Monthly Archives: March 2012

Corkage and Racism

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Corkage and racism… These aren’t two words you’d expect to find in a binomial expression. But they are the words that flashed like burning embers in my mind the other night at Sotto in Los Angeles when two couples (right out of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, facelifts, fake tans, shiny teeth and all) sat down and plopped a magnum of a wine that rhymes with joke (you know what I’m talking about), a Brunello I’ve never heard of, and a pack of Marlboro Lights on the table (no joke).

Before I get to explaining my thought process, let’s begin by revealing how offensive it is when restaurant goers do not follow the etiquette of proper corkage.

Lettie Teague wrote this excellent corkage guide a few years ago. And I also really like this guide by Jack Everitt on his site Fork and Bottle.

When it comes to corkage, there are three things that everyone seems to agree on: 1) find out what the corkage policy is before you visit the restaurant; 2) bring something truly special and ideally rare (not something readily available) and offer the sommelier a taste; and 3) order a bottle comparable in value from the list (and leave a generous tip for your server who’s check is reduced as a result of the corkage).

The couples that came the other night already knew that we have a two-bottle limit. They thought that they could get around this by bringing a magnum (two bottles in one) and a 750ml. (It reminded me of a story about an undertaker who got a ticket for using the carpool lane with just him and a cadaver in the van.) It was as if they were saying (and in fact, they were shouting at the top of their lungs): we love the food (and the A-list celebrities) here but we think the wine list sucks and we can’t drink your crappy wine…

And here’s the part where their attitude became racist in my view.

Our wine captain informed them that the magnum counted as their two bottles of wine and so they were forced to order something from our list. Otherwise, how could they get their drink on between smoke breaks?

A server brought them the list and I approached the table and asked the hair-plugged gentleman who seemed to be in charge of alcohol consumption, very politely, “may I answer any questions about the wine list for you, sir?”

He looked up at me and said dismissively, “no, I think we’ve got that covered.”

He ordered a glass (yes, just a glass!) of Lioco 2009 Indica (Carignan and Grenache blend from Mendocino by one of my favorite Californian winemakers, Kevin Kelley).

It was then that I realized that his fear of “the Other” — in this case, southern Italian wine — overwhelmed any ounce of civility that his parents may have imparted to him during child rearing.* (In case you’re not familiar with the concept behind our wine program at Sotto, it’s devoted to southern Italian wine, with a short list of Natural wines from California.)

On the one hand, here was this slick angeleno, with his trophy wife and his Santa Rita Pinot Noir. On the other hand, our wine list must have conjured every southern Italian stereotype in the western canon.

Granted, our list is esoteric by any measure. Even Italian wine professionals will tell me that they don’t recognize many of the wines I have sourced for the list.

But his gesture was a sweeping dismissal: it was abundantly clear to me that in his view, there was no wine from southern Italy that he could possibly drink.

And that, my friends, is racism in flagrante delicto.

When you work in a restaurant, you have to de-sensitize yourself to rudeness. It’s part of the deal. But this is where I draw the line…

Thanks for reading and please treat your servers and sommeliers well!

* Hegel was among the first to introduce the idea of the other as constituent in self-consciousness. He wrote of pre-selfconscious Man: “Each consciousness pursues the death of the other”, meaning that in seeing a separateness between you and another, a feeling of alienation is created, which you try to resolve by synthesis. The resolution is depicted in Hegel’s famous parable of the master-slave dialectic. (Wikipedia)

My chat @IsleWine @EatingOurWords @HoustonPress

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Photo via Grub Street.

Beyond writing about wines under $25, my mission as wine writer at the Houston Press is to offer coverage of fine wine in Houston and Texas.

So what could be better than an interview with my friend Ray Isle, Houston native, who’s on his way to Texas next month for the Austin Food & Wine Festival?

You can read the interview here.

And here are his thoughts on Italian wine (topic of one his seminars) that didn’t make it into the Houston Press post:

    Cesanese was a discovery for me not too long ago (particularly the wines from Damiano Ciolli, who’s a very talented young guy). In fact, in general Central Italy fascinates me — it seems like it’s been a little bit bypassed, attention-wise. Marco Carpineti’s wine in the Lazio are great; a lot of Abruzzese wines are terrific (I think La Valentina’s Binomio bottling is a standout); and there’s been a crazy wave of good Lambrusco coming in, which has been a godsend for dinner parties, as far as I’m concerned. But what’s great about Italy overall at the moment is it seems as though you can’t go to an importer tasting and not run across a producer you’ve never heard of before who’s doing something ambitious and interesting.

Ray is such a cool guy… I’ve promised him a night of honkytonking while he’s out here. Ginny’s Little Long Horn Saloon, anyone?

Why Cornelissen is on our list @SottoLA

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“Frank Cornelissen came from Belgium to Etna,” wrote Eric the Red in a recent New York Times piece, “where he makes extreme wines unlike almost any others on earth, which people tend to love or hate.”

Cornelissen’s supremely polarizing wines are a wine director’s worst nightmare. Because they are entirely unsulfured, there is extreme bottle variation in any allocation and secondary fermentation (and the resulting spritz) is more common than not. Because they are unfiltered and unfined, the wines are cloudy and have all kinds of nasty looking bits floating around in them. And the volatile acidity in the wines — there’s no way around this — can make them smell like shit when you first open them.

So why did I put them on my list at Sotto in Los Angeles (where I’ve been curating the carta dei vini since the restaurant opened on March 5, 2011)? And why did the general manager, Dina Pepito, agree to let me, against her better judgment?

It’s a lot easier to serve Cornelissen’s wines at home, where you have all the time in the world to let them rest upright and let their sediment fall to the bottom. When we’ve served them in our home, we made sure to give them ample time to repose and we’ve drunk them over the course of an entire evening, following along as the wine changed from first glass to last.

When I worked the floor at Sotto on Saturday night, there were ninety people on the waiting list trying to get in. It’s one of the hottest A-list tables in LA right now. And in all that hustle and bustle (between the CAA dick-waggers and the Chardonnay-drinking housewives of Beverly Hills), a sturdy Gaglioppo works great while a delicate Etna blend tends to be unsettled by the roaring din of the rich and famous.

And even though the allocation we managed to get certainly doesn’t meet the criteria for “fine wine,” we store the bottles with our verticals of Taurasi, Cirò, and Graticciaia because the wines need to be handled with the same gentle tenderness.

When the wines became available to us thanks to Amy Atwood Selections, I put them on the list because I wanted to offer our guests Natural winemaking in its most extreme expression. From the Natural wine police to the consumerist hegemony of wine punditry in the U.S. today, everyone agrees that 1) these are impeccably Natural wines; and 2) they represent, to borrow an expression from Roland Barthes, “wine degree zero.” These are wines to which literally nothing has been added. Nothing, zero, zippo… (If you don’t know the wines, read this profile by Matt Kramer in the Wine Spectator, of all places!)

And of course, I wanted our wine list to reflect the renaissance of winemaking that’s taking shape on the northern slopes of Mt. Etna.

I sold a couple of bottles of the wine over the last weekend (when I was visiting for staff training and to “work the floor”).

One was to a table of wine geeks who had read a preview of the list in one of LA’s sea of food blogs. It was amazing to watch their eyes light as the stink blew off and they slowly nursed the wine. “I’ve never tasted anything like this,” said one. “The wine is slightly sparkling,” noted another.

I sold another bottle to super glam Eastern European lady (Hungary?) who sported a Farrah Fawcett hairdo and who was in town to visit her daughter, who was dining with her.

“I cannot drink wines with sulfites,” she told me. “I break out if I drink wine with sulfites. I can only drink natural wine,” she added, clearly unaware of what the volatile term natural can mean to wine professionals these days.

“As it just so happens,” I said, “I have a wine to which, I am 100% sure, no sulfites have been added.” (We actually have a couple on the list.) And I opened the Contadino (the same as in the photos above).

She wasn’t entirely thrilled by the wine but she didn’t send it back. She was normally a “Merlot drinker,” she told me. And in one of the most bizarre moves I’ve ever seen, she ordered coffee after dinner but kept nursing the wine with her coffee. (Disgusting, right?)

I don’t think the wine made much of an impression on her. But I’m assuming, since she didn’t call to complain, that she didn’t break out the next day.

And in our small little way, we made the world a little safer for Italian wine…

Stay tuned for my next post about my recent visit to Sotto: “The Racism of Corkage.”

What I do for a living…

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Folks often ask me just what it is that I do for a living…

After receiving my doctorate in Italian (UCLA, 1997) and getting my start in the wine writing business as the chief wine writer for La Cucina Italiana (1998-2000, New York), I began working as a freelance copywriter for New York-based importers of Italian wine and spirits.

What started as a print-media monthly newsletter for Fratelli [Fernet] Branca (in New York) quickly grew into a business that provided content to importers like Terlato Wines International and Kobrand. Continue reading →

Home, where my love lies waiting

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So glad to be heading home today…

Homeward bound
Home, where my thought’s escaping
Home, where my music’s playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me

Pig’s head ragù, the most important ingredient @SottoLA

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What’s the most important ingredient in pig’s head ragù?

Nomina sunt consequentia rerum.

Chefs Zach and Steve carefully carve all of the tender meat around the pig’s head and then grind it for their ragù at Sotto in Los Angeles where I curate the wine list together with my friend and colleague, the inimitable Rory.

I usually have the classic pizza margherita (my favorite) when I finish my shift. But last night I decided to mix things up a bit and had the housemade sausage and broccoli raab pizza with freshly chopped red hot chili peppers. It paired unbelievably well with the Nanni Copè, the new and supremely sexy (read ACIDITY) Pallagrello Nero from Caserta, with the earthiness of the wine holding the spice of the pizza in check.

I’ll be at Sotto again tonight: please come on down and see me and I’ll pour you something great…

Lou Iacucci: Many mourn a friend who was a friend of Italian wine…

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In the wake of yesterday’s post and remembrances of the great Italian wine maven Lou Iacucci, a number of people who knew him wrote to me or commented here on the blog.

Of all the remembrances, I was perhaps most deeply moved by what my friend Francesco Bonfio, president of the Italian associations of wine shops, wrote, paraphrasing a quote uttered by Lou: “I do not want to drink italian wines that taste like French wines and I do not want to pay for Italian wines at French prices.” (Francesco attributes the quote to an interview in Wine Spectator, which I’ll have to track down.)

Amen, I say…

Alfonso sent a scan of an obituary published shortly after Lou’s passing in Civiltà del Bere (vol. 12, ,2 April-June 1988), “Lou Iacucci succeeded in introducing thousands of people to Italian wines.” I’ve uploaded them (2 pages) as PDFs and you can download using the links below.

One of the profile’s subtitles reads: “Many mourn a friend who was a friend of Italian wine.” Italian wine insiders will recognize many of the names of Lou’s peers and colleagues quoted in the article.

Page 1
Page 2

See you tonight in Los Angeles @SottoLA

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I’ll see you tonight and tomorrow night at Sotto in Los Angeles, where we’re launching my new 2012 list…

“Lou Iacucci, I remember the night he died…”

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Lou Iacucci, I remember the night he died so well,” said thirty-something Edoardo Falvo, scion of the Avignonesi family and co-owner, with his brother Alfredo, of the Masseria Li Veli winery in Puglia.

The glamorous Edoardo and his effervescent wife Alessia Nebuloni were in Austin, working the market with their wines from Salento and my good friend, Master Sommelier Craig Collins, regional sales manager had asked me to join them for dinner.

In case you don’t know who Louis “Lou” Iacucci was, just ask anyone who worked in the New York wine business back in the 1970s and 80s: as the owner of Gold Star Wines and one of the founders of Vias Imports, Lou started importing fine wines from Piedmont and Tuscany before anyone could imagine the renaissance of Italian wines in our country that emerged in the 1990s. Every New York-based Italian wine professional over the age of 50 remembers Lou (whom I never met) as the great pioneer of the contemporary era of Italian wine in our country. The legendary wine cellar at Manducatis in Long Island City, Queens was shaped by his palate and the then unknown wines he imported — particularly from Piedmont.

“I remember that night very well,” recounted Edoardo. “Fabrizio Pedrolli [his partner in Vias] called to say that there had been an accident. He was crying and he told us that they had been driving in two separate cars. Fabrizio had passed a truck on the road and Louis followed him. Fabrizio made it but Louis had a frontal collision. They were driving from Siena to meet my father [Alberto Falvo] at the winery [Avignonesi].”

I imagined that Edoardo would remember that night because a number of people who knew him had told me that he was driving to Avignonesi when the accident occurred.

Lou was taken to the hospital in Siena where he died the next day, said Edoardo.

Even though I never met him (and he passed long before my time), Iacucci sits supremely in my mind’s vision of the Italian wine Olympus. And his hagiography is as fascinating (at least to me) as the Nebbiolo he brought to this country in a time before the American media reinterpreted the iconic wines of Italy — just ask Charles Scicolone, Alfonso Cevola, Livio Panebianco, Francesco Bonfio et alia…

Edoardo’s reminiscences of the evening sent goosebumps traveling across my skin… The night that Lou Iacucci expired was, in many ways, the day the music died.

(BTW, Googling around before I composed this post, I came across this excellent and superbly detailed account of the recent sale of Avignonesi and its new owner and her biodynamic conversion of the estate. Fascinating reading imho.)

In other news…

Yesterday wine legend Christopher Cannan (above) was also in the River City (that’s Austin to the rest of yall) at the best little wine bar in Texas, Vino Vino, pimping his new project, the Clos Figueras (Priorat).

He seemed most geeked to taste me on the white he produces on the newish estate, a blend of stainless-steel fermented Viognier with smaller amounts of cask-fermented Grenache Blanc.

“They were supposed to send me Cabernet Sauvignon [rootstock],” he told me, “but they sent Viognier instead. And so I decided to plant it.” The wine was fresh, with bright acidity, and I was impressed by how the Viognier’s unctuous character was kept in check by the wine’s overall balance. It was delicious.

To all those folks who were worried about me not having any good wine to drink down here in Texas, not to worry. We do alright… ;)