Monthly Archives: March 2010

On right health and good pleasure

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Above: Pope Sixtus IV appoints Bartolomeo Platina prefect of the Vatican Library, fresco by Melozzo da Forlì, c. 1477 (Vatican Museums). That’s Platina kneeling. Click the image for the entire fresco.

The title of today’s post is a play-on-words, a riff on the canonical translation of Bartolomeo Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine, On Right Pleasure and Good Health (as translated, superbly, by Mary Milham in 1998). Italian humanist, gastronome, and literary consultant to some of the most important cultural and political figures of his time, Platina authored a treatise considered by many the earliest printed work on gastronomy. It was overwhelmingly popular in Europe from the time of its initial publication in the late 15th century through the 17th century, by which time it appeared in myriad translations from the Latin. (I know a little about Platina and his book since I translated the 15th-century Italian recipe collection by Maestro Martino from which Platina drew heavily).

In the mind of the Renaissance humanist, good health and right pleasure were inexorably linked. As food historian Ken Albala illustrated so eloquently in his 2002 Eating Right in the Renaissance, inhabitants of 15th-century Italy believed — rightly — that everything you put into your body affected your health, emotionally, intellectually, and physically.

Sumus quales edamus: we are what we produce (äfere), we are what we eat (lèdere).

I’m no Renaissance man but I do believe that right pleasure and good health go hand in hand, so to speak.

That’s why I’m thinking today about “right health”: President Obama’s signing of the new health care legislation (however flawed, however riddled by political posturing) marks for me the fulfillment of a dream (both personal and civic). As David Leonhardt wrote in The New York Times today, “The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago… Speaking to an ebullient audience of Democratic legislators and White House aides at the bill-signing ceremony on Tuesday, Mr. Obama claimed that health reform would ‘mark a new season in America.’ He added, ‘We have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care.'”

As a long-time self-employed translator, writer, copywriter, and musician/songwriter, health care has always been a primary issue for me. To my mind and in my heart as a member of American society, the inequality of health care in our country has always represented a tragedy in our affluent nation.

So today I ask you to consider a step forward in our country, toward an inalienable right that is guaranteed, however imperfectly, to citizens in most Western countries.

What’s next? Will we outlaw the death penalty? I’d certainly drink to that.

In other news…

Please read BrooklynGuy’s excellent post today, with its oxymoronic title, How to Buy Excellent Cheap Wine.

Stinky dirty wine I drank in Piedmont and a note about vitello tonnato

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When in Piedmont, do as the Piedmontese do and drink Piedmontese wine. But when I saw the 2004 Trebež by Dario Prinčič (from Oslavia, Friuli) on the list at La Libera (probably the hippest, best see-and-be-seen place to dine in Langa), I couldn’t resist. After all, it was my turn to pick the wines the Barbera 7 was going to be drinking at dinner that night. I know it’s a shame to drink a Friulian wine in Piedmont (and for our red, we drank an a killer 2006 Dolcetto di Dogliani by one of my favorite producers, Cascina Corte), but the mimetic desire created by my browsing of the list simply overwhelmed me. I had to have it.

According to Divino Scrivere, the wine is a blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, and Sauvignon Blanc, obviously vinified with skin contact. (I believe that Trebež is a toponym that refers to a river by the same name, but I’m not sure.) Cloudy and practically brown in color, this is as real, natural, and orange as it gets… not for the refined palate but rather the folks who did real, groovy wines… Acid and gently astringent tannin, apricot and prune flavors, balanced by dirt and rocks. The man, Dario Prinčič, is dry and sour in person, perfectly polite, but never a smile on his face when I taste with him at Vini Veri. His wines, on the other hand, are full of joy and glorious flavor and they are among my all-time favorites.

The night we ate at La Libera, I asked owner/chef Marco to feed us whatever he wanted (which is always the best way to go in any great restaurant, btw). Among other victuals, he made us a tetralogy of classic Piedmontese antipasti, including the sine qua non vitello tonnato (the photo above borders on the pornographic, no?). I love vitello tonnato and eat it whenever and wherever I know it’s good. Today, vitello tonnato is regularly made with mayonnaise but the addition of mayonnaise is a relatively recent adjustment to this recipe. In fact, the sauce prescribed by Artusi (1891) calls for tuna in olive oil, anchovies, lemon juice, and capers in vinegar.

I enjoyed another excellent vitello tonnato, while Tracie P and I were in Barolo in February, at the Osteria Barolando, served on a roll of crusty bread (above).

I love vitello tonnato so much I could most certainly write a dissertation on it — its variants, its history, its epistemological implications… but, alas, I need to make a living…

Do Bianchi Springtime Selection is LIVE!

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If you reside in California and/or know someone who does and you’d like to taste the wines I’ve selected this month for the Do Bianchi Wine Selections email list, please click here.

Thanks for your support!

Italy’s barrique stainless steel revolution

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Above: Cory posed for me in front of an old large-format chestnut wood cask, once used to age Barolo at the historic Fontanafredda winery in Serralunga d’Alba. I highly recommend a visit there. The winery represents an important piece in the historical puzzle of the first Italian wine renaissance that began in 19th-century Italy.

One of the more interesting elements to emerge from my recent trip to Piedmont was one enologist’s observation that Italy did not undergo a “barrique revolution” in the 1980s but rather a “stainless steel revolution.” One of the results of the new trend of stainless steel aging introduced in Italy in the 1980s, he claimed, was that small-cask, French-oak aging soon followed as a natural and necessary corollary. Made from an impenetrable and inert substance, stainless steel vats do not allow for oxygenation of the wine. As a result, he claimed, the use of barrique aging expanded in Italy. The smaller cask size oxygenates the wine more rapidly and the more manageable format helps to maximize cellar space (among other efficacious aspects of the now overwhelming popular French format).

Above: Owner and winemaker Giovanni Rava at La Casaccia in Monferrato showed us this “vat,” carved into the tufaceous subsoil, once lined with glass tiles and used for vinification of Barbera (in the 18th century), now used to store barriques.

The day we visited the Marcarino winery and spoke with enologist Mauro de Paola, I was interpreting and so wasn’t able to take notes and photographs. And I will agree with colleague Fredric that beyond Thor’s account of the visit there couldn’t be “a more fair or thorough explication of our visit to this puzzling property.” (I will say, for the record, that I loved Paolo Marcarino’s wines, however manipulated the process to achieve no-sulfite-added expressions of Barbera and Cortese.)

Above: This patent, for “botti di cemento [cement casks],” dated 1887, is believed to be evidence that Fontanafredda was the first to use concrete vats to age wine in Italy.

A 1982 visit to Napa by Giacomo Bologna, Maurizio Zanella, and Luigi Veronelli is widely considered the “eureka” moment that led many of Italy’s foremost producers to begin fermenting in barrique (Zanella) and aging in barrique (Bologna). (I have written about in one of my favorite posts here, and Eric wrote about it here.)

Above: Cement vats used to make one of my favorite wines in the world, Produttori del Barbaresco. Stainless steel is also used today at the winery, even for some of its top wines. In the 1980s, a lot of Italian winemakers shifted from glass-lined and varnish-lined cement aging and large cask aging to barrique aging (not at Produttori del Barbaresco, however).

I had always assumed that Angelo Gaja had begun using barrique aging around the same time as Bologna (whom many credit as the first to use new cask aging in Italy). But when we visited and tasted with Gaja on our recent trip, he told me that his winery began experimenting with new, small cask aging in 1978. (I have a long backlog of posts but I’ll get to our Gaja visit, which was, as you can imagine, immensely interesting.)

Above: One of Gaja’s barrique aging rooms is dominated by this fantastic Giovanni Bo sculpture, an extension of the well, no longer in use, in the courtyard of the winery.

Honestly, I can’t say that I wholeheartedly agree with De Paola’s assessment that the advent of stainless steel is what made barrique aging necessary in Italy. But I do think that the introduction of stainless steel and barrique, together with a California-inspired approach to cellar management (prompted by the emergence of the Napa Valley fine wine industry) are all elements in the current renaissance of Italian wine (whether you prefer traditional- or modern-style wine). His observation that “stainless steel was the true revolution,” in my opinion, is a fair if atypical assessment: it’s not that Italian producers decided one day that they should age their wines in barrique.

Barrique and stainless steel were both part of the new and contemporary era of Italian wine.

So much (too much, really) of the wine we tasted during Barbera Meeting was dominated by new oak but we also tasted some fantastic stainless-steel aged and large-cask aged Barbera that really turned me on.

In other news… Man and husband cannot live by Barbera alone…

Last night we paired this wonderful Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Cerasuolo with Tracie P’s excellent slow-cooker braised pork chops smothered in cabbage. Check out the recipe and tasting notes here…

Our personal SXSW and why wine blogging is so cool

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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…

The Enosis “wonder” glass, the “entry-level” Barbera, and a couple of Barbera comments worth reading

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Above: At Il Falchetto, we tasted in Donato Lanati-designed “Meraviglia” (“Wonder”) glasses by the Enosis laboratory. The ring in the middle of the balloon is intended to preserve and concentrate the wine’s aromas. That’s Scotsman and spirits wine writer Bill McDowall, left, with Barbera 7 members Stuart and Whitney. If you ever meet Bill, be sure to get into his good graces and enjoy his ever-present flask. ;-)

During one of the afternoon sessions of Barbera Meeting 2010, the Barbera 7 tasted at Il Falchetto, where we all liked the winery’s mid-level, as it were, single-vineyard Barbera d’Asti Superiore Lurei, which is aged in large cask. The winery’s flagship Barbera d’Asti Superiore Bricco Paradiso, which is aged in new, small French cask (barrique) didn’t impress me as much. Pretty much across the board, you would see the same thing, even at the wineries I liked the most: the entry-level and mid-level Barberas were juicy and fresh, with the bright acidity I love, while the flagship “important” Barberas tended to be oaky (often judiciously so, in all fairness, as in the case of Il Falchetto) and concentrated, with restrained acidity.

In other news…

My last two posts generated a couple of interesting comments worth re-posting here. In the first, Barbera 7 member Thor offered his transcription of Belgian wine writer Bernard Arnould’s polemical observations, uttered on that fateful, snowy night in Nizza last week.

    I was scribbling as fast as I could, and had Arnould as saying:

    “Why so much oak? Why so many uninteresting tannins? My quest is to find a wine with fruit, freshness, and tannins that are interesting and not dry, and…[there was a pause here, and while my memory is that he said “maybe” I did not write it down]…a little oak. If you think that putting oaky barberas on the market is a good idea, you only join the rest of the world in making big, oaky wine.”

And, in the wake of yesterday’s post, Londoner, organic grape grower, respected enologist, and Tuscan winemaker Cristiano offered a reality-check technical point-of-view:

    However when talking about acidity in Barbera, one should remember just how fierce this can be. One thing is taming slightly the acidic character of these wines and another is completely obliterating that zippy side, that works so well with food. Although not completely correct in technical terms but gets the message across: a wine with high acidity is one that has over let’s say 6-6.5gr/l (expressed in tartaric acidity), there are some Barberas that can have naturally over 12gr/l of acidity,now that wouldn’t do, would it ? It’s a question of common sense. I am however completely against the use of oak in Barbera.

Thanks, everyone, for reading and for all the insightful comments.

Tracie P are taking the rest of the day off and we’re going to enjoy some of the groovy SXSW festival that transforms Austin into the musical epicenter of the world…

If traditional Italian food can do it, why can’t traditional Italian wine?

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Above, from left: Professor Vincenzo Gerbi (enologist, U. of Turin), me, winemaker Michele Chiarlo, and unidentified woman, March 9, 2010, Tuesday morning in Canelli. Alfonso provided a caption and thought bubbles for the photograph, which he lifted from the Barbera Meeting Flickr feed. Alfonso’s captions are humorous, of course, but the tension was as thick as Australian Shiraz with added tannin extract. It’s never an easy to task to interpret in those situations. I was using a technique called chuchotage or whispered translation, where I would whisper translations of the questions into Professor Gerbi’s ear. Then I used consecutive translation to translate his answers. Ne nuntium necare!

The events of Tuesday, March 9, 2010, at the Barbera conference in Canelli and the heated debate that ensued have been the subject of much discussion. Perhaps the best account of the ideological arm wresting was rendered by fellow member of the Barbera 7 Cory here. (Leading Italian wine writer Franco Ziliani had high praise for Cory’s observations. And fellow Barbera 7 member Fredric chronicled the excellent luncheon here.)

Here’s what Cory had to say:

    The first event was a presentation on new research being done on pruning by a group funded by some of the bigger names that produce barbera. For those of you don’t know much about the farming of wine (i’m no expert myself) the way vines are pruned are central to the way grapes ripen, how much they produce, and how the wine comes out. Traditionally barbera has been pruned using the guyot system, (which i won’t get into in detail here). The research being done is on the spur cordon system. It’s one of those things that sounds innocuous to the outsider, but the effects on the wine were profound.

    We were told about the effects of the pruning on the acids, the tannins, the color of the wine.

    It was around this point that things began to become heated.
    Questions were asked as to why this was necessary. Do you really need to keep messing with the grape? Why would you need to control the acid in barbera?

    Isn’t acid essential to barbera?

    The answer we got was that they were making barbera… important.

Read the entire post here.

Above: During the morning and afternoon sessions, my good friend and blogger colleague Charles Scicolone challenged the winemakers directly, asking “Why don’t you make the same great, food-friendly wines you made 20 years ago?”

As the interpreter, I couldn’t jump into the debate. But as I listened and interpreted, interpreted and listened, the same thought kept rolling around my head: traditional Italian cuisine has conquered the world over; so why is it that Italians want to send modern-, international- (i.e., homogeneous-) style wine abroad? In other words, if traditional Italian cuisine can do it, why can’t traditional Italian wine?

After all, the thing that Tracie P and I love the most about real Italian wine is its food-friendliness. Whether old, regal Nebbiolo or young, bright Barbera, we look for three basic elements in the wines we like, the same three elements that make wine friendly to food: high acidity, low alcohol, and honest fruit aromas and flavors. At our house, we never serve food without wine and never serve wine without food (well, to be honest, we only rarely serve Champagne at breakfast!). Joking and clichés aside, our approach to wine can be distilled in the following chiastic aphorism (do you like that one, Thor?): never wine without food, never food without wine.

And what could go better with traditional Italian cuisine than traditional Italian wine?

In other food-friendly news…

Tracie P and I FINALLY got to spend a quiet night at home alone last night. She treated me to Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes…

Did I mention that besides being jaw-droppingly gorgeous, the girl CAN COOK? ;-)

In other news…

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of doing an online interview with Grappolo Rosso. I particularly enjoyed his request that I pair wines with songs. I really liked, if I do say so myself, my pairing for Australian Shiraz: a little Judas Priest, anyone? Thanks again, Jury! And complimenti per il tuo nuovo blog!

The Barbera affair: what really happened that snowy night in Nizza

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The following is my account of the events that took place on Tuesday, March 9, 2010, during Barbera Meeting 2010. The facts, ma’am, just the facts. See also the account published by Tom’s Wine Line.

Bernard Arnould

Above: Even after they traded words more acidic than an unoaked Barbera, Belgian wine writer Bernard Arnould (left) and winemaker Ludovico Isolabella shared pleasantries during the aperitivo after the conference on the wines of Nizza last Wednesday.

The controversy really began before lunch, when Italian wine writer Carlo Macchi, Austrian Helmut Knall, and Americans Charles Scicolone and Tom Maresca asked some pointed questions during the Q&A following a presentation by professor of enology Vincenzo Gerbi (University of Turin) and legendary winemaker Michele Chiarlo in Canelli before lunch. The speakers had presented the results of the Hastae experimental laboratory project. Researchers were able to reduce levels of acidity by employing non-traditional vine-training methods they said. I had been asked to interpret.

Why, asked the attendees, would you want to reduce the acidity levels of Barbera when its bright acidity is it’s defining characteristic? The answer, said the presenters, lies in a desire to make a wine more palatable to a wider market. The same held for judicious oak aging, they said. A heated argument on what defines “recognizability” and “typicity” ensued. Frankly, I had an easier time interpreting for the Italian foreign minister’s delegation and a hostile group of Chinese officials when I worked at the United Nations some years ago.

Above: Charles Scicolone addressed Michele Chiarlo directly during the afternoon session.

But things really heated up after we had tasted roughly 50 wines in the afternoon session in Nizza and Belgian wine writer Bernard Arnould took the floor and openly challenged the winemakers present: the wines we had tasted, he told them, were so oaky and concentrated that they were barely drinkable. They did not resemble Barbera, he said, and he couldn’t help but wonder out loud where they expected to sell these wines.

To this, winemaker (and one of Piedmont’s foremost lawyers) Ludovico Isolabella, owner of the Isolabella winery, responded by asking: “Do you know anything, anything at all, about wine?”

Following this, Charles Scicolone addressed the winemakers, and Michele Chiarlo in particular. He asked them for whom these wines were intended. They did not taste like the wines he had tasted 20 years prior, he said. Why, he asked, did they change their winemaking style? Were they making one wine for their own consumption and another to sell to America? The Barberas he had tasted, he explained, were no longer the high-acidity, bright fruit, low-tannin, food-friendly wines of two decades ago.

Above: The Barbera 7 watched on as the volatile acidity flew. You can see Polish colleague Andrzej Daszkiewicz in the background with Charles and Tom Maresca to his left.

That’s all I have time for today. I’ll have more to report tomorrow and I know that my colleagues are also scribing posts on the fateful events of that day.

In the meantime, I’ve spent the whole day (and last night) stuck at JFK. I kinda feel like the Tom Hanks character in Spielberg’s Terminal. Ugh… Hopefully, I’ll make it back to that beautiful lady of mine tonight. I don’t think I can stand another day without her…

My date with the city (of Milan)

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After a week of working myself to the bone in Asti and Langa, and a successful and happy epilogue to Barbera Meeting 2010 (and all the many blogilicious waves we surfed there), my little gift to myself was an afternoon of book shopping and strolling in Milan on a beautiful, crisp but not too chilly afternoon. That’s Milan’s famous gothic cathedral, the Duomo of Milan, above.

A visit to the original Feltrinelli book shop on Via Manzoni revealed a Massimo Montarari (Italian food historian) title that was missing from my collection. And a visit to one of the flagship Feltrinelli megastores in the Galleria (above) delivered the toponymic dictionary I’d been looking for.

When you exit the subway at the Duomo station, the stairs are rigged with midi triggers that play acoustic piano samples. As you walk up the stairs, if you land on each “white key” step, you play the C major scale. The eerily beautiful cacophony created by commuters and tourists reminded me of an angular Antonioni film score.

My Milan will always be a black and white movie from the 1960s but Milan is also the capital of haute couture and high design. I love the glamour and color of Milanese window shopping.

But the best part was dinner of Piave cheese, perfectly sliced Lombard bresaola (above), and Friulian Cabernet Franc in the home of my super good friends Stefano (from Treviso, Veneto) and Anna (from Ischia, Campania). None of us could stop marveling at the wonderful, uncanny counterpoints and parallels of life. This adoptive padovano has been away from his adoptive ischitana for way too long. Thank goodness the next stop is Austin, Texas, U.S. of A.

A great winebar in Asti and 3 wines that blew me away

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Special thanks to Tom H, who hipped me to this place.

Above: Classic-method Petit Rouge “Caronte” by Morgex et de La Salle (Val d’Aosta)? Hell ya! Caronte is Dante’s Charon, as the label reveals with these lines: Charon the demon, with eyes of glowing coals/beckons to them, herds them all aboard/striking anyone who slackens with his oar (Inferno 3, 109-11). This wine had elegant structure and citrus fruit balanced by a savory minerality. One of those, I-could-drink-everyday-and-never-get-tired-of-it wines.

Posting hastily as I head out for meetings in Alba and Grinzane this morning and then to Milan to reconnect with friends, old and new, and hopefully to visit a bookshop or too before dinner.

Above: “Natural wine” is a touchy subject in Italy and the term “natural” really refers here, as Thor pointed out the other night, to a philosophy, loose but honest, rather than a rigorously enforced code. Owner Claudio called this a “natural” Barbera. 2006 Piemonte Barbera (although actually a Barbera d’Asti) by Hohler. It was earthy and savory, meaty but not over rich. I completely dug it.

After everyone left yesterday, I spent the day alone, catching up on correspondence, doing a little translating for a client, and resting. Tom H had mentioned TastéVin Vineria, a fantastic wine bar near Asti’s city walls, and so I headed out for a little walk and then took a seat at the tiny counter and chatted with owner Claudio, munching on charcuterie and cheese and tasting wines he recommended.

Above: I was completely floored by this wine. 2004 Aglianico d’Irpinia Drogone by Cantina Giardino. No sulfite added. Rich and savory, gorgeous tannin (slightly mellowed after having been opened the night before), rocks and red fruit, and impressive acidity. Definitely a great candidate for aging. My one word tasting note? Wow.

Okay. That’s all I have time for today. Gotta run. If you ever make it to Asti, please check out TastéVin Vineria. That’s a photo of owners Claudio and his fidanzata below (I’m so sorry, Claudio! I lost the card you gave me last night with your last names!).

TastéVin Vineria
Via Carlo Vassallo, 2
14100 Asti, Italy
0141 320017

In other news…

Only my love holds the other key to me…