Ever since graduate school, Italy has been my lifeline and my livelihood.

It started with a fellowship at the Italian Department at U.C.L.A. Then came my first non-service job as an Italian instructor and researcher. Later came a Fulbright and other grants and scholarships for study in Italy. And during four summers off from school, I made a living playing in a cover band in Belluno, Padua, and Venice.

After school, I shifted to commercial media when I got an assistant editor job at La Cucina Italiana in New York. That led to wine writing. That led to copywriting. That led to marketing consulting. More recent years brought a teaching position at the Slow Food University in Piedmont and a gig as an editor for Slow Wine.

For more than 25 years now, Italy, Italian culture, and Italian food and wine have helped me make a living.

And now Italy and Italian food and wine needs us more than ever before.

Just this morning, I received a press release from the Italian Federation of Independent Grape Growers outlining the Italian wine industry’s most urgent needs: debt relief, small business loans for wineries and restaurants, relaxed restrictions on retail sales and production limits, etc. It echoed an open letter to Governor Cuomo from a New York-based food and wine association that arrived last night. These were just two of the myriad pleas for help, support, and solidarity that have been flooding my my inbox.

We’re all facing similar challenges in this unprecedented health crisis.

That’s why I’m inviting you to open a bottle of Italian wine from your cellar and share it on social media. Tag me and I’ll share it, too.

My client Scarpa has just launched its “Scarpa Cellar Dive” program: open a bottle of Scarpa, share a video and they’ll replace the bottle.

My client Ethica Wines has asked me to lead a series of live tastings on its Instagram. Tomorrow (Wednesday, April 1) at 3 p.m EST (2 p.m. CST), I’ll tasting with Alberto Cordero from Cordero di Montezemolo (a super cool old-school estate that not enough folks in the U.S. know about).

And yesterday afternoon I shot my first virtual tasting video (below). My good friends at Folio Fine Wine partners generously sent me a care package of wines that Tracie and I have been enjoying over the few weeks of isolation (thank you Folio!). The Ricasoli 2015 Chianti Classico Colledilà Gran Selezione blew me away when I tasted it in Tuscany in January.

Buy Italian wine, drink Italian wine, order from your favorite retailer and/or restaurant (many states are allowing restaurants to sell wine with take-out orders). And if your finances don’t permit any of the above, open a bottle from your cellar and share the joy on social media (tag me and I’ll share it, too).

We can all use a little joy in our lives right now and Italian wine is a great way to find it.

Thanks for being here and thanks for supporting Italian wine.

At 11 a.m. CST today, I’ll be doing an live story with Aleš Kristančič of Movia on the @EthicaWines Instagram.

It’s the first of a series of virtual tastings that I’m leading with them. I hope you can join us.

Aleš and his family are great friends of mine and when I visited them in January of this year, we had a blast remembering when they brought my band Nous Non Plus to play a concert at the winery back in 2008 when we had a hit song in Slovenia (no joke!).

Please join us at 11 a.m. and please look out for more Ethica Wines tastings I’ll be doing.

See you shortly! We’ll be tasting four wines, including the Pinot Grigio Ambra.

Above: a vineyard in Brescia province, a photo taken nearly a year ago to the day.

In what’s become a daily ritual, there’s a late afternoon-late night call to Italy when a couple of middle-aged wine professionals — one an American in Houston, the other an Italian in Brescia province — catch up on the ongoing health crisis in their respective cities.

Yesterday’s call was grimmer than most.

“I see the number of cases has actually begun to fall in Italy today,” said the American, noting that there was a drop, however small, in the number of new cases and victims with respect to the previous day’s reporting.

“But not in Brescia,” replied the Italian.

His words were echoed in a story this morning on the front page of the New York Times website: “Dip in Italy’s Cases Does Not Come Fast Enough for Swamped Hospitals.”

“In Brescia,” write the paper’s editors in a caption for the lead image, “hospitals have been reporting hundreds of new cases a day.” The photo that appears at the beginning of the article was taken in the intensive care unit of the Spedali Civili hospital in Brescia.

While the numbers are beginning to level off, just barely, in the rest of Italy, the situation in Brescia and neighboring Bergamo province is getting worse. Bergamo and the Italian region of Lombardy where Bergamo and Brescia are located are the epicenter of the ongoing health crisis.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a concentration of suffering so intense,” says
Dr. Intissar Sleiman in a video the man from Brescia shared with his American friend during their chat. She’s a Brescia medical professional on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy.

“We’re not used to losing so many people in such a short period of time,” she says as she holds back her tears.

The video left the American wine professional with tears streaming down his face. Just a few months ago, he was there in Brescia province visiting his Italian friend. He was supposed to be in Italy this week. How he wishes he could embrace his friend in Brescia right now! Magari!

The wine professional from Brescia and his partners are donating proceeds from the sale of one of their wines to a fund that supports the struggling Brescia hospital system.

Walter Speller wrote about it for JancisRobinson.com this week.

G-d bless Brescia. G-d bless us all.