Monthly Archives: January 2010

Wrath of grapes: thoughts on the Calabria riots

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rissa in galleria

Above: Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni’s celebrated and controversial canvas “Rissa in Galleria” (“Riot in the Galleria”), 1910. Boccioni was born in Reggio Calabria, not far from Rosarno, in Calabria (the “toe” of Italy’s boot), where African immigrants rioted over the weekend to protest “subhuman living conditions” and organized crime.

News of the riots that took place over the weekend in Calabria came to our attention this morning via The New York Times and NPR. I’ll leave the reporting to the experts but I will also report that Tracie B and I were both deeply saddened by this news as we drank our morning coffee on a chilly Austin morning today.

Most of the African immigrants (the extracomunintari, as they are called in Italian) who were rounded up by Italian authorities and bussed off to “deportation centers” (I’ll let you interpret the euphemism) do not pick grapes. In fact, they pick mostly oranges and other citrus. Historically, Apulia and Calabria (both ideal places to grow fruit and vegetables) have provided the rest of Europe with fresh fruit (including commercial grape production for bulk wine). Since Italian immigration policy began to change in the 1990s with EU reform, southern Italy has come to rely more heavily on migrant workers (sound familiar?) to pick its fruit.

riots

Above: An image from the riots that took place in Calabria over the weekend published today by The New York Times.

From this side of the Atlantic, as much as we’d like to view Italy solely as the “garden of Europe,” the “birthplace of the Renaissance,” the “fashion capital of the world,” and the home to an enogastronomic tradition that has happily conquered the world (and it is all of those wonderful things), Italy — from north to south — is experiencing one of the most troubled times in its history — socially, financially, politically, and ideologically.

I can tell you from personal experience, as an observer and a lover of Italy: Italians, by their nature, are among the most generous and human souls on this planet. Italy is one of the world’s biggest contributors to the UN budget (the sixth biggest, the last time I checked) and Italy does more than any other European country to promote economic development in Africa (I know this firsthand from my days working for the Italian Mission to the UN).

But as Africa’s gateway to Europe, Italy also faces some immensely difficult issues when it comes to race and attitudes toward race. When I first traveled to Italy as a student in 1987, these issues had yet to emerge. Today, they are at the forefront of the national dialog.

An editorial published today by the Vatican daily L’Osservatore romano (The Roman Observer, a highly respected gauge of the Italian cultural temperature) tells its readers that Italy has not yet overcome its issues with racism, as is clearly evidenced by the events of the weekend.

I’m going to poke around this evening in our cellar for a bottle of wine from Calabria for me and Tracie B to open with dinner. As we drink it, we’ll remember the hands that picked those grapes and the people who turned them into wine.

Thanks for reading…

Impossible wine pairing? Chex Mix (stinky Jura wine and Cory’s thoughts on tasting notes)

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Above: What to pair with Chex Mix? Stinky, oxidized Domaine de Montbourgeau 2006 Chardonnay (with a little Savagnin). What else? Now, how’s that for fusion? Photos by Tracie B.

Do you think that Dr. V minds that I borrow his “impossible wine pairing” schtick? I’m sure he doesn’t (do you, Dr. V?)…

Tracie B and I love this wine (which we paired last night with Mrs. B’s Chex Mix). It’s got that irresistible oxidized stinkiness that we love. Not everyone will like this wine (man, does it stink!) but at roughly $28 in our market it’s one of our favorite “Saturday night” wines. If I’m not mistaken, the first time I tasted this wine (probably the 05) was at a dinner in Los Angeles where wine guru Paul Wasserman was charged with picking a wine that Alice would like unqualifiedly. He chose it because it was “the most oxidized wine on the list” (we were at Palate)!

Above: It also paired extraordinarily well with Mrs. B’s pulled pork, topped with mayonnaise and sliced red onions.

Our far-out pairing of stinky oxidized wine from the Jura in France (an über-wine-geek wine) with some southern comfort seems all the more a propos today in the light of Cory’s excellent post from the other day On Tasting Notes. I’ve long maintained, borrowing a phrase from the great Italian twentieth-century writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, that tasting notes are the “lice” of wine writing. Just read the comment thread to the post: those who defend the obscene practice of fanciful, capricious tasting notes only prove Cory’s well-made point!

The best wine writing (in my book) is about context, people, and pairing: whom with, where, when, and why you opened a given wine and how it made you feel — not the supercilious virtuosismo of strong-armed tasting notes where certain wine writers and bloggers (and we all know whom we’re talking about) seem to thumb-wrestle the notes out of the wines they taste.

In other news…

Above: Tracie B took this photo with her new Blackberry!

Tracie B and I are in Orange, Texas for the first of her wedding showers. I’ve been itching to see more of Lousiana (yes, it’s Lou-siana ’round these parts) and so Tracie B had promised to accompany me across the border (which is also the city limit) to one of the gambling joints. I’d never gambled before in my life and it was fun to have a drink and blow ten bucks on video poker (although, man, it was smoky in there!).

Above: It’s illegal to transport beautiful Texan women (before marriage) across the Lousiana border but Rev. B gave me permission in this one case.

In the glow of our upcoming wedding, Tracie B is more beautiful than ever! To borrow the phrase that Franco has already taken to calling her, she is a simply gorgeous sposina. :-)

We’ve also been having fun planning our honeymoon. Guess where we’re going? You guessed it! MUMBAI! ;-)

Bea Santa Chiara 07, an orange wine couldn’t push back the crimson tide

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Above: We toasted the Longhorns last night at Vino Vino with an orange wine, Paolo Bea 2007 Santa Chiara (since orange is the school’s color) but it didn’t help them push back the crimson tide.

Two years ago, if you would have told me that I’d be “double dating online,” I would have told you to go to quel paese, as they say in Italian. Yes, online double dating. That’s exactly what Tracie B and I did last night when we connected for wine and dinner with the couple behind the fantastic Austin food blog, Boots in the Oven, Rachel and Logan. We started following their blog a few months ago and an exchange of comments led to traded emails and the realization that we had a lot in common. The next thing you knew, we were double-dating! (It’s actually uncanny: Rachel and I were born in the exact same neighborhood in Chicago and practically went to the same Hebrew school, though she’s much younger than I; she did go to the same middle school my older brothers attended.)

Above: The owner of Vino Vino brought in a TV to watch the Texas-Alabama game last night and he debuted his “biergarten” menu. The kielbasa is made in-house and was finger-licking delicious.

We all met up last night at Vino Vino in Austin to watch the game together and check its new “biergarten” menu.

And then, as happy chance would have it, we ran into to couple Nat and Erin, who authors a hilarious but also insightful rant blog about working in the restaurant industry in Texas — To Serve Man (the title alone…).

Above: My eyes were bigger than my stomach and I just had to have the boneless, fried chicken thigh sandwich. Snackboy, I’ve got to take you here next time your in my town!

In honor of the orange-clad Longhorns, we opened a bottle of 2007 Santa Chiara by Paolo Bea, a blend of Grechetto, Malvasia, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Garganega (as per Jack’s post on the wine — you can find the blend on the label, btw). It’s an indisputable “orange wine,” a tannic white made from white grapes vinified with extended skin contact.

Man, I love this wine. It’s one of those if-I-could-afford-it-I’d-drink-it-every-day wines for me.

The first vintage I ever tasted was the 2005, which I really didn’t like. But the 2006 and 2007 (even better) are phenomenally good. When I tasted with him in April 2009 at Vini Veri, I asked Gianpiero Bea what changed between 05 and 06 and he told me that he hadn’t macerated with skins long enough in 05. From then on, he said, extended maceration has been employed. And wow, the results are fantastic — a tannic, mineral-driven wine, with rich dried fruit flavors (think apricot) and a rich orange marmelade note. N.B.: in my opinion, this wine should be served cellar temperature, not chilled. (Last night, we grabbed a bottle from the wall at Vino Vino and asked our server to bring over an ice bucket. We chilled it for just a few minutes and then served. It was perfect.)

Unfortunately, as good as the orange wine was, it didn’t help the Longhorns to push back the crimson tide.

In other news…

I was very proud to be included as a “wine influencer” in a Palate Press post entitled Thoughts on the New Year. Guess what I’m talking about: no, not wine. PASTRAMI!

It’s not easy being green

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From the “what have you been smoking?” department…

It was like a scene from the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine: I parked outside a Starbucks (so I could get online) on my way back into Austin after meeting with a client in Driftwood, and a flock of bright green parrots suddenly appeared on the grassy knoll before me. I have no idea where they come from or why they are here.

All I do know is that in this cold weather (and with Austin awash in the pumpkin orange of the Longhorns), it can’t be easy being green!

The parrots appeared in Alfonso’s blog here.

Vino (Vino) and football

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From the “just for fun” department…

Above: In Texas, they take their football seriously. That’s Tracie B’s cousin Grant at a recent Longhorns game. When he found out we were getting married, his father Terry, my favorite uncle-to-be, called and congratulated me and then politely requested, “but please don’t get married during the playoffs.” UT is playing Alabama in the championship tonight at the Rose Bowl.

I’m not exactly what you’d call a “jock.” Don’t get me wrong: I stay in shape and have long enjoyed the competitive sport otherwise known as “jogging.” All of my brothers were highly accomplished athletes in high school and beyond. But me? I got through my teenage years on good grades and playing guitar. Let’s just put it this way: Tracie B loves me for “my brain,” not my biceps. ;-)

Well, I live in Texas now: as Anne in Oxfordshire pointed out the other day, I “care about where the apostrophe is” but when in Rome…

Tracie B and I will be watching the game tonight at our favorite neighborhood wine bar, Vino Vino: I can’t think of any other city in the world where you could watch a college-football championship game and sip on a slightly sparkling Favorita (blended with a little bit of Moscato) from Piedmont with an alcohol content of around 11.5%. (It’s the Grangia by Tintero, one of our cannot-live-without wines.)

Vino and football! Who’d have ever thunk it?

In other news…

Photo by Benoit.

The squirrels are at it again. Click here to submit your nominations for the Squirrel Wine Blogging awards.

Killer Nerello from the “highest” vines and fried oysters

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austin

Above: At $10 a glass (!), this 2008 blend of Nerello Mascaelese and Nerello Capuccio from “2,100-2,900 feet above sea level” (!) BLEW ME AWAY. The pairing with fried gulf oysters was a great example of how the right red wine, not to heavy in body, can be ideal for seafood.

It’s been just over a year now since I moved to Austin and there are still a few culinary destinations that I haven’t made it to yet. Last night finally found me at appetizers and a glass of wine at Jeffrey’s in Austin. It’s one of the more elegant rooms here, well laid out architectonically for intimate dining (despite a couple who had brought their crying newborn and a table of five older ladies who complained vociferously — more loudly, in fact — about the child’s lachrymatory suspiration).

I’ll have to take Tracie B back for a proper dinner soon: I liked the wine list and was surprised by some interesting choices but I was BLOWN AWAY by a wine I’d never had before, the 2008 Etna Rosso by Tenuta delle Terre Nere — at $10, yes $10! by the glass (“BTG” in restaurantspeak).

aetna

Above: Tenuta delle Terre Nere doesn’t have a website but I used PagineBianche.it to find the address and then Google-mapped it and switched to “satellite” view. That’s the peak of Mt. Aetna in the center. I love how you can see the black soil (the “terre nere”) from space!

I wasn’t expecting to like this wine but was curious about it. I’d heard a lot of people talk about it since I moved to Texas but was nonetheless skeptical: it’s owned by a famous importer of Italian wines, who tends to favor modern-style wines (historically and commercially) and I’ve often been disappointed by wines created by importers for the American market. But a little research this morning revealed that Tenuta delle Terre Nere sells its wines actively and aggressively in Italy. In other words, it’s not just a winery created for a foreign market and has a true connection to the place where it is made.

austin

Above: There is tartare and then there is tartare. The fried potato puffs were a little soggy unfortunately but the tartare was delicious and paired magnificently with the Nerello.

According to the importer’s website, grapes for this wine are grown “at extremely high altitudes, ranging from 2100-2900 feet above sea level” and the winery owns the “highest-altitude red-grape vineyards in Europe” (although that fruit doesn’t go into this wine).

This wine was all black earth and dusty minerality (like putting lava in your mouth) yet fresh and bright, with a seductive aromatic profile that made me think of dried figs. (I apologize for the “precious” tasting notes but this wine really turned me on.)

I loved it. I loved the price, I loved the body, aroma, and flavor. I loved the food-friendliness of it. I even loved the label (honest, clean, elegant, true to the style and origin of the contents). The only thing I don’t like about it is how so many wine writers compare it to Burgundy and to Pinot Noir (to my palate, Nerello and Pinot Noir have little in common, other than the fact that they can produce light-colored tannic wines). When they do that, they only reveal their ignorance: this wine is one of those truly terroir-driven wines, a wine that could only be made in the volcanic subsoils of Mt. Aetna, from Nerello grown in the “highest” vineyards in the world…

Run don’t walk…

More wine and cinema, Italian and Italian (and thoughts on ya’ll vs. y’all)

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san dona del piave

Click here or on the image to view a short documentary (infomercial) about wines produced in the Veneto, made in 1969.

A lot of folks commented and/or retweeted my post from the day before yesterday, on Wine in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Thanks to all for the link love! :-)

This morning, I poked around in the Archivio Luce website (the Istituto Luce was founded by the fascists to create propaganda films, L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa or The Educational Cinematic Union) and found this clip from 1969 about the “ichthyic wines,” i.e., the seafood wines of the Veneto.

The short film (essentially an infomercial for the Canella winery in San Donà del Piave) is interesting for a lot of reasons. Tocai, Verduzzo, Merlot, and Cabernet from the Veneto (Tocai and Verduzzo to pair with seafood, Merlot and Cabernet with roast meats and game), are top exports to the gourmets of the world, says the narrator. But the thing I find the most fascinating is the music and the chipper style and feel of the film — reminiscent, however distantly, of the feel of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

Watch the clip and let me know your impressions.

In other news…

Thanks to all the folks who retweeted yesterday’s post! :-)

lunar

I wanted to post another picture of Tracie B’s peepaw and meemaw (above) since Tracie B pointed out to me that peepaw wasn’t smiling in yesterday’s photo (it was the only one I could find with a glass of orange wine in it).

He just turned 90 and well, you don’t ask a lady her age, but the two of them are pretty amazing: peepaw may not be as spry as he once was but they both get out to all the family functions (meemaw drives) and they enjoy all the festivities, food, fixings, and the wines, too…

Honestly, there are not a lot of options for fine wine in Orange, Texas, and Texas retailers do not ship within the state. It is legal for out-of-state retailers to ship here but few have jumped through the hoops that allow them to do so. If Lunar made it to Orange, Texas, on the Lousiana border, it was ’cause Tracie B and me brought it! :-)

Thanks for reading!

In other other news…

In recent months, I’ve received a lot of comments (even some ugly ones) about my usage of the expression ya’ll. I addressed some of the linguistic issues and implications in this often heated debate in a comment thread the other day and would like to repost it here for all to consider. Thanks for reading!

“My thoughts on the (often heated) ya’ll vs. y’all debate.”

@TWG and IWG the ya’ll vs. y’all question has become contentious at times! There’s no doubt in my mind that the “more correct” inflection is “y’all” since nearly everyone agrees that the expression is a contraction of “you all”. I also believe it is the more correct inflection because it is the more common: orthography and the “correctness” of language are determined by usage and frequency. There are more occurrences of “y’all” than there are of “ya’ll” and so “y’all” wins as the “most correct.”

Having said that, a little research reveals that the earliest inflection is “yall”, written without the inverted comma denoting the elision (btw, an entire chapter of my doctoral thesis is devoted to the history of the inverted comma and its early usage to denote elision in the transcription of poetry in incunabula in 15th-century Venice tipography — no shit!). It appears in transcriptions of early 20th-century African-American (read “black”) parlance. So, technically, the most correct form is “yall”.

Having said that, “ya’ll” is an accepted form and I’m not sure why it evokes so much ire among observers. I, for one, will continue to use “ya’ll” because I like the way it mirrors the dialectal pronunciation of the vowel cluster, where the greater aperture of the “a” seems to take precedence in the enunciation of the contraction and elision.

Language is by its very nature a balance between idiolect (a language spoke by one person) and dialect (a regionally inflected and mutually comprehensible corruption of a standardized linguistic code).

In other words, “ya’ll” feels just right to me and I know that everyone understands it. So, as they say, if it ain’t broke? ;-)

Clearly, I’ve spent some time thinking about this.

Peepaw drinks some orange wine (in Orange, Texas)

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lunar

Above: Tracie B’s peepaw (grandfather) turned 90 this month. He and meemaw still live in Orange, Texas where Tracie B grew up. He tasted Movia’s Lunar with us over the Christmas holiday — orange wine in Orange, Texas on the Lousiana border!

This morning, when I read McDuff’s fantastic post about drinking Lunar under a full moon on New Year’s eve and his excellent treatment of the importance of the cycle of the moon in the discourse of natural and biodynamic winemaking, I couldn’t help but remember that we opened a bottle of the same wine, the 2005 Lunar by Movia, with Tracie B’s family in Orange, Texas over the Christmas holiday.

lunar

Above: Tracie B and I shared our bottle of Lunar with the B family as Tracie B was preparing her dumplings for the chicken and dumplings we ate the night after Christmas day.

I highly recommend McDuff’s post to you. And while not everyone is as crazy about Movia’s Lunar as McDuff and I are, it’s worth tasting: whether you enjoy it or not, it pushes the envelope of natural winemaking in unusual and perhaps unexpected directions. I, for one, enjoy it immensely and prefer not to decant it (although winemaker Aleš Kristančič recommends decanting). Peepaw and meemaw both seemed to enjoy it…

In other news…

fellini

Above: Tracie B and I agreed that we would have been better off going to see the new Chipmunks movie instead of the lame excuse for a movie otherwise known as Nine.

I’m going to break my rule of never speaking about things I don’t like here and tell you that the new movie Nine (a musical about the life of Federico Fellini) is a travesty, a lame excuse for a movie, and is wholly offensive to the grand tradition of Italian cinema and one of its greatest maestri, indeed one of the greatest filmmakers and artists of the twentieth century, Federico Fellini.

Here are some of the more awful lines from the movie, sung by Kate Hudson (fyi, Guido Contini is the name of the Fellini character played by Daniel Day-Lewis).

    I love the black and white
    I love the play of light
    The way Contini puts his image through a prism
    I feel my body chill
    gives me a special thrill
    each time I see that Guido neo-realism

It makes me wanna HEAVE. The folks who wrote and made this movie should be ashamed of themselves and should be barred from the movie industry entirely: there is no book to speak of, the songs and lyrics were seemingly written as a high-school drama class project, and the premise (Contini’s inescapable and pseudo-Italianate womanizing as an aesthetic disease) is entirely offensive to the Italian nation and its grand historic artistic sensibility — whether figurative or literary.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have found more aesthetic reward and intellectual enjoyment if we had gone to see the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, which was screening in the theater next to ours.

Wine in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita

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marcello mastroianni

Tracie B and I have been taking it easy these days, staying in, cooking at home, and just enjoying these first quiet days and nights of 2010 in the last month of our lives together before we get married. :-)

Last night, Tracie B made an excellent dinner of boneless chicken breasts sautéed and deglazed in white wine with mushrooms (fresh cremini and dried porcini), wilted and sautéed curly-leaf spinach (slightly bitter and a perfect complement to the glaze of the chicken) and a light rice pilaf, paired with a 2005 Sassella by Triacca.

Triacca is actually a Swiss winery, located just on the other side of the border in Valtellina. I’ve not tasted its higher-end La Gatta, which sees some time in new wood according to its website, but I like the Sassella, which is vinified in a light, fresh style. (By no means a natural wine, btw, as many would think, since it’s imported by Rosenthal, but a real and honest wine, nonetheless.)

triacca

After dinner, as we continued to sip the Sassella, we watched Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), in my view, one of his most misunderstood films and not his greatest, although certainly the most famous in the Anglophone world because of its cross-over success and Fellini’s break from neorealism with this work.

I hadn’t seen the movie in years and although I don’t think it’s one of Fellini’s masterworks (in fact, I think it’s a bit heavy-handed, too engagé, and facile in some moments), I do think it’s a wonderful movie that gorgeously captures a fundamental moment — in its beauty and its ugliness — in Italy’s revival and renewal after the Second World War. (La Dolce Vita is more interesting, in my view, for the hypertexts it spawned than the movie itself, but that’s another story for another time.)

I must have seen the movie a thousand times and I used to teach it when I was grad student at U.C.L.A., way back when. But last night I noticed something I’d never noticed before: in the first true speaking scene (there is some dialogue in the first sequence, when Marcello and Paparazzo ask the girls on the roof for their phone number but the first dialogue, in the conventional sense, takes place in the second sequence, the second “episode,” and the first evening scene), Marcello asks the waiter at the night club what wine he has served to a celebrity couple. “Soave,” answers the waiter. And then, one of the transvestites interrupts him (I believe it’s Dominot) and corrects him: they had a Valpolicella, he tells Marcello.

It’s fascinating (at least to me) to think that in Fellini’s view, celebrities on the Via Veneto in the 1950s would be drinking Soave and/or Valpolicella (wines from the Veneto) when today we wouldn’t associate these appellations with luxury and status. It’s also fascinating to me that the screenwriter doesn’t seem to mind that the one wine is white, the other red. It’s clear that the wines are intended to be a clue to the status of the celebrities and that these details are intended to add color to the world in which Marcello moves.

There’s a subtext here and here is where you need to know Italian history to understand what’s going on and why these wines are significant. (So much of this movie is tied to this particular moment in Italian history and in many ways, it is more of a historical document than it is a pseudo-Freudian or anti-religious movie, as so many American scholars would like you to believe.)

Keep in mind: we are in Rome in the late 1950s and the scars of war were still very fresh in the minds of the characters (let alone the writers and movie-makers).

What was the connection between Rome and Valpolicella (think Lake Garda) that would be immediately apparent to the viewer (bourgeois or proletarian)? (Howard and/or Strappo, thoughts please…)

I’m taking Tracie B to the movies tonight. Guess what we’re going to see? ;-)

Buona domenica a tutti!

One of the best feelings in the world…

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is when…

…you’re sitting at your computer writing, and all of a sudden, you start getting emails and texts from your friends in Los Angeles telling you that Anne Litt is playing your band on KCRW as part of her “best of 2009” show…

I’ll never forget the first time I heard my band on KCRW… a teenage dream come true… that thrill, wow, may be a small one to others, but it’ll always be one of the best feelings in the world to me… :-)

Thanks, ya’ll, for the kind words!