“The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.” – Karl Kraus.

Image via Nick Saltmarsh’s Flickr (Creative Commons).

A conversation at last night’s Italian Trade Commission dinner in Houston led to a discussion about the Italian word infinocchiare (to cheat or to swindle someone) and its relation to wine and wine tasting.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: wine sellers did not doctor their wine with fennel (finocchio in Italian) or fennel seeds in the Middle Ages or Renaissance.

What they did do (and we have ample knowledge of this from primary sources) was to serve certain foods like fennel before customers would taste wines they were considering buying. They did this, it is now well known, to impair the buyers’ ability to perceive the aromas and flavors of the wine. (Fennel seeds were widely used in the preparation of salumi in the Middle Ages but that was an unrelated practice.)

And while the first known mention of fennel used to deceive wine buyers dates back to the 15th century (Corniolo Della Cornia’s La divina villa), the foods that were primarily used for this purpose were walnuts and cheese (Crescenzi mentions this in the early 14th century and Corniolo also mentions this a hundred or so years later; English speakers will find all of this info in Massimo Montanari’s excellent book Let the Meatballs Rest, And Other Stories About Food and Culture).

But today, philologists are relatively certain the word infinocchiare does not come from this practice (although Montanari seems not to be up on the current philological dialectic with regard to the lemma).

Instead, they believe (and I concur), it most likely came from the Greek word φένᾱξ (phénāx) meaning liar or cheater.

The word finocchio (commonly used in the plural, finocchi, to avoid equivocation), comes from the Latin foeniculum (the perennial herb was a popular vegetable in Roman times).

So to say that infinocchiare comes from a medieval practice of doctoring wine with fennel is entirely erroneous.

Neither of these terms is to be confused with the Italian homophobic slur finocchio.

The etymology of this ugly epithet is unknown. The one thing we know about it was that it originated in Florence, probably in the early 20th century. The most plausible etymology, embraced by many philologists today, is that it came from the name of a mask used in 19th-century Florentine theater. There’s no hard evidence of this. But it is believed to be the most likely etymon among experts in the history of the Italian language.

What’s important here is that three terms — finocchio (vegetable), finocchio (homophobic slur), and infinocchiare — are probably not related and should be considered separately in terms of their cultural significance.

Making flippant jokes about their homonymity only propagates an ugly cultural trope that gay people are in some way “deceiving” those around them.

Next on deck: the difference between lasagna and lasagne and cultural swindlers like so-called “chef” the Kevin Bryant at Roma restaurant in Houston. Yes, I have a bone to pick there as well, pun intended… stay tuned.

Image via Wikipedia Creative Commons.

“Wild boars pull off mega heist in organic vineyards in the Colli Euganei,” read a headline in the Mattino di Padova, Padua’s daily newspaper, over the weekend. Feral hogs “devour 10.5 metric tons of grapes.”

Feral hogs — a term used in U.S. English to denote the cinghiali or wild boar that we love so much in our pappardelle al ragù di cinghiale — have increasingly become a nuisance and even safety hazard in Italy as hot temperatures, dwindling water resources, and scarcity of their natural foods have increasingly led them to venture into the human sphere.

Earlier this year, the Smithsonian magazine published an article entitled — no joke — “Wild Boars Are Ransacking Rome.”

Check out this video posted on Twitter by Wanted in Rome.

You’ll see a brood of the beasts strolling down a heavily trafficked street in Italy’s capital.

Beyond the neighborhoods of the Eternal City, where the biggest concern is that they will spread disease or physically harm residents, the animals have come to represent an existential threat for small wine growers.

Enrico Selmin had used electric fences to protect his five hectares of organically farmed grapes — his first commercially viable crop.

“My five productive hectares were completely eaten,” he told the Mattino. My winery [opened just this year] will remain closed and unused because I don’t even have one cluster to make wine.”

For large-scale growers, the animals, which have little fear of humans, represent a growing problem in terms of crop loss. But for someone like Enrico, it means starting all over from scratch. He also lost his investment in the electric fence.

Last year, Italy’s national daily La Repubblica reported that the Chianti Colli Fiorentini appellation lost 30 percent of its crop to feral hogs.

Tuscany’s regional government has allocated €4 million to build “double fences” to keep the beasts out of vineyards, and farm and ranch land.

Efforts to curb the damages have been underway since 2015 when it became clear that the problem needed to be addressed, says Chianti Colli Fiorentini president Marco Ferretti in the Repubblica coverage. But programs to hunt and kill the animals were put on hold during the pandemic. As a result, the boar population continued to grow during 2020 and 2021.

Italian wine growers are already contending with one of the hottest and driest vintages on record. The last thing they need is to contend with ungulates eating their already diminished crop.

*****

Roadkill is certainly no solution to this ongoing and increasingly challenging ecological problem.

But nearly anyone who’s ever dined in the home of Tuscan in wine country will tell you that roadkill boar is thoroughly delicious. My favorite has always been gooey fried boar liver paired with a nice glass of young Sangiovese and a side of chestnut flour polenta and white beans.

“The Sreja 2022 died before it was even born,” wrote Cascina Fornace grower and winemaker Enrico Cauda on his Instagram this week. He was referring to one of his top red wines, Sreja, made from 100 percent Nebbiolo grapes, grown and raised in Roero.

“It died in the bellies of of the parched people of the woods. What the f*&%. #sreja #cacscinafornace #roero #everythinglost” (translation mine).

Like many Italian winemakers, Enrico and his crew have been dealing with extremely high temperatures and prolonged drought. In some places across the peninsula, the drought persisted for more than three and a half months before moderate rainfall gave them some relief — and hope.

And now that the red grape harvest is around the corner, Enrico, like his peers and counterparts at all levels of the wine trade, is facing the challenges of extreme hydric stress.

As Riccardo Cotarella, the president of the Italian association of enologists (Assoenologi), wrote in a widely circulated statement earlier this month:

everything will depend on what happens in coming days because the vines will need a significant amount of water in the ground. They need it not just to keep their vegetation alive. They also need to feed the many berries in the clusters that they have produced. If enough rain falls over the next few days, we should be able to save the harvest. If not, we are going to have problems… If the rain doesn’t come, we will see a phenomenon where the plant will need to take back the little water it has given to the berries. This is the worst-case scenario. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen.

In the case of Enrico’s Sreja, the precipitation was too little, too late.

From grape growers to bottlers, from large importers to small distributors across Europe and the U.S., the trade is holding its breath and praying for the best as the red grape harvest approaches.

According to Cotarella, there will be “appellations that suffer to a greater extent while others will suffer to a lesser extent. It depends on the type of soil and the vineyards’ exposure. This means we can’t generalize about the entire country in our analysis without recognizing these distinct differences.”

For many white wine growers, it seems that last week’s rain was enough to carry them through to a successful if not abundant 2022 harvest.

The following are a few snapshots from around the country (from growers I follow on social media).

I’ll be heading to Italy soon and will post updates as I travel across central and northern Italy. In the meantime, I’m keeping up with it all via social media and have also been giving some growers a hand with translations of their “statements” and press releases on the situation there. Stay tuned…
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For more than a decade, the Boulder Burgundy Festival has quietly grown an extremely loyal following among top Burgundy collectors and wine lovers.

The inspiration for the festival came to founder Brett Zimmerman after he volunteered at Daniel Johnnes’ Paulée festival in New York. The idea was to put together a similar gathering of top wines and wine professionals but with one major difference: a more approachable price of admission.

Over the years, Brett has invited a wide range of wine media personalities to be part of the event: Eric Asimov, Jancis Robinson, Ray Isle, Alice Feiring, Raj Parr… And the roster of producers has been equally impressive. Care to have dinner with the likes of Jean-Charles le Bault, Jean Marc Roulot, or Guillaume d’Angerville? Just to name a few.

Today it’s official: this year’s featured speaker will be Esther Mobley, wine columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

She will be appearing on a panel on “sustainability in Burgundy” and she will also be joining for nearly all of the tastings, including the Sunday morning seminar, and dinners, giving guests a chance to hob-nob with one of their favorite critics.

I’ve been a media consultant for the festival since 2014 and I also manage media and original content for the Boulder Wine Merchant, Brett’s amazing shop.

As I always like to say, Italy is my signora but Burgundy is my mistress. Although still not a cheap date, the Boulder Burgundy Festival is a great way for the Burgundy-curious like me to spend time with some of the world’s most extraordinary wines — and the people who love them.

The event’s legendary marquee tasting, the Paulée-Inspired Lunch, is already sold out. But there are still spots available for the seminars and dinners (pricey but worth every penny, especially for the all Grand Cru menu). The Sunday walk-around Grand Tasting is one of the weekend’s best values and its been an invaluable experience for people like me who want to taste through Burgundy (more than 200 wines) without breaking the bank.

Add to the mix all the great people and restaurants in Boulder, the beautiful setting, and the city’s cannabis-friendly laidback vibe… and it’s a recipe for a great weekend. Tracie will be there with me this year as well.

Registration is now open for Boulder Burgundy Festival 2022, November 11-13 in Boulder. I hope to see you there!

Above: winemaker Gianluca Cabrini of Tenuta Belvedere in Oltrepò Pavese shared this photo on his Facebook last week as he prepared to pick his Pinot Noir for the production of classic method sparkling wine. This harvest is “the most difficult, the most impossible,” he wrote.

“#sky #light #night #hope” wrote Chianti Classico winemaker and grape grower Francesco Ricasoli yesterday in a haiku-esque expression of relief after rains brought much needed water and lower temperatures to vineyards across central and northern Italy this week.

Check out this amazing shot he captured, just one of “thousands” of lightning bolts, he wrote.

As severe weather — “Europe’s Scorching Summer” — continues to affect Europeans across the continent and peninsula, drought and extreme heat have tempered growers’ optimism for the 2022 harvest in Italy.

In early August, Riccardo Cotarella, president of the Italian enological association Assoenologi, warned that the situation could be catastrophic if rain did not arrive this month.

“Climate change,” he wrote in a widely circulated statement, “is putting the entire farming industry to the test. As far as viticulture is concerned, we are witnessing a truly anomalous and extraordinary season. It resembles 2003 [one of the hottest on record at the time]. But the current drought is even more challenging and deeper. And it’s coming together with a dangerous element: the high temperatures. When combined with the drought, they create an environment that is highly unsuitable in terms of the vines bearing fruit as best as they can.”

Official estimates for the Italian grape have yet to be published, noted Maurizio Gily in his popular industry newsletter MilleVigne today. But this week’s rainfall and lower temperatures have raised hopes for a solid vintage.

“The rains,” he writes, “which came mostly in the form of storms, did not reach the deepest layers of the soil. But the vines benefitted nonetheless and ripening was suddenly accelerated in the end after a veraison that came early for most. The health of the grapes is excellent at this moment. Harvest of early-ripening grapes has begun in the south while they have started picking Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for sparkling wines in the north.”

Above: Lake Iseo in Brescia province as seen from Mt. Orfano in the south of what is now the Franciacorta appellation. Its morainic “lean” soils, as they were described in the Middle Ages, contributed to its reign as a top zone for wine between the 14th and 16th centuries.

One of the most remarkable and compelling things about early Italian ampelography is how cutting-edge it appears today.

Attentive readers of 14th and 15th-century viticultural treatises will discover that what are called “biodynamic” farming practices today were standard operating procedures for grape growers in the Italian Middle Ages: cover crops and farming practices aligned with the lunar cycle were sine qua non elements of commercially viable vineyards. The only difference was that the humus didn’t need to be revived and restored through the purging of chemical based treatments.

But Medieval growers in Italy were also extremely knowledgeable about soil types, vineyard density, harvest timing, and, perhaps most significantly, pruning. Anyone with even a vague sense of how fine wine grapes are largely farmed today will immediately recognize the myriad parallels with contemporary knowledge and know-how.

Another striking element that emerges through close readings of these texts is that the Italians were extremely advanced with respect to their French counterparts. By all accounts, head-trained vineyards were the norm in southern France while Italians were already using sophisticated cordon and cane-pruned training systems (the latter is what we commonly call Guyot today).

Of course, the Italians had a huge advantage over their transalpine cousins: Mediterranean as opposed to Continental climate in the time before the fossil fuel transformation of the earth’s weather systems. And however far off climate change may have been on the horizon, the Italians were well aware that their warmer climate made them the viticultural leaders of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

What will come as a surprise to contemporary readers is that neither Tuscany or Piedmont figure as top centers for wine production. Tuscany would become an elite region for wine as the Medici family’s power grew. But it was still far from dominant when Dante began writing the Comedìa. Piedmont was centuries away from becoming a top wine region.

And while Naples was the center of the fine wine world of the time thanks to its connection to the Greek wine trade, Brescia province (yes, Brescia!) was the top area for red wine and Romagna was the leader for white. The Marches were also considered a number-one producer. (Naples was renowned for what we now call orange or macerated white wines but much of that wine was imported from Greece, although vin greco — “Greek wine” — was also produced locally around the Castello di Somma on the lower slopes of Mt. Vesuvius.)

This observation is based on my own close reading of the first definitive work on ampelography by an Italian, Pietro de’ Crescenzi from Bologna, who died around 1320. He was an itinerant lawyer who traveled throughout the peninsula for his work. Written in Latin and based on his own experiences combined with his readings of the then newly rediscovered agricultural classics of the Roman era, his work was remarkable in part because it represents an ante litteram protohumanist achievement. It was widely popular in its day and when it was translated into Italian during the Renaissance a few centuries later, it became an instant best seller.

Many Italian philologists believe today that Boccaccio used Crescenzi’s work as a source and inspiration for his own descriptions of the natural world in the Decameron.

Crescenzi pointed to Brescia — Brixia in Latin — as the top producer of red wine in the time of Dante, who died around the same time that Crescenzi did (1321). But the uncanny thing about it is that Dante, in his book about the nascent Italian language, De vulgari eloquentia, points to the Brescians (more precisely, the Bergamask, but the linguistic and geographic connection is undisputed and undeniable) as the worst speakers of Italian.

Lucky in wine, unlucky in language… go figure!

Thanks for checking out today’s post. This is the kind of stuff that I really love to do. It means the world to me that I can share it with like-minded wine lovers and Italophiles.

Grape harvest in the north of Italy began this week.

That’s a cluster of Pinot Noir at Ronco Calino in Franciacorta.

Sparkling winemakers are always the first to pick their fruit. Depending on the winemaker’s style, they need to obtain higher acidity and freshness in order to create the final product they envision.

A high-quality harvest is expected across Italy despite the ongoing drought and high temperatures.

In Franciacorta last month, growers requested and were granted authorization for emergency irrigation. Winemakers simply didn’t have enough water to obtain the desired fruit.

As Franciacorta consortium technical advisor Mario Falcetti explained in an interview, it’s important to remember that the scarcity of water has affected estates across the appellation to varying degrees. As he points out, the vegetative cycle, while impacted by the heat, was by all indicators a healthy one until this summer’s heat wave. Irrigation, he tells the interviewer, will ensure a good harvest.

While winemakers in southern Italy have had a relatively easier time in dealing with climate change, their counterparts in northern and central Italy have faced increasing challenges over the last decade.

In a June interview, prolific winemaker Andrea Lonardi told WineNews.it that “we are seeing things that we have never seen before. Until the 2000s, climate change had positive effects. There are some appellations that have been transformed [by climate change] in terms of quality. Today the situation has completely changed. And we are seeing certain regions that are facing great difficulties. It’s a worrisome situation.”

He has proposed creating a series of reservoirs in affected areas. Some trade observers are proposing new water conservation efforts while others believe that hybrid grape varieties are the key to safeguarding Italian viticulture.

Despite this year’s major challenges (namely drought and extreme eat), most growers in the north and central Italy were spared the wrath of spring freezes and extreme weather events. A healthy crop is expected across Italy.

And with about a month to go before growers began picking white grapes for still wines and reds to follow, they are still praying for rain…