Above: on Sunday morning we took the girls to the Renzo Piano-designed Menil Museum in Houston to see its awesome collection of Magritte paintings. That’s Lila Jane wearing her “my dad is Do Bianchi” t-shirt, given to her by Vinogirl.

Things were a little heavy last week here on the blog. I really appreciate all the folks who shared my post on Friday and offered words of support and solidarity. It was hard to write but I felt it was important.

Now it’s time to get back to what the blog is really about: our lives, our loves, our passions…

Above: The girls’ Levy cousins, who live here in Houston, came over to play on Friday. We’re so blessed to have a family that loves us. From left, that’s Georgia P, Josie, and Colin.

On Friday, Alfonso aka “the Italian wine guy” posted an excellent aggregate of online Italian wine resources. I was honored to be part of it and I really like his note on how true wine appreciation is like learning to play a musical instrument. Practice, practice, practice… It’s a great post, on many levels (and Alfonso’s blog has never been more exciting imho).

Check it out here.

Above: the Branch cousins came in from Orange, Texas for a few days earlier in the week while I was in Chicago. The main reason for our move to Houston was to be closer to family and we are so lucky to have them. Clockwise, Tobey, Emilee, Brady, Lila Jane, and Georgia P in the center.

In other news…

On Friday, I translated this post on the Bianchetta grape for my client Luca Ferraro at Bele Casel.

Luca’s working with some old-vine Bianchetta that he found in a newly purchased vineyard.

I really love Luca’s approach to biodiversity and his embrace of traditions that span far beyond the Prosecco boom.

With Glera so widely planted in Asolo-Conegliano-Valdobbiadene (thanks to its lucrative returns), Bianchetta is an underdog these days.

It’s going to be really interesting to see what Luca does with these old plantings.

Check out the post here. You might be surprised by Bianchetta’s role in Veneto viticulture before the Prosecco advent.

Above: we are so fortunate to have daughters who love to eat.

In family news…

Friday marked our third week in the new house in Houston. We love it here and we love our new home (a fun Mid-Century Modern three-bedroom in a nice neighborhood just outside “the Loop”).

Saturday, Tracie P and I had our first date night since we’ve moved: we went to Tony’s and were treated to the best table in the house and butternut squash gnocchi topped with Norcia truffles among other delicacies.

And Sunday, we threw our first Houston dinner party (Tracie P’s Carbonara paired with Selvapiana).

It’s a really special time in our lives and our blessings are too many to count.

Thanks for being here… More groovy stuff to come this week.

Above: an image from Oliviero Toscani’s 1989 United Colors of Benetton campaign (via the Benetton corporate website).

Responding to an Italian-Swiss reader of his weekly column in Tempo in 1969, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote on “unconscious class hatred”:

Racism [directed toward jailed Italians] is unconscious class hatred.

Compare it to American racism, which, until now and even today, has been unconscious class hatred.

But from the moment that negroes began to combat it and to become self-aware as an impoverished class, the obscure and indecipherable racial hatred directed toward them has become clear-cut, easy-to-decipher class hatred.

It is the same type of hatred that an Italian bourgeois feels for a communist but not for “lazy southerner” or a jailed countryman.

(The article was republished posthumously in Il Caos [Chaos], Mondadori, 1979. You can read it in its entirety here. Translation mine.)

I selected this famous quote for my post today because of its reference to racism in the U.S. in the late 1960s.

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Above: all of the wines in the Pasternak Prestige Portfolio tasting yesterday in Chicago were spectacular. But La Nerthe’s 2009 Clos de Beauvenir is the one I can’t stop thinking about today. A rich blend of Roussanne and Clairette, the wine showed nuanced but intensely focused layers of dried and fresh stone fruit. What a wine!

At last week’s Design Bloggers Conference in Atlanta, my friend Adam Japko delivered a brilliant talk on “moving outside of your tribe.”

When interacting solely within your own tribe, Adam explained, you don’t push yourself toward a new awareness of your potential.

And so, when the marketing team at Pasternak Wines asked me to come up to Chicago to do some live social media from their Prestige Portfolio tasting, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to gaze beyond my comfort zone.

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Above: a scene from my second-favorite hotdog joint in the world, Hot Doug’s. I won’t be able to get over there tomorrow while in Chicago for the day, but you can bet I’ll be eating my share of Chicago dogs!

On a flight today to Chicago, where I’ll be attending the Pasternak Prestige Portfolio tasting: the nice folks at Pasternak asked me to come up and give them a hand with social media for the event.

I’m always geeked to visit Chicago, the city where I was born and one of the most fun food destinations in the U.S.

Tonight, I’ll do some wine bar-hopping and I’ll catch with some of the awesome wine pros up there. Thursday, I’ll report back.

Thanks for tuning in and see you on the other side!

Above: Cécile Kyenge, Italy’s first African-Italian minister (a member of the Letta cabinet) was subjected to hate-fueled and racially charged epithets during public appearances and in online public fora last year (image via the Wiki).

I’ll never forget the night that the U.S. and NATO began bombing Kosovo in 1999. I was in Milan and even though the planes were taking off from the U.S. base in Aviano, Friuli, you could hear their engines roar.

My friend Stefano and I took a cab home after dinner and we got into a heated argument with the driver: commenting on news of the strikes, he shared his thoughts that the Albanians in Milan should be rounded up and killed.

When I returned to New York, I told the story to the managing editor of the magazine where I was working. She was the daughter of the Italian publisher of the magazine. A privileged young woman who had grown up in a gilded neighborhood in Milan, she could have walked right out of a frame from a Pasolini film like Teorema or Porcile.

The Albanians should be rounded up and shot, she told me.

Sadly, brutal racism and a tolerance of hate speech are not uncommon in Italian bourgeois society.

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Above: Our meal yesterday with leading Houston food writer Mai Pham at Thuan Kieu Com Tam in Houston’s sprawling Asia town. Here’s her most recent post on this wonderful restaurant.

Conference goers were so cordial with me last week at the Design Bloggers Conference in Atlanta. But I was surprised by how many of them questioned the wisdom of my family’s recent move from Austin (the River City), Texas, to Houston (the Bayou City).

I shouldn’t be: across the country, my friends and colleagues continue to ask me, how could you leave Austin, “the blue city in the red state” and the current hipster capital of the world (thanks to interactive media, music, and now Formula 1 racing)?

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Nicolas Quinones’ Woodfire Grill in Atlanta really impressed me on Tuesday night, the last night of the Design Bloggers Conference where I gave a talk on social media.

The food was beautiful and thoughtful. I loved how Chef Tyler Williams added artistic flair to each dish, as in the macarons above. And I loved the wholesomeness of his farm-to-table cooking. Georgia is, after all, a farming state, and the quality of the young chef’s materia prima was superb, as was his execution.

But what I loved the most was Nicolas’ 400-lot list and its aggressive pricing.

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Above: if I were a rich man, I’d spend my days in the reference/reading room of the British Library in London, one of my favorite places on earth (image via Wiki Commons).

Last week, a client of mine asked me to prepare a shortlist of “challenging” Italian wine terms in translation.

I was unavailable for a consecutive interpreting gig for one of said client’s high-profile clients and so they ended up contracting an interpreter who, however accomplished, didn’t have a lot of experience in wine-trade interpreting.

The following list of terms and translations by no means represents a complete bilingual glossary.

Instead, it’s populated by “challenging” words that are often mistranslated.

Like the Italian Grape Name and Appellation Pronunciation Project and the Italian Winery Designations Project, I’ll continue to update it: please send me your queries (by leaving a comment)!

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Corkiness can be one of the quirkiest and most contentious issues in wine appreciation.

My post today for the Houston Press addresses the conundrum of how to determine the fitness of a bottle of wine.

Thanks for reading…

Above: a view from the stage yesterday at the Design Bloggers Conference 2014 in Atlanta where I led a guided tasting for 300+ bloggers.

Social media saved my life.

It’s thanks to social media that I reinvented myself and found a new career as a wine blogger back in 2007 when I was broke, single, and rudderless in New York City.

It’s thanks to social media that I met Tracie P in 2008, fell in love, got married in 2010, and started a family — the greatest experience of my life.

And it’s thanks to social media that I became friends with Adam Japko, one of the most extraordinary, dynamic people I know.

Above: wine for 300 bloggers!

Adam asked me to speak yesterday about “how to make any story a sharable story” at the Design Bloggers Conference in Atlanta (#dbc2014), a standing-room-only event that he organizes each year.

And so I told the story of how my story became a sharable one and how social media helped me reinvent myself, find the true love of my life, and launch a successful marketing consulting business.

Each of the wines we served at the tasting represented a moment in the arc of my narrative.

Above: back in 2007, as my childhood friend Irwin remembers fondly, I told him that I was going to have a career as a wine blogger. “What’s a wine blogger?” he asked me at our favorite taco shack in La Jolla. I could have never imagined where social media was going to take me.

The Bele Casel Prosecco Colfòndo, aged on its lees and undisgorged, was cloudy and savory with a sharp citrus note. Like me back in 2007, its raw, pure flavor was looking for the right pairing.

The Ka Maciné Rossese from the Ligurian riviera was bright and rich in brilliant, Technicolor red fruit and berry flavor, a wine that you might sip as you gaze into your new lover’s eyes as he/she looks out on the bay at Portofino.

In sharp focus, the Castello di Verduno Pelaverga delivered its classic white pepper note, the spice of a new love, a new life, and a new career, the fulfillment of a peripeteia that began après la guerre.

Thank you, Adam, for being such a great friend and mentor and for letting me tell my story to such a wonderful audience.

And thank you, design bloggers, for all the thoughtful comments and kind words that you’ve shared.

I’m so glad to be here and so happy that social media has brought us together.

All of the wines can be found at Ceri Smith’s Biondivino in San Francisco, one of my favorite wine merchants in the country.