëtta” using a “fantasy” name because the grape is not authorized for the Langhe Bianco DOC labeling (it’s authorized for the blend but not the label).
2010 – After Valter’s successful lobbying, the 2010 vintage will be first labeled as Langhe Nascetta [sic] DOC.

Above: Valter’s Nascetta is an excellent value for a structured, age-worthy white. Be sure to serve it at cellar or room temperature.

When I asked Valter directly about his use of diacritics (in this case the umlaut and the hyphen), he told me flatly that he introduced them in the labeling for purely proprietary reasons. The mutation of the grape names Nascetta and Anascetta was inspired by his frustration with labeling requirements. The good news is that the confusion has been resolved and this noble white grape will be labeled as “Langhe Nascetta DOC” beginning with the 2010 vintage.

While in Piedmont in March, I also tasted another excellent bottling of Nascetta by Rivetto.

Be sure to read Cory’s post on the last bottle of 2001 and Whitney’s post, too.

… O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Rev. B baptized little Georgia P yesterday at his church in Orange, Texas. And so she got to get dressed up for the first time (she was five months old on Saturday).

Isn’t she adorable? :)

Earlier this morning, when I filed my Mother’s Day brunch recommendations for the Houston Press, I started thinking about what a special Mother’s Day this is for our family.

Tomorrow, in Orange, Texas, we’ll be celebrating Mother’s Day with four generations: memaw, who is 90 and is a greatgrandmother many times over now; Mrs. B (my mother-in-law and grandmother to four), and Tracie P, above with our nearly five-month old Georgia P.

Tracie is such a wonderful, sweet, gentle mother to our baby and I’d like to honor her today by talking about a “drinking problem”… No, not the one you’re thinking!

No, the drinking problem I’m referring to is how the pressures of consumerist hegemony and bourgeois society drive mothers away from breast-feeding.

In an op-ed published in today’s New York Times, “Maternity Ward Swag,” author Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong reports the following:

Breast-feeding offers numerous benefits to babies, including protection against childhood obesity, diabetes, some respiratory and ear infections and sudden infant death syndrome. Mothers who breast-feed have lower risks of breast and ovarian cancer. Yet although three out of four mothers in the United States breast-feed their newborns, fewer than half are still doing so by the time their babies are 6 months old.

The support of hospitals is crucial to getting more women to begin breast-feeding and to do it longer. And yet many hospitals hand out free formula samples, which, according to a 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office, tend to reduce breast-feeding rates among the women who receive them…

The infant formula market is big and growing; last month, Nestlé announced that it would buy Pfizer’s infant nutrition division for almost $12 billion. Even as hospitals try to reduce the influence of industry by prohibiting pharmaceutical companies from distributing gifts and free lunches to doctors and medical students, they continue to allow these wealthy and powerful manufacturers to promote their goods in maternity wards.

Some hospitals are beginning to push back. Sixteen percent of birthing hospitals now refuse to hand out free samples. Massachusetts nearly banned the practice in its hospitals at the end of 2005, but at the request of Mitt Romney, then the governor, the state’s Public Health Council reversed the decision.

Tracie and I are very lucky inasmuch as our finances currently allow her to be a stay-at-home mom. One of the biggest factors in our decision that she not go back to work was the issue of how difficult it would be to breast-feed at her job (as a sales rep for a major fine wine distributor here in Texas).

Anyone who’s ever weaned a child knows just how hard it is to breast-feed. Between the hormonal mood swings, fatigue, and the physiologic challenges, it’s probably the most emotionally and physically draining experiences we’ve ever gone through.

Watching and attending to them (as best I could) as Tracie and Georgia found their rhythm, my wife — for the second time — became a super hero to me (the first was labor).

Tracie P, words cannot express just how much I love you and how much deeper our love has grown since the day we conceived Georgia and every day since.

You are the greatest, most generous, and most beautiful mother I could have ever dreamed of and you have given us a beautiful, happy, laughing, smiling little girl… Someday I’ll tell her what a hero you are to me and to her…

I love you, Tracie and Georgia P… I love you so much… Happy Mother’s Day…

We the Wine Lovers of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Meal, establish better Wine Pairings, insure enogastronomic Tranquility, provide for the common wine service, promote the quality of fine wine, and secure the Blessings of Vinous Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Wine Drinker’s Bill of Rights for the United States of America.

Click here to read my work-in-progress wine lover’s Bill of Rights post today for the Houston Press…

It’s difficult to overestimate the impact that Lidia Bastianich has had on gastronomic culture in the United States and on the renaissance of Italian cuisine throughout the world.

She is to our generation what Julia Child and James Beard were to my mother’s generation (my mother was a James Beard devotee, for the record).

And to her credit, she has never wavered from her devotion to regional Italian cuisine. Long before “peasant” food (what an awful and despicable term!), “rustico” cuisine, or even “Northern vs. Southern” Italian cooking ever appeared in the American gastronomic lexicon, Lidia championed regional culinary traditions from Italy, first in the Croatian neighborhood in Queens where she and her family got their start and then later at Felidia in Manhattan (a restaurant where I used to regularly take my mother during the decade that I lived in New York).

In 1998 — the year that Babbo opened and the year that “regional Italian” became bywords of food culture in America — Lidia launched her first cooking show, “Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen” on PBS. To this day, Tracie P’s Saturday morning ritual is not complete without watching a DVR’d episode.

I asked Lidia to share her thoughts about the renaissance of Italian gastronomy and her role in Italy’s culinary conquest of the U.S. palate and hedonist imagination.

Her response, I must say, surprised and inspired me.

“When you look at the great beauty of Italy,” she said. “It’s easy to understand why the Italians are such creative people. From the [historic] Renaissance to this day, Italians have made so many contributions to the arts and culture. It was only natural that Italian cooking would do the same.”

“I don’t know if I’ve been an architect of the Italian culinary renaissance as you put it,” she added graciously. “But when I am surrounded by this beauty and the goodness of the ingredients I find here, I know that I am inspired by them.”

Lidia also told me that she has been asked to be the madrina (i.e., the grand marshal) of the first-ever “Biennial of Cuisine” in Venice. I wasn’t surprised by this news: her celebrity and her contributions to the dissemination of Italian cuisine and culture in the U.S. is not lost on Italians — at least, gauging from my Italian colleagues and counterparts.

“But it’s really Joe [Bastianich, her son] who’s become a celebrity here,” she told me. His appearances on “MasterChef Italia” (the number-one rated show in Italy this year, I was told by a journalist at our luncheon) have made him a megawatt star there.

“Just the other day, we were stopped by school children in Venice who wanted his autograph,” she said.

Whether or not her celebrity is or will be eclipsed by her son’s is irrelevant, really. After all, if it weren’t for Lidia, there would be no Joe, would there?

As a proud new father myself, I couldn’t resist the urge to share a photo of Georgia P with Lidia.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but she’s a prettier version of you.”

Words only a mother could utter.

Di mamme, ce n’è una sola… You only have one mother…

Here’s a link to some photos of what Lidia made us for lunch that day.

Photos by Tracie P.

Every once in a while, you stumble upon a bottle of wine that expands your vinous horizons.

Once such bottle came into our lives the other day after wine seller Marcy Jiminez in Houston recommended it to me: the 2008 Laimburg Alto Adige/Südtirol Kalterersee Auslese Classico Superiore DOC Ölleiten (Kalterersee is German for [Lago di] Caldaro Scelto; “Ölleiten” refers to the fact that the vineyards lie adjacent to olive groves).

Here’s the link to the winery and link to the wine and fact sheet.

The wine was bright and fresh, with the zinging acidity and balance of technicolor (red berry and black cherry) fruit and earthiness that really turn us on. And even in a market like Texas, where we pay more for European wines than our counterparts in New York and California (thanks to higher alcohol tax, higher storage cost, and the big distributors’s choke-hold monopoly on the Texas legislature), this wine weighed in at only $23.

We love, love, loved it…

Especially after tasting a wine like this, it’s not hard to understand why Schiava was such a popular grape in another era.

As editors Calò et alia write in Vitigni d’Italia (Grape Varieties of Italy, Calderini, Bologna, 2006), Schiava (pronounced SKEE’AH-vah) “was one of the first grape varieties to be cited in the legal documents and treatises of the Middle Ages.” Its popularity was so great that “it represented the viticultural model for Slavic grape growing by antonomasia.”*

The name Schiava comes from the High German Schlaff, an ethnonym denoting “A person belonging by race to a large group of peoples inhabiting eastern Europe and comprising the Russians, Bulgarians, Serbo-Croats, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary). And it is related to the Italian schiavo (meaning slave, from the Latin sclavus) only in its morphology.

In other words, it was (and is) an ampelonym that, by synecdoche,** represented a cultural epoch in which Slavic culture dominated that part of the world.

When I attended Vinitaly earlier this year, I asked Florian Gojer of the Gojer winery to pronounce Lagrein for the Italian Grape Name & Appellation Pronunciation Project. When I asked him to pronounce Schiava, he insisted on using the German name, noting that in “Alto Adige, we use the German” Vernatsch.

My philological intuition points me to a relationship with Vernaccia but that inquiry will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, here’s Florian…

* antonomasia: “The use of a proper name to express a general idea, as in calling an orator a Cicero, a wise judge a Daniel” (Oxford English Dictionary).

** synecdoche: “A figure by which a more comprehensive term is used for a less comprehensive or vice versâ; as whole for part or part for whole, genus for species or species for genus, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary).

These days, Parzen family honkytonking starts earlier in the evening day than it used to: yesterday we took Georgia P to two of our favorite spots for Sunday afternoon jams, Guero’s Taco Bar and Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon (our all-time fav).

That’s Ginny above in the photo holding little Georgia P. She came out back to meet Georgia for the first time.

“Mommy’s been coming here a looooong time,” said Tracie P, remembering when she first came to Ginny’s in 1999.

That’s Ginny’s daughter Sharon holding her.

The amazing Dale Watson wasn’t performing this last Sunday as usual but his band was there.

“Dale’s in Atlanta,” said Sharon. “He’s the understudy for John Mellencamp in a play in Atlanta.”

It’s called “Ghost Brothers of Darkland County” – Book by Stephen King; Music & Lyrics by John Mellencamp; Musical Direction by T Bone Burnett.

Of course, Daddy P couldn’t resist a Ginny’s dog. “The best dogs in the world,” as Dale would say.

Tracie P and I are so blessed. We’re going through that tough time that all new parents talk about: “sleep training.” It ain’t easy but her smile and laughter eclipse the fatigue and weariness of any sleepless night…

Photos by Tracie P.

1 bulb fennel, washed and trimmed
2 cloves garlic, peeled
extra-virgin olive oil
kosher salt
1 cup white wine
1 cup chicken stock
2 porter house pork chops, about ½ inch thick

Slice the fennel vertically into rounds about ¼ inch thick.

In a wide sauté pan, heat 3 tbsp. olive oil over medium heat. When smoke begins to rise from the pan, add 1 clove garlic. When the garlic has begun to brown, add the fennel rounds, sprinkle with salt, and brown on both sides.

Deglaze with ½ cup white wine. When the alcohol has evaporated, add ½ cup chicken stock and simmer over low heat until the cooking liquids have reduced by half. Transfer the fennel to a mixing bowl, discard the garlic, filter the sauce using a fine strainer, and add the sauce to the bowl. Reserve.

Preheat oven to 200° F.

Gently season the pork chops with salt on both sides.

Add 3 tbsp. olive oil to the same pan used to braise the fennel and brown the remaining garlic clove over high heat. Add the pork chops and brown on both sides (n.b.: it’s important to brown the pork quickly over high heat; they don’t need to cook through).

Once browned on both sides, transfer the pork chops to an oven-ready dish and cover with aluminum foil; transfer to the pre-heated oven.

In the meantime, add the remaining wine to the pan over medium heat. When the alcohol has evaporated, add the remaining stock, the reserved fennel and its sauce, and reduce to desired consistency. Remove the fennel from the pan and reserve and then filter the sauce using a fine strainer (n.b.: in the time that it takes you to reduce the sauce, the pork chops will have cooked through).

Arrange the pork chops on a serving dish and then top with the braised fennel and sauce.

The tannin of the skin-contact, amphora-aged Vitovska was ideal with the fatty, juicy chops and its nutty fruit flavors the perfect complement to the sweetness and tang of the fennel.

Buon weekend, yall!