Above: Massican’s Annia, a blend of Ribolla Gialla, Tocai Friulano and Chardonnay from Napa. Los Angeles-based sommelier and consultant Taylor Parsons poured me the wine back in 2014 when he was running one of California’s hippest wine programs at the time.

Overheard last night at a progressive wine bar in Houston…

Wine professional 1: “I’m really a francophile at heart but I also love Italy. I don’t drink any Californian wine at all.”

Wine professional 2: “Well, you should try this Sauvignon Blanc from Massican. It’s a real ‘f— you’ to the California wine industry.”

Massican winemaker and owner Dan Petrosky is widely known in the industry as a maverick (to put it mildly). For the last 10 years or so, his elegant, lean, “moody, textural” white wines (as one wine writer put it) have wowed “young, t-shirt clad sommeliers across the U.S.” (see this excellent profile and interview by one of my favorite American wine writers Lauren Mowery).

But more than a decade after he set out to show the world that Napa Valley could produce acidity-driven, fresh, food-friendly, and nuanced Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc (not to mention a smattering of his favorite Italian white varieties), Petrosky seems no longer to be part of the California wine counterculture. Today, in fact, he’s part of an expanding movement of California growers and winemakers who have embraced old world styles and sensibilities. Like many of his peers, he learned winemaking in Europe and brought his experience and newfound tastes back to the states with him.

And he’s one of the winemakers who will be profiled in the 2019 Slow Wine Guide to the Wines of Italy, Slovenia, California, and Oregon.

With all of their field work completed over the summer, the editors (me among them) are in the midst of putting the book together.

The 2019 edition, the second to include American wines, will include more than 130 California winemakers (last year’s featured 70) and 50 Oregon producers (this is the first year the guide covers Oregon).

Like last year’s book, the 2019 guide isn’t intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive: it’s a growing, living, and breathing almanac that’s meant to give voice to the new wave of America’s viticultural renaissance.

I couldn’t be more proud to be one of the guide’s senior editors for California and the coordinating editor for the U.S.

About the Slow Wine Guide:

The Slow Wine Guide is part of the international Slow Food movement, which was founded in Italy by foodways activist Carlo Petrini in the late 1980s to counter “fastfoodization” and to safeguard the world’s gastronomic traditions. The first Italian edition of the wine guide was published in 2010 and in 2011 Slow Food began translating it into English. In 2018, the editors released the first edition to include California wines. And the current edition of the guide (2019) will include not only California but Oregon wines as well.

Unlike the overwhelming majority of wine reviews and guides, the Slow Wine guide doesn’t “score” its wines. Instead, its mission is to “tell the stories” of the wineries through their people, vineyards, and wines. The overarching criterion for inclusion is the winemakers’ “connection to the land” where they grow their wines. With this guide, the editors hope to share with their readers wines that reflect the place where they are grown and the people who make them.

More than 40,000 copies of the guide are sold in Europe each year and the entire guide is available online for free. Copies of the guide are also sold in the U.S. at each of tastings organized by the Slow Wine tour.

“Everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic [and thus] we can only say ‘The goal of all life is death’, and, casting back, ‘The inanimate was there before the animate.’”

Sigmund Freud
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922)
[italics his]

Wine is the one agricultural product that can outlive us. It’s also the one form of nourishment that can live before us.

It’s true, as Eric Asimov wrote recently for the Times, that “no wine is meant to last for a century. If it does, it’s by accident.”

But many wines are conceived to have lifespans longer than those of their producers. And the longevity of those wines often ensures that the winemaker won’t live long enough to experience the wines when they “peak,” in other words, when they achieve their true greatness in complexity and nuance.

There is no other agricultural product that we allow to age so long. Can you imagine slathering your sandwich with 30-year-old mayonnaise? Would you stuff your warm tortillas with huitlacoche harvested years earlier?

Cheese can rival wine in terms of its ageworthiness. But it still comes in at a distant second when it comes to wine’s ability to age with spectacular results.

For many wine lovers and professionals, one of the most memorable experiences is drinking wine that is older than the persons consuming it (as Eric did when he attended a dinner at the storied Bordeaux estate Lafite and drank a wine that was harvest in 1868).

Last week I had the immense fortune to attend a dinner where three of the wines in the flight were older than me (I was born in 1967). A fourth wine was harvested the year my wife Tracie was born (she’s younger than me). The wines were all very fresh on the nose and very vibrant in the mouth. They were very much “alive”: the color was rich, the acidity was bright, and the flavors nuanced. We drank them with our meal, not as a curiosity or a lab experiment. It was an unforgettable and thoroughly enjoyable experience, as you can imagine.

Wine is the grape’s last dying gasp. Once picked, the fruit begins to decompose. Oxygen and yeast team up to transform its sugar (its life blood) into alcohol. And as the process unfolds, the winemaker (through a rational distortion of nature, as Lévi-Strauss might have said) captures the essence of the fruit and its flavors.

The winemaker then protects the wine from oxygen by sealing it up in a tank or cask and then in a glass bottle. Later she or he lets a tiny bit of oxygen come into contact with the wine (through the pores of the wood staves in the cask or the pores of the cork in the bottle) over a long period, so that the “dying” process continues very slowly.

Some people cite a romantic notion of history or narrative through wine when they taste wines older than they are (or the same age). It’s always an emotional experience to taste a “birth year wine” or a wine that was grown in a historically significant year (the 1945 vintage is among the most coveted among wine collectors, for example).

But I believe that the powerful allure of drinking wines older than you goes much deeper than that.

When you taste a wine that was grown before you were born, you experience its “death”: its ultimate degradation as the fruit decomposes into an inorganic state. True, you experience that with all wine, even young wine. But when the wine is older than you, it represents a life longer than yours and as such, its decomposition is — I believe — more profound and compelling on the palate of the drinker.

Freud held that there is “a tendency innate in living organic matter impelling it towards the reinstatement of an earlier condition” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle). In other words, we have an intrinsic drive to return to an inorganic state as Freudian scholars put it.

Since he first published his ideas on the “death drive,” scholars and clinicians have argued heatedly about the validity of his theory.

But there’s no doubt that the idea has a deep resonance within the human experience.

As G-d says to Adam in Genesis,

By the sweat of your face
You will eat bread,
Till you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.

Ashes to ashes, as they say, dust to dust. We all know that we will all return one day to the ground. We will all return to an inorganic state.

As I sipped the 1957, 1961, and 1964 the other night, I thought of those lines from Moses’ books. I was consuming grapes that were grown before I was born and I was tasting them as they finally began the last leg of their trip back to the ground. They weren’t allowed to drop to the ground naturally. No, they were picked and then vinified, their essence captured in a bottle for someone to experience many years later. The person who made those wines is no longer alive today, I thought.

I also thought about my oldest brother who died in a car accident when he was 15 and I was five. He was born in 1957, too.

Thanks to its unique nature and unrivaled longevity among foods, wine has a remarkable ability to evoke intense feelings and thoughts in the drinker.

It can taste pretty good, too.

Everything dies baby that’s a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

Bruce Springsteen
“Atlantic City” (1982)

It didn’t occur to me until I got back to Texas week before last from a whirlwind trip across the U.S.: despite two visits over the years to Ronchi di Cialla — one of the pioneers of Friuli’s native grape revival and one of its most acclaimed and soulful winemakers — I had never tasted the winery’s Pignolo.

Thinking my mind was playing tricks on me, I checked out the estate’s website: the Rapuzzi family, who founded the winery in 1970, doesn’t even mention the wine on it library release page.

Visits to Robert Parker and Antonio Galloni similarly revealed no mentions of the wine.

It was a week ago last Thursday that my friend, Italian wine importer Earl Cramer-Brown, generously opened a bottle of the Rapuzzi’s 2012 Pignolo to share with me in McMinnville, Oregon where we had dinner at the famous Nick’s Café.

Man, what a wine!

Many compare Pignolo to Nebbiolo because of its generally powerful tannic character and rich fruit buoyed by vibrant acidity. But it’s such a distinct and distinctive grape in my experience: black cherry and black currant seemed to dance against the minerality and hint of eastern spice in this wine. It was just so lithe in the glass that you simply couldn’t stop drinking it. And even though its tannin has many years of evolution ahead, it was already drinking great, food-friendly and approachable, straight out of the bottle (opened on the spot).

It reaffirmed my belief that this grape wholly deserves its place among the pantheon of Italy’s great red wines.

Thank you again, Earl, for sharing this extraordinary bottle with me!

The news ricocheted across the enocentric internet yesterday afternoon: in a press release issued by the Court of Master Sommeliers Americas, the group announced that its board had “unanimously voted to invalidate the results of the tasting portion of the [September 5] 2018 Master Sommelier Diploma Examination for all candidates due to clear evidence that a Master breached the confidentiality with respect to the wines presented for tasting.”

Wine writer for the San Francisco Chronicle Esther Mobley broke the story in the mainstream media yesterday evening. Her piece includes background info on how the court works and how the exams are administered.

And New York-based sommelier and wine writer Courtney Schiessl published this excellent post on the developing story for the wine trade portal and blog SevenFifty. She reports that “23 newly-minted Master Sommeliers [had their] tasting results revoked.” Of the 24 who recently passed the three-part exam, only one retained his title, she writes, because he had previously completed the tasting portion.

According to the Court’s press release, “the Board of Directors found sufficient evidence that the tasting portion of the 2018 Master Sommelier Diploma Examination was compromised by the release of detailed information concerning wines in the tasting flight.”

“The tasting portion is what first made the exam the object of popular fascination,” writes Mobley. “In 25 minutes, a candidate must taste six wines, blind, and identify each one’s grape variety, region of origin and vintage.”

One of the Master Sommeliers who lost their titles lives with his family around the corner from our house here in southwest Houston. He’s one of the most beloved and respected wine professionals working in our city. I’ve sat with him in blind tastings and have watched him ace the wines without even breaking a sweat. Our kids go to school together and we eat at the same breakfast place. He is one of the nicest and most talented people working in a business where niceness and ability don’t always go together. I admire him immensely and am devastated to learn that his much deserved title has been snatched away from him by a cheat.

Master Sommeliers do so much to foster wine education and appreciation in this country. As mentors to young wine professionals pursuing careers in the culinary arts, they set a standard of conduct and excellence in their industry. I applaud the Court for its transparency and I wish them speed in cleaning house. And I grieve for their erstwhile members whose perseverance and sacrifice have been sullied by a swindler.

Scion of the legendary winemaking family from Piedmont, Giovanni Gaja (above) is just one of the boldface winemakers whom I’ll be presenting next Monday here in Houston at the Grand Marchi (Top Estates) tasting.

Piero Mastroberardino, Alessia Antinori, Maurizio Zanella, Alberto Tasca, Alois Lageder, Alberto Chiarlo… And those are just some of the a-listers who will be there. It’s a true hit parade of Italian wine.

So if you’ve ever been curious about tasting Sassicaia from Tenuta San Guido, Barbaresco and Brunello by Gaja, Chardonnay by Jermann (one of my personal faves), Taurasi by Mastroberardino etc., this is a great opportunity to dive in.

I’ll be leading a guided tasting in the morning, followed by a walk-around tasting where the estates will be presenting a broad selection of their wines.

Click here for event details and registration info (you have to register).

I hope to see you next Monday in Houston and thanks for your support!

Image via Giovanni Gaja’s Facebook.

High fives, hugs, and congratulations filled the air last night at Light Years, Houston’s newest wine bar and its first and only radically natural wine bar.

The congratulations were gladly shared, no doubt, with owners Steve Buechner and John Glanzman, who moved here from New York to build their dream wine bar in a market they suspected, rightly, would embrace it (see Eric Sandler’s preview of the venue for CultureMap here).

But felicitations were also shared between the revelers themselves.

“We finally have the wine bar we’ve been dreaming of,” said one noted Houston wine professional to another.

Houston has seen a boon of alternative and progressive wine bars in recent years: the pioneer was 13 Celsius, followed by Camerata and Vinology.

But the new wine bar/shop represents a new frontier for the city: it’s the first vineria that specializes solely and exclusively in natural wine — à la Terroir in San Francisco or The Ten Bells in New York. No conventionally vinified wine here, whatsoever.

What is natural wine? Most would agree that natural wine is wine that has been organically farmed, spontaneously fermented (using ambient yeast), and bottled with as little intervention and sulfur as possible.

My definition of natural wine? It’s like obscenity: I can’t define it but I know it when I taste it.

At last night’s friends and family event, Tracie and I drank Clos Saron Tickled Pink and Clarine Farm al basc Albariño from the Sierra Foothills in northern California. They were both great and Tracie looked more beautiful than ever.

When we arrived home, paid our babysitter, and tumbled on to the couch together, it just felt like Houston’s now an even better place to live. That’s what natural wine can do to you…

Mazel tov, Steve and John, on your launch! And thank you for bringing Light Years to Houston!