In case you haven’t been following the news about the fires in Napa and Sonoma, please see this harrowing account by leading wine blogger Alder Yarrow. Our heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to our sisters and brothers on the ground there. See also this Calfund.org link with information about the current status of the fires and relief organizations that are taking donations.

This Thursday for our weekly virtual wine dinner at Roma restaurant in Houston, we’ll be hosting Pertinace winemaker Cesare Barbero (above) and presenting the cooperative’s Dolcetto, Barbera, and Barbaresco.

Whether the single-vineyard designates or the classic Barbaresco (the one we’ll be drinking on Thursday), these are some of my all-time favorite wines.

I started following Pertinace back in the early 2000s when I was still living and working in New York. For nearly two decades now, I continue to reach for these wines as one of Langa’s best values and one of the greatest expressions (imho) of Italian viticulture.

Roma owner Shanon and I have been working with the distributor to make the wines available at the same price he charges for all of these dinners. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be hosting Cesare and the wines this week.

See the menu and details here.

You can reserve by simply sending me an email (here).

I’ll look forward to tasting these extraordinary wines with you. Thank you for your support.

And btw, the importer recently gave me a bottle of the 2016 Dolcetto by Pertinace because I wanted to make sure the vintage was showing well. This wine knocked me off my feet with its vibrant fruit and balance. I thought it was stunning. I know our guests are really going to love these. They are really special wines.

When the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce South Central, my longtime client, first contacted me about helping out with a virtual trade tasting, I have to admit that I was skeptical.

The concept was as simple as it was ambitious. The project leader planned to convince producers in Italy not to send just a handful of bottles for each of their labels but rather multiple cases of each one. He and his team (I’m a member) would then reach out to leading Texas wine professionals across the state to set up one-on-one virtual conferences where the Texans and the Italians would each have the same wines in front of them. Using a time-tested logistics partner on the east coast and a new digitally based importing platform, the wines would be gathered in Florence and then sent to Texas to be distributed between trade members and media in Houston (where the chamber is based), Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin.

On paper and in practice, it was nothing short of a herculean effort.

I was surprised that the producers were willing to ship so much wine for the uncharted waters of a massive virtual wine event. But ultimately, when they factored in all the money they were saving by not traveling to the U.S., scores of wineries were eager to participate.

And when you explained to incredulous Texas-based wine and restaurant professionals that the wine would be delivered to their doorsteps and that all they had to do was log on to a virtual 30-minute call with producers they selected, they were happy to take part. After all, not only did you get to taste the wine, but you had the opportunity to “spend some time with it” later in the day and at dinner. That’s something that rarely happens at a conventional trade tasting where you line up to get a small pour in a crowded and often chaotic ballroom or events space.

My ah-ha moment came when I sat down to taste a line of sparkling wines with a newish producer from Modena, Venti Venti. We had a great chat about the use of copper in organic farming as we tasted through their classic-method Lambruscos.

The wines were very good but I was the most curious about a still rosé they included in the flight. It was from Sorbara grapes, they told me.

I’ve been working in the wine trade for more than two decades now and Lambrusco and sparkling wine in general are some of my main interests. But I had never tasted a still wine made from a Lambrusco clone in all my years.

The day after the two-day event, I caught up with a Hosuton-based importer who was raving about a Gutturnio from Piacenza producer Zerioli.

That was when it struck me: if two veteran wine professionals can learn something new in a virtual tasting like this, there must be something to it.

I have seen the future of trade tastings and it’s name is “virtual.”

You’re probably wondering why I’m posting a picture of a dog with a basket full of flowers on my blog today.

Yes, it’s true that Tracie, the girls, and I are dog lovers and we count a Chihuahua and a Chihuahua mix as family members (Paco and RooRoo, respectively).

But it’s actually the flowers that make the image compelling.

This week at the weekly virtual wine dinner I host for my client Roma restaurant in Houston, we’ll be welcoming Emilio Fidora of the Fidora winery in Veneto.

Founded in 1974, Fidora claims to be the Veneto region’s first organic certified winery. And it was also one of the first estates there to convert to biodynamic farming.

But one of the things that I find so exceptional about Emilio (a super cool dude who lives in Padua where I studied for many years) is that he actually makes his biodynamic preparations himself. That’s his dog in the image above and those are some of the flowers he grows for the preparations.

For those not familiar with biodynamic preparations, they are powders made from flowers and herbs. They are then mixed with cow dung, which in turn is used to fill cow horns. Those horns are then buried and once the desired microbiome (bacteria and fungi) has been achieved, the horns are unearthed. Their contents are mixed with water and then sprayed across the vineyards to help bolster the “humus” or life force (some would call it the biodiversity) of the soil.

On Thursday night, we’ll be tasting three of Emilio’s wines paired with Chef Angelo Cuppone’s food. And Emilio will be walking our guests through the history and impact of biodynamics on grape farming and winemaking.

One of the things I’m most interested to ask him is the spiritual aspects of biodynamics. In America, many fine wine grape growers have embraced biodynamics but they tend to omit the historic movement’s quasi-religious character. In Europe, in my experience, winemakers seem more attuned to the metaphysical elements of philosopher Rudolf Steiner, one of the first and most widely hailed agronomists to champion biodynamics.

As always, it’s going to make for fascinating conversation. If you’ve never attended, I know you’ll enjoy our simpatico group of regulars.

See the menu and reservation details here ($119 per couple for three courses and three bottles of wine!). And please feel free to email me here if you’d like me to hold you a spot.

On deck for next week: Barolo producer Giuseppe Vaira from G.D. Vajra.

Late last week, RepurposeMemorial.com posted its latest billboard across from the newly built neo-Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas where Tracie grew up.

Today, we are happy to report, “Black Lives Matter” looks down on the site from across the road.

Tracie and I launched RepurposeMemorial.com in January, 2018 (we began protesting the site in November 2017 after the neo-Confederates began displaying their flags there for the first time). Since that time, we have repeatedly asked the Sons of Confederate Veterans (the neo-Confederate and outwardly racist group behind the memorial) to enter into dialog with us about how the memorial could be repurposed (not torn down) to reflect community values in a city where nearly half the residents are black and where there is a sordid legacy of racist violence.

So far, the Sons have responded with threats of violence and trolling.

The billboard was made possible through our ongoing GoFundMe campaign. Thanks to the generosity of donors, we were able to secure the billboard for six months. This is the second billboard we’ve published since we inked our latest contract.

We hope to raise enough money to renew the contract by the time it expires in January, 2021 (right before Martin Luther King Day).

The “Confederate Memorial of the Wind” stands on Martin Luther King Dr., one of the city’s main arteries. Construction on the site began in 2015 and the neo-Confederates began displaying their flags there in late 2017 (not long after the notorious neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate march in Charlottesville, Virginia).

The response to the new billboard has been overwhelmingly positive.

Heartfelt thanks to Orange native designer Ashley Evans for creating the artwork and to Beaumont-based photographer Pete Churton for the photo above.

And thank you to everyone who contributed to our campaign: none of this would be possible without you!

Above: Tony Vallone at his landmark Houston restaurant Tony’s in 2013.

Tony Vallone, an Italian-American culinary pioneer and owner of one America’s most renowned restaurants, has died this week. He suffered from “health complications” said his wife, Donna Vallone. He was 75.

Vallone’s landmark restaurant Tony’s in Houston was a place where presidents, sentators, oil executives, and socialites entertained for more than five decades. See this Houston Chronicle obituary where society reporter Amber Elliot lists just a handful of the politicians, business leaders, and celebrities who dined regularly at the restaurant.

Myriad remembrances have been published since news of his passing stunned the Houston food community yesterday. Countless more will surely be posted in coming days.

Few will remember, however, that beyond his role as chef and host to America’s glitterati for more than a half century, Tony was an insatiable gastronome and gourmet, an authority on Italian and American cuisine, and a generous soul who mentored a generation of food and wine professionals. He simply loved to talk about food — especially Italian cookery — with anyone who shared his boundless passion for gastronomy.

Above: Baron Enrico “Ricky” di Portanova (left), a Houston socialite, with Tony (center) and baseball great Bob Aspromonte in an undated photo (circa 1980).

I worked for nearly eight years as a media consultant for Tony’s restaurant group and spent many mornings with him bantering over the minutia of Italian cuisine and drinking espresso.

In the 1970s, after the legendary Houston developer Gerald Hines had recognized Tony’s immense talent and helped him launch the second Tony’s (the first stood where the Macy’s in Hines’ Galleria shopping mall is now located), Tony began traveling regularly to Italy where he dined and researched Italian regional cuisine.

From the finer points of ragù alla bolognese to the wild fennel fronds needed to make a proper pasta con le sarde (the classic Sicilian spaghetti with fresh sardines), no nuance of Italian gastronomy escaped Tony, a true culinary titan of his times.

His recipe for cannoli was based on his experiences eating the dessert in Piana degli Albanesi in Sicily, a small village in Sicily where he had traveled expressly to uncover the secrets behind the iconic dish. Today, in the (pre-pandemic) world of global travel and Instagram, that may not seem impressive to some. But when you consider that Tony made the trek in the late 1970s, it’s clear that he was an unrivaled culinary pioneer and gastronomic adventurer of the era.

Italian food writer and restaurant critic John Mariani often cited Tony as a leading restaurateur of the “FedEx” generation. Tony famously recollected how he would source his calamari from bait shops in the early days of Tony’s because no fish monger in Houston would carry them. But in the 1980s, when international couriers made it possible to obtain fresh buffalo’s milk mozzarella from Campania and line-caught Mediterranean sea bass, Tony was literally one of the first in America to offer his guests such delicacies. Today, food like that may seem commonplace to WholeFoods devotees. But when Ronald Reagan was president and Houston was enjoying its second wave as one of the world’s must-visit destinations for the well heeled, Tony was an unrivaled trailblazer of fine dining.

His encyclopedic knowledge of Italian and world cuisine was nothing short of spectacular. And his hunger for culinary exploration never waned. I remember his unbridled joy when he finally sourced a rare Italian heirloom legume, a broad bean distinctive for its nearly black coloring. The dish he was working on at the time wouldn’t be complete without it, he said.

When a friend texted me to let me know of his passing yesterday, my mind overflowed with warm memories of Tony, our conversations, and spellbinding meals that Tracie and I shared at his table.

The greatest lesson that he ever taught me about Italian food was as simple as it was profound.

“For Italian food to be truly authentic,” he told me, “it has to be creative.”

That philosophy — that ethos — pervaded all of Tony’s cooking. He’ll be sorely missed. But he and his food will never be forgotten.

Sit tibi terra levis Iosephe.

Dante only mentions wine once in the 100 cantos of his poem the Commedia.

Petrarch never mentions wine in his Italian songbook, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Things) even as he rails against ubiquitous alcoholism and gluttonous cardinals thirsty for (French) wine in his Latin writings.

But with Boccaccio, their successor to the Italian literary crown, wine suddenly emerges as a diegetic and extra-diegetic element central to mimesis. In the Florentine writer’s Decameron, wine not only plays a key narrative role but also transcends its alimentary value and becomes a quasi-epistemological device.

On Friday, October 16, I’ll be leading a virtual tasting where I’ll share some of my research into Boccaccio’s unique textual relationship with wine and discuss how he vanquished his predecessors’ ampelophobia.

I promise it won’t be as boring as it sounds! And even more importantly, the event is open to anyone who lives in a state where Chambers St. Wines can ship.

The tasting, organized by Italian poet Luigi Ballerini, Lacanian psychoanalyst Paola Mieli, and New York gallerist Robert Simon, benefits Animal Zone International.

Click here for details (deeply discounted early-bird tickets available as of this posting). I would love for you to join us.

And for Houstonians and Texans at large, here are some other tastings that should be on your radar…

Sommelier Riccardo Guerrieri and the good folks at Vinology wine bar and shop in Houston have mounted a savory “week-long exhibition of skin-contact wines,” September 28-October 5. Visit their site for forthcoming details. The event will feature discounted macerated white wines and accompanying videos. Give me some skin! Tracie and I are HUGE skin-contact enthusiasts!

On Thursday, September 24, Court of Sommeliers members Jack Mason and Steven McDonald will be leading a superb virtual wine tasting to benefit She Has Hope, “a Houston-based human trafficking response initiative operating programs for vulnerable girls and women in Asia and Africa.” It’s always an amazing experience to taste with these dudes.

There is still time to sign up for virtual tastings with Italian wine and food producers September 21-22 at the Taste of Italy virtual trade fair organized by the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce South Central. Click here for participating producers and appointment portal. All trade members and wine and food-focused media active in Texas (Austin, Dallas, San Antonio included) are eligible to take part. Free wine and food delivered to your doorstep? It’s a no brainer, if you ask me.

Lastly, I continue to lead virtual wine dinners every Thursday night for my restaurant client here in Houston Roma. Each week, we host an Italian winemaker and the cost is $119 for 3 bottles of wine and dinner for two. See the restaurant’s website for weekly details and click here if you’d like me to add you to our distribution list.

Thanks for reading, speaking, tasting, and supporting Italian wine! Italian winemakers and the wine and food professionals who rely on them need our support more than ever!