Please consider donating to our GoFundMe so that we can raise an MLK over the Neo-Confederate monument in Orange, Texas in time for MLK Day and Black History Month 2025.

Click here to donate.

The monument, believed the biggest Neo-Confederate site to be built since the 1910s, was debuted in 2017 and we have raised a billboard and organized a protest each year since.

At this point, we only need about $1,300 to reach our goal of $2k. Thanks to a surplus of $600 from 2023-24, we are already so close!

People ask me and Tracie why we do this every year. They’re never going to take it down, they tell us.

As a wise person once told me, sometimes the battles you know you are going to lose are the ones most important to fight.

We’ve been spit at, cussed at, rolled coal on, threatened with violence, bombarded with lit cigarettes…

But we’ve also received so many notes of thanks and encouragement from residents of Orange, especially from those who are frightened by the ongoing threats — verbal and physical — from the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their followers.

“I have to drive my child by that monument every day on our way to school,” one person wrote to me.

Click here to see what some of that abuse has looked like (it ain’t pretty).

Someday, the people that built the monument will be gone. We’ll see if their children continue to propagate their white supremacist message. In the meantime, Tracie and I are teaching our children that we all must stand up to racism and hate in our communities.

Thank you for your support. And hopefully we will see you in Orange on Monday, January 20, for the historic MLK March there, followed by our protest in the shadow of our MLK billboard at the site of the monument.

Read more about our efforts over the years and see photos from our protests here.

Thank you.

Thanks for all the support and solidarity in 2024! Have a great holiday and please check out my new album, including my latest single, “Christmas in the USA,” at ParzenFamilySingers.com. I’ll see you in 2025. Feel the spirit! G-d bless.

Can you really blame a wine blogger for the excessive use of superlatives when they come across a dish that is the Platonic embodiment of a manifest fantasy?

Well, that’s what happened when I had dinner last month at one of my favorite restaurants — really, one of my favorite places on earth.

Usually, I ask owner and sommelier extraordinary Anthony, my good friend, to make a menu for us. But my friend Adam had been talking about the veal parmigiana — “veal parm” — all day in anticipation of our dinner there.

Our meal began with a Swiss-chard spaghetti alla puttanesca and then was followed by the veal, drowning in cheese and tomato, above.

Hyperbole aside, the food at Manducatis is excellent imho, in the sense that, beyond its wholesomeness and deliciousness, it captures a moment in time. Just like a song.

I don’t need to remind you that Anthony’s wine cellar is one of the most exciting Italian-focused programs in the country. I’m talking to you: lovers of old Nebbiolo, old Sangiovese and old Italian Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and even old Bordeaux, as I recently discovered.

It’s perhaps the only top-of-the-line list in the country that is ordered alphabetically. You don’t go to Anthony to drink “Italian regions.” You go to Anthony to drink iconic, rare, and aged. It’s nothing short of a fantasy fulfilled for this wine blogger. And the prices remain exceedingly reasonable.

As my year in blogging winds down, I just had to give one more shoutout to Anthony and Brendan, the floor sommelier whose deft hand has never met a crumbly cork he cannot conquer.

Thank you, Manducatis, for another night to remember. I can’t wait to see you again next year. G-d bless.

From Wikipedia:

“The Piazza della Loggia bombing (Italian: attentato di Piazza della Loggia) was a bombing that took place on the morning of 28 May 1974, in Brescia, Italy during an anti-fascist protest. The terrorist attack killed eight people and wounded 102.”

That’s the Palazzo della Loggia and the Piazza della Loggia in downtown Brescia. I took that photo in December 2022 during one of my many visits with my dear friends there.

Citizens of Brescia awoke this morning to find Neo-Nazi symbols spray-painted in the piazza, a beautiful Renaissance square in the city center.

Just a few days ago, Neo-Nazis staged an unauthorized rally in their city.

The Neo-Nazi thugs are drawn there in part because Brescia — led by a democratic, left-leaning mayor — is the one holdout city in a region now awash in post-Fascist attitudes. (Italy’s current government coalition defines itself as “post-Fascist” and traces its political roots back to Mussolini.)

A good friend of mine in the wine business, a gentile, recently complained to me about how much anti-Semitic language he heard on his last trip to Italy.

I’ve had my own recent encounters with rabid anti-Semitism in Italy.

You can see images of the vandalism here. And you can read the mayor’s response on her Instagram here. (Disclosure: she is a good friend of ours.)

I’ll be heading back to Italy in early 2025 for work. But before I roll up my sleeves and set about making a living, I already know what my first stop is going to be.

I’ll say a Kaddish for those who died there fighting for freedom in 1974. I’ll need a minyan. Will you join me?

Thank you, Mayor Castelletti, for standing up to these hooligans. I stand with you!

Looking back on the years since the advent of the enoblogosphere in the second half of the 2000s, it’s clear now — at least to me — that the collective aversion to international grape varieties grown on Italian soil was misguided and even wrong-headed at times.

Italians are growing international grape varieties to appeal to the U.S. market and U.S. wine critics, the thinking went at the time. They were doing so at the expense of native grape varieties. As a result, they were abandoning tradition.

Today, it’s clear that the growers of the so-called Super Tuscans were partly trying to find new ways to be relevant in a changing market. In retrospect, we owe them a thanks for driving renewed interest in Italian wine when the category was struggling in North America. Those efforts opened many paths for future Italian growers. They were also trying to level the playing field by saying, hey, we can make world-class wines like the ones you already love!

There was another element that a lot of us — me included — overlooked: for many Italian growers, Cabernet Sauvignon et alia were part of a longstanding tradition that stretched back decades and even centuries before the Italian wine renaissance that took shape in the late 1990s.

One of those wines was San Leonardo from Trentino.

A generous colleague of mine recently shipped me a sample bottle of the 2019 (the current release) and we served it on the occasion of one of my Houston cousins’ birthdays. He’s a Cabernet Sauvignon lover.

The wine opened with a burst of vibrant fruit on the nose and palate. But as the wine aerated, the red stone and red berry flavors were swiftly balanced by earthiness and classic goudron. The oak was present but beautifully integrated — at just five years out — in this elegant wine. And from first sip to last, it retained a wonderful freshness that made it food-friendly and moreish.

Nearly 20 years after I started my blog, it turns out that I’m an Italian Cabernet Sauvignon lover after all.

It’s an experience shared by more than one member of the wine trade. You roll up to a classic Floridian strip mall and can’t help but wonder out loud, how is that a place with such an unusual name, located in such an anonymous row of classic “strip mall” businesses, could be so renowned for its food and beverage program?

Last week, an itinerant wine blogger finally had the chance to dine at Pasta and… in Margate (a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale) and they are here to report that this restaurant is nothing short of extraordinary.

The other thing that was remarkable about an otherwise humdrum Wednesday evening at Pasta and… was that it was PACKED.

As fine dining restaurants across the country struggle to make their bottle line these days, they might want to take a look at how Pasta and… has continued to fill its dining room night after night thanks to a fantastic authentic Piedmont-focused menu and a stellar wine list. When so many U.S. restaurateurs are downsizing, Pasta and… actually added a new dining room, private dining space, and bar!

I genuinely loved everything about this restaurant, from the way our server greeted us and had solid knowledge of the wine list to the warm, inviting atmosphere at every turn of the meal. The food was delicious. The wine list was a Piedmont-lover’s dream but there were also ample Tuscan selections and a healthy representation of pan-Italian.

Above, from top: risotto with speck and Fontina; angolotti al plin; and ravioli stuffed with porcini and topped with black truffle. The ravioli were the showstoppers of the evening but everything was fantastic.

It’s a bit of a drive from Miami and traffic can be challenging. But man, it’s well worth the journey. I can’t wait to get back.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a wine blogger coming down along the road…

Last week found me in Miami at one of my happiest of places.

Vinya in Coral Gables (there is another location in Key Biscayne) is a wine bar, restaurant, and retailer. And imho, it is also the apotheosis of what wine-focused hospitality should be.

Not only does owner and founder Allegra Angelo offer a roadmap to enogastronomic pleasure (and the Latin spice in her menus takes that delight over the top). But she also serves up a model for how to run a successful food and wine business.

She does that in part by using every avenue available to her: she’s a triple-threat when it comes to on-premise, off-premise, and in-house events and education.

But even more impactful is the fun vibe she creates. She takes wine seriously (and her wine knowledge is crazy good) but she keeps it approachable and accessible through user-friendly wine education and pricing.

Every time we connect I tell her the same thing: she should tour the country teaching people how to move boxes in the ever-changing dialectic of wine in the U.S.

And every time I visit one of her locations, it seems that my Miami friends group continues to grow. If you ask me, that’s the ultimate sign of a great food and wine destination: when you walk out with more friends than you had when you walked in.

I highly recommend it.

My food and wine communications grad students at the Slow Food University in Piedmont will surely remember sommelier and activist Tahiirah Habibi (above, in a photo she shared with me yesterday; disclosure, she is a good friend of our family).

During my last four or so years of teaching there, we would watch her Instagram reel where she laid bare some of the too-often-left-unspoken transgressions of the wine industry. It was one of the examples of “activism in wine communications” we discussed in class.

It was always one of our most compelling sessions, with many students (and the instructor) welling up with tears. A lively dialog was guaranteed to follow. Sometimes, just voicing an unright can lead to changes of mind.

Tahiirah has developed a new online seminar she calls “Secure Wine.”

With her video sessions, she seeks to alleviate the “intimidation” that can come with “so many choices, so much jargon.”

It’s meant to be fun, informative, convivial, ecumenical, and approachable.

But it also addresses an underlying issue that too many in the wine trade continue to ignore. It’s what Eric Asimov has called “wine anxiety”: wine in our country sadly remains a dividing line between those “in the know” and those “on the outside.”

One of the things that has always struck me about that great misunderstanding otherwise known as the Atlantic Ocean is that wine in Europe has always retained its demotic nature while here in the U.S. it stands apart from other food and beverage in its cultish and often exclusionary status.

I love the way that Tahiirah has inverted the conversation: she’s giving her students the tools to feel the confidence we all should feel — we all deserve — when it comes to talking about and socializing over wine.

When I saw that she had launched this wonderful program, I couldn’t help but think that it would make for a great holiday gift. I highly recommend it to you.

Here’s the link to sign up.