Georgia comes home, fav photos, and what we drank at the hospital…

December 14, 2011

We’ll be bringing little Georgia P home today. She’s passed all her tests with flying colors and she and Tracie P are doing great. We loved how the last page of her birth certificate form welcomed our “new little Texan.” :)

I know that every new father thinks that his little girl is the most beautiful of all and I’m no exception. I’ll have two gorgeous girls at home now… I’m the luckiest guy ever…

We are so lucky to have the support of our family: it’s been a joy to have Rev. and Mrs. B here with us and they’re staying at the house all week to help us get settled.

What a joy to watch Rev. B. rocking his new granddaughter! He’s so big and she’s so little! :)

Modesty won’t allow me to reveal a photo of Tracie and Georgia P nursing. But to see Georgia “latching” just minutes after she came into this world was like viewing a living and breathing allegory of maternity. This drawing by Raffaello will have to suffice: words cannot express the emotion we both felt in that precious, precious, unforgettable moment. We’re happy to report that nursing is going great.

The staff at the Seton maternity ward was fantastic. Maybe it’s Texas: everyone was so friendly and sweet and all the nurses shared their own personal experiences. Dr. Abikhaled, our ob/gyn, was awesome. And our anesthesiologist — the only male health care provider in the crew — wore cowboy boots.

And what did we drink to celebrate our joy? As if you have to ask…

Georgia P, Tracie P, and I would like to thank all the folks who commented, tweeted, texted, emailed, and posted on Facebook from the bottom of our hearts. Our lives are so rich right now: full of joy, full of happy tears, full of laughter, brimming with love for a newborn child, overflowing with love for each other… Our virtual community — spanning the Atlantic ocean and the continental U.S.! — means so much to all of us. G-d bless you all…

7 Comments | de natura, de rebus familiari, de rebus texanis, de vino | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi

Cork porn: Bollinger 1999 Aÿ Rouge

March 7, 2011

Just had to share these photos snapped by Tracie P the other night when we opened a bottle of 1999 Bollinger Aÿ Rouge Coteaux Champenois La Côte aux Enfants with Coalminer Mark and Annie Oakley the other night at Trio in Austin.

Earlier this year, BrooklynGuy did a fantastic post on an amazing tasting of still red wines from Champagne organized by him and Peter Liem in NYC.

The bottle had an immensely powerful aura about it. After all, how often do you get to taste a still red wine from Champagne? By our favorite house no less!

The wine was excellent, a rich and tannic expression of Pinot Noir that seemed to have mellowed at 12 years out from harvest. But the most thrilling part of the experience was the bottle itself, the mushroom cork, and the metal seal. Note the old-school lip of the bottle (no crown cap here!).

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Posted by Do Bianchi

Crazy good wines tasted in New York last week

January 26, 2011

Not necessary in chronological order…

The legacy of the canicular 2003 vintage in Europe continues to express itself in fascinating ways (the fallout of the Brunello controversy is probably the ugliest manifestation of the ripples it sent through the wine world). It was one of those challenging vintages when the honest and true made interesting wines nonetheless.

While in New York, a colleague gave me a sample bottle of the 2003 by Bollinger, an anomaly for a winery that only vintage dates its Grande Année releases.

Tracie P and I are huge fans of Bollinger and drink it every chance we get. This wine was most definitely not in the classic “yeasty” and “toasty” style that is the winery’s signature. I’m not sure what went into the assemblage but this wine was crisper and brighter than the traditional “Special Cuvée” and it drank beautifully.

I was told that the winemaker decided to release this “second label,” vintage-dated wine because the estate’s 03 crop was not destined for the classic bottling. (For the record, I always find that Champagne blended from different vintages tends to be more complex and interesting to my palate.)

An anomaly and a curiosity from one of our favorite estates, it made for a wonderful and refreshing aperitif at a good friend’s house.

Next up: 2002 Joly at Alice’s Restaurant.

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Posted by Do Bianchi

When this man is not writing screenplays, he’s wine blogging

June 9, 2010

When our friend Howard isn’t writing screenplays or composing poems to recite at our wedding (glass of Bolly rosé in hand), you can often find him tasting and discussing wine at his (and my) favorite wine bar in LA, where he and I have spent many an eve discussing the epistemological implications in the nuanced semiosis of a bottle of Cascina Francia by Giacomo Conterno (1998 was the last one we opened together).

He’s even been known to wine blog now and then, like this wonderful post he did today for a film promotion (click on the images to read his wine and cinema pairings).

Chapeau bas, comrade Howard! I will raise a glass to you tonight as I quote my favorite passage from Gramsci!

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Posted by Do Bianchi

Our personal SXSW and why wine blogging is so cool

March 21, 2010

Tracie P and I take SXSW pretty easy. Since we live in Austin, Texas, the “live music capital of the world,” we’re treated to the good stuff year around. For me, SXSW is special mostly because so many of my good friends from the music world come to town. Here are some highlights from our personal SXSW…

Tracie P had an heirloom martini (above) and I sipped some bourbon with my old bud Billy at the High Ball.

My friend and ex-label-mate Robert Francis put on a rocking show at the Atlantic Records showcase. Man, he’s going to be a huge star. The dude’s so friggin’ talented. Great show…

After the show, Tracie P and I snuck off to Max’s Wine Dive for a little Bollinger rosé and a chili dog. @TWG I know, I know! Tomorrow the diet begins again!

In other news…

There’s been a lot of chatter lately in the enoblogosphere about the futility of wine blogging. I haven’t really been following it, although I have enjoyed some of the reactions, intellectual here and visceral there.

Previously my virtual friend and only recently my real-life friend (after he and 5 other wine bloggers, nearly all of them COMPLETE STRANGERS, joined me in Asti for the Barbera-athon), Thor likes to tease me that I don’t write a wine blog but rather a relationship blog. He’s right. I don’t author a wine blog: I write a blog, a web log (as the etymon reveals) whereby I chronicle my life, my relationships, the music I like, the food I eat, and the wines I enjoy. It just so happens that a lot of my life is centered around wine. I make a living writing about, talking about, teaching, and selling wine. I also happen to be deeply in love, to enjoy music immensely, and to see poetry and inspiration in the world around me — sometimes in a glass of traditional-style Barbera, sometimes in a guitar solo played by a friend.

Wine blogging is really about sharing experiences and connecting with like-minded folks. After all, if it weren’t for wine blogging, I would have never met really cool folks (who are now part of the fabric of my life, even though I have very little real-time contact with most of them) like Alfonso, BrooklynGuy, McDuff… not to mention the LOVE OF MY LIFE.

It’s Sunday morning and Tracie P and are sitting around sipping coffee and listening to This American Life and we’re both “blogging away” (she’s working on a post about Lacryma Christi). I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t care how useless it is… I wouldn’t give it up for the world…

Buona domenica, ya’ll…

8 Comments | de austinopoli, de cibo, de musica, de vino, de vinographia | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi

Champagne, Xerox, and Kleenex

December 31, 2009

antonomasia [ahn-TAH-noh-MAY-zee'ah], the use of a proper name to express a general idea, as in calling an orator a Cicero, a wise judge a Daniel (OED, online edition).

Above: An unforgettable bottle of 1996 Billecart-Salmon that I shared last year with Jayne and Jon at Spago in Beverly Hills. We weren’t celebrating anything. But we were being treated by a famous winemaker.

In this week’s semiotic treatment of Champagne, we neglected to address one of the most fascinating semiotic implications of the lemma Champagne (at least, one of the most fascinating to me).

The term Champagne is a wonderful example of the literary figure antonomasia, from the Greek ἀντί (anti, meaning instead or against) and ὄνομα (onoma, meaning name), whereby a proper name is used to denote a general idea, in this case, sparkling wine.

Above: A bottle of Bollinger that we popped to celebrate pulling the first mix from Nous Non Plus’s 2009 release Ménagerie. The track? “Bollinger” (click to listen)! A song about our favorite Champagne and official band beverage. (We are a “French” band, after all, n’est pas?)

Other examples that immediately come to mind: Xerox and Kleenex. Both are proper names, in fact, brand names, yet both have come to denote generic items, namely, photocopies and tissue paper.

Let’s face it: even though we wine professionals and enthusiasts strictly use the term (toponym and proper name) Champagne to denote sparkling wines sourced from the place and appellation, Champagne, 99% of the intelligent lifeforms in the world interpret it as any sparkling wine. In his 1953 editio princeps of With a Jug of Wine, for example, food and wine writer Morrison Wood casually and regularly makes reference to California champagne.

Above: A bottle of Initial by Anselme Selosse that Alfonso opened for me and Tracie B last year to celebrate my move to Texas. Perhaps more than any other, Selosse is the most coveted and illustrious brand of Champagne in the U.S. It’s not cheap but it’s worth every penny. Check out this great post, from earlier this year, by McDuff.

Just this weekend, I was reminded of this fact when Melvin C and I visited a Walmart in Orange, Texas in search of some Prosecco for Tracie B, and I was greeted by a “stack” (as we say in the biz) of André California Champagne (“the best selling brand of sparkling wine in the U.S.,” according to the Wiki).

Whatever you plan to drink tonight for your New Year’s celebration, Tracie B and I wish you and yours a happy, healthy, and serene 2010. Thanks for all the support and love in 2009!

Breaking news: this just in from Italy

Thanks are due to reader Elaine from Italy who identified the champagne-method Nerello Mascaelese by Murgo (Sicily).

Also just in from Italy…

According to the Agenzia Giornalistica Italia, when all is said and done, Italians will have spent Euro 2.7 billion on sausage (cotechino and zampone) and Italian sparkling wine (spumante). “Salmon, oysters, and caviar” were no match for the famed boiled sausages of Modena (both delicious, btw). Nor did Champagne, with a “a 66% drop in sales,” rival its Italian counterparts.

On that part, according to a press release issued by the Prosecco di Valdobbiadene e Conegliano Producers Association, Italian agriculture minister Luca Zaia sent 60 “3-liter Jeroboams” of Prosecco to the staff of the “national radio and television stations.”

An early celebration of his upcoming governorship of the Veneto, no doubt.

Happy new year, everyone, everywhere!

4 Comments | de cibo, de musica, de nominibus, de vino, de vinographia | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi

Bolly and NJ pizza: who could want for more?

November 21, 2009

Tracie B and I are going to have a hard time topping the wedding guest welcome gifts left for us by betrothed Eileen and Greg. When we arrived last night at 2 a.m. to our hotel in West Orange, NJ, we found a chilled bottle of Bollinger Special Cuvée (the official wine of the band that both Greg and I play in, Nous Non Plus) waiting in our room. Today, as we are primping for the wedding and I am practicing the Beatles songs I am to perform during the ceremony, Tracie B ordered peperoni pizza and broccoli raab from Enzo’s in West Orange and we popped the cork on that bottle. Who could want for more? (A funny thing: Tracie B grew up in West Orange, Texas. No genuine Italian-American pizza there!)

We’re really looking forward to the wedding tonight and celebrating with Eileen and Greg!

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Posted by Do Bianchi

You can take foxes outta the country but…

June 25, 2009

From the “just for fun” department…

Johnny OtisLife’s been a little stressful lately and there’s so much negativity going around right now in the world of wine that I thought it was time for some “just for fun.”

It had been a while since Tracie B and me popped any Movia. So Sunday night, we invited our friend and fellow natural wine freak Josh Loving over for Tracie B’s famous fried chicken and mashed potatoes and a bottle of Puro, which Josh — the consummate wine professional — ably disgorged (check out the video I shot below).

Dinner was served accompanied by one of my favorite records: Cold Shot! by the Johnny Otis Show. I love every track on that disk and “The Signifyin’ Monkey” is probably the most famous. But my favorite favorite track is “Country Girl.” Toward the end of the song, Johnny Otis doubles the following aphoristic chiasmus with his guitar: You can take foxes outta the country, but you can’t get the country outta foxes. It’s one of the mysteries of life but that line just kills me every time. Check it out, as Josh disgorges the wine:

You’ve probably seen Puro disgorged at Do Bianchi before but in case you haven’t, it’s really easy to do (as in the vid above). Winemaker Aleš Kristančič makes the wine using the méthode champenoise but he leaves the lees and sediment in the wine (i.e., he doesn’t disgorge before release). You store the wine upside down in your fridge (using a cardboard cylinder that comes with the wine) and then you disgorge it upside down in a basin of water. The wine will be totally clear (as in the photo below).

Although Bollinger remains the indisputable official wine of my band Nous Non Plus, we have been known to disgorge a bottle of Puro… or two.

Life could be worse…

In other news…

Today, “the absolutely fabulous Alice Feiring,” as Tracie B likes to call her, is up to bat at 31 Days of Natural Wine. Alice is a dear friend, a great lady, a mentor, and one of the few things — besides Katz’s pastrami and Barney Greengrass whitefish salad — that we miss about New York City. I love the wine she talks about and I can confirm what Cory writes in his intro, that “very Alice Feiring” has become a canonical wine descriptor. How cool is that?

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Posted by Do Bianchi

Ending on a high note: a swig of Bolly to wash it all down

February 11, 2009

bollinger99

Above: Bonnie Day (Emily Welsch) and Jean-Luc Retard (Dan Crane) at the end of our sold-out show in New York on Monday night. Official Sponsor Bollinger (our only endorsement… no Ibanez guitars here!) provided us with a few bottles to end NN+’s “tourette” on a high note.

Touring is never easy and we were all pretty beat by the time we got to NYC for the final show of our tourette, as it was dubbed.

me_ry

Above: Me (Cal d’Hommage) and Maurice Chevrolet (Ryan Williams) in the green room before the show. Ben Shapiro, seated between us.

Yesterday our new record Ménagerie hit number 22 on the college radio charts. We’ve never debuted so strongly and I can’t conceal that I am thrilled at the response to the record.

crowd

Above: A view from the stage at the show. Thanks everyone for coming out on a Monday night.

A hearty thanks to everyone who came out. Check out JT’s take on the show (thanks for the shout-out, man!).

cavatelli

Above: Cavatelli with broccoli raab at Centovini in SoHo.

Tracie B, Prof. Harry Covert (Greg Wawro) and his lady Eileen, and Ben Shapiro and I convened at Centovini in SoHo for a light dinner (much needed after saucisson lyonnais!) and 2006 Pelaverga by Castello di Verduno before the show. Times may be tough in the NYC restaurant world these days but Nicola Marzovilla’s mother Dora’s cavatelli are always a winner in my book. The 06 Pelaverga had a richer mouthfeel (more corposo, you would say in Italian) than in previous vintages I’ve tasted. I like the way that winemaker Mario Andrion is making it even more rustic in style. A great food-friendly wine that will pair well with a variety of dishes.

Thanks everyone for visiting Do Bianchi, all the well wishes and the kind words about the tourette. Tracie B and I are back in Austin and tomorrow I’ll start posting about our enogastronomic adventures.

On deck for tomorrow: “The Best Pork Store in New York City.”

Stay tuned…

6 Comments | de cibo, de musica, de urbe novo eboraco, de vino | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi

Mixing Bollinger?

July 19, 2008

Above: Jean-Luc Retard (aka Dan Crane) and Céline Dijon (aka Verena Wiesendanger) relax after mixing the first track from our new album.

Nous Non Plus celebrated the mix of the first track from our new album (work-in-progress title Ménagerie), “Bollinger,” with a bottle of the eponymously named Bollinger (NV, Special Cuvée) that I had picked up earlier in the day at my favorite Southland wine store, Wine House (great Italian selection, a really cool enomatic tasting room, and an excellent cheese monger as well).

We’re such fans of Bollinger that we were inspired to write a song (about some lovers who love the wine). Bollinger will also make another appearance in one of our more sexy tracks (but you’ll have to wait until we disgorge the album to hear it…).

Above: It’s quite a scene at Colorado Wine Company’s Friday night tastings in Eagle Rock.

After we finished tweaking the track and listening with our friend, engineer, and fellow wine lover Bryan Cook at Juice Monster studios in Eagle Rock, we headed over to Colorado Wine Company for their Friday night wine tasting. When I asked the dude at the register what the theme was, he said “After a while, we just ran out of ideas so there really is no theme” to the flight of wines they serve. This week’s tasting was dubbed “Under the Covers” because “we’re playing only cover songs” on the house stereo, he told me. It’s quite a scene (read “singles”) over there at Colorado Wine Company and for $15 you get 5 generous pours — nothing to write home about but it helps to “break the ice.”

My night ended with mezze lune ravioli stuffed with eggplant and scamorza over at what’s become my LA late-night hangout, Mozza, where I believe they serve until about 10 or so. GM David turned me on to a wine I’ve never tasted before (and imported to the U.S. for the first time only recently), 2006 Sella Coste della Sesia DOC Rosato “Majoli,” 100% Nebbiolo rosé, fresh and bright with a perfect touch of tannic structure, a great pairing for the flavors of my ravioli.

Life could be worse…

1 Comment | de cibo, de musica, de urbe angelorum, de vino | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi

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