By the time I became a teenager in La Jolla, California, my family was in severe crisis. My home was fractured and I was drifting, taking a lot of drugs, and drinking heavily.

When a family of Mexican immigrants, who had only recently arrived in San Diego, invited me to spend the summer with them in Mexico, I thought it was because their kids, with whom I had become friendly, had asked their parents to take me along.

Many years later, I realized that this family — who was deeply religious and had a profound sense of charity — was trying to help me get through one of the worst times in my life. I did go to Mexico with them that summer and when we got back, I started spending more time at their house than my own.

The mom never mentioned that she was trying to help me. I only realized it years later. She never made that weigh on me. She just let me live my life in a safe and secure environment. Ultimately, I got my head back on straight, got my grades up again, got into UCLA, and got as far away from La Jolla as I could.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that family these days as we watch families in our own community being torn apart by the U.S. government. The stories I’m hearing from Southern California (where I grew up) and Southeast Texas (where I’ve lived for a decade and a half) are horrifying and heartbreaking.

I honestly don’t know where I’d be today without that family so many years ago in San Diego.

In other news, the Trump administration is using a classic Ku Klux Klan and Sons of Confederate Veterans tactic to re-institutionalize the names of military bases. As I read in the paper today, they are re-naming Fort Gregg-Adams as “Fort Lee,” but they are claiming the Lee in question was a Black soldier. No offense to the Black Lee but this move is as insulting as it is offensive.

In other other news, I also read that Trump is destroying the Fulbright scholarship program. I was a Fulbright scholar. I can only wonder how my life would be different today had I not had that opportunity.

This is not American greatness. It’s American rot.

Tracie, the girls, and I won’t be going to Italy this summer. That’s partly due to the fact that Tra is so busy with work right now (which is great).

But our absence from our spiritual homeland this season is owed mostly to the fact that we want to spend some extended time in California with my mom.

And… one of my bestest friends and brother by another mother, Jeremy (we even share a name!), is getting married. We are all so excited for him and his bride and we’re also looking forward to the party (Jeremy is part of a well known food-and-wine family and so we know the wedding celebration is going to be off the charts).

One of the things that I’m going to miss about Italy this summer is the perfectly draft beer.

Italians take immense pride in drafting beer properly. The photo of the beer above was taken in Piazza Vittoria in downtown Brescia, at a respectable but hardly noteworthy bar (what we in America would call a café). Despite the anonymity and convenience of the venue, the young person behind the bar delivered the perfectly draft beer.

I first experienced the burgeoning new beer culture and the second coming of unpasteurized beer back in the early 90s when I was playing in a cover band in Veneto.

Today, many of my Italian friends won’t even look at a beer that’s not unpasteurized. And all of them expect and take a good foam for granted.

In my experience (which is vast at this point), the foam enhances the flavor of the beer by making its aromas more prominent. I love drinking beer wherever I am. But a good head on the beer really makes the difference in my humble opinion.

It’s just one of those little things, like a good coffee or expertly sliced prosciutto, that I’m really going to miss.

What are you missing about Italy this summer?

Man, the tariff thing has really put a stranglehold on our industry.

And when times get tough — we all know the drill — people show their true colors.

Sometimes that means working together to find solutions.

Other times it means callously casting off people who have helped you for years and who genuinely believed you were an honest operator.

But there’s a golden truth in the world that keeps me going. As a good wine industry friend wrote me yesterday, “the great thing about being a real mutha fker and sticking to who you are is you never have to worry about changing the story. The wine world is filled with lazy ass posers. That’s why people who do the work seem like champions.”

Sometimes people really suck. But the show must go on!

Italian Wine & Pizza Party
Emmit’s Place
Houston
Saturday, June 7, 5-7pm
no cover

Please join me this Saturday, 5-7pm, at Emmit’s Place in southwest Houston where I will be hosting a kid-friendly Italian wine and pizza party. There will be house-fired pies, mocktails for the kids, and four different Italian wines to taste and enjoy.

And I’ll be your personal sommelier!

The best news is that this is a FREE event. You just have to cover the cost of the wines (moderately priced for the occasion), mocktails, and pizza.

Email me for more details (jparzen at gmail dot com) or just show up and enjoy some great wine and pizza!

Abruzzo Consortium Tasting
Il Fornaio
Beverly Hills
Wednesday, June 18, 12-3pm
open to trade

Then, week after next, I’ll be speaking at an Abruzzo consortium-Charming Taste of Europe event in Los Angeles, Wednesday, June 18, 12-1pm, seminar followed by lunch.

Click here to register.

I hope I’ll get to taste with you this weekend or later this month! Thanks for the support and solidarity. I need it now more than ever.

As it just so happened, a best friend of Marty’s showed up to his party in Chicago last Saturday night with a bottle of 2009 Colgin Cariad.

It goes without saying that the wine lovers among the guests were impressed by the generosity of the gift and eager to taste the wine!

The next day, as we reconvened for a family stroll and a pizza send-off for the out-of-towners, we gathered the wine glasses at our cousins’ Hyde Park apartment and mounted a semi-formal and super fun tasting for 10 of the adults — a proper minyan!

The wine had rich, opulent but elegant fruit, with wonderfully balanced acidity that kept it fresh on the palate and lithe in the glass. The finish was also fresh, with lingering notes of berry and earth. Tannin was still going strong but didn’t attenuate the vibrant flavors.

There was more than a bit of sediment in the wine and we would have been better served by letting the bottle stand upright for a few days before opening.

But the verve of the moment called for it to be opened à la volée! (Excuse the paronomasia.)

I’ve come to reconsider the iconic wines of Napa in the autumn of my oenophilic career. This bottle reminded me of how Napa has reshaped the world of wine, in so many ways.

The wine was delicious and a wonderful way to bring our family together over something truly special and unique, a benchmark for an American wine legacy. Chapeau bas to its producer.

Happy 80th birthday Marty Levy! How wonderful to see you surrounded by people who love you and what a great party! We wouldn’t have missed it for the world. We love you. Thanks for sharing the celebration with us.

A good family friend recently asked me if I thought their activism for the people of Gaza was an expression of anti-semitism.

My answer was an unequivocal “no, it is not.”

As someone who grew up in a country where they were frequently menaced with racist epithets and threats, they found it hard to understand, they said, that people level accusations of anti-semitism at them for their advocacy.

It’s still hard to wrap my mind around the fact that we need to be having conversations like that… that we need to have the courage to have conversations like that. But there’s no doubt that we do. And I understand the historical and present reasons why.

There is no “but…” in answering these questions. The Israeli aggression in Gaza is a horrific and morally indefensible human tragedy. And the Israeli military’s efforts to “destroy” Hamas have not achieved the two purported goals of the country’s government: hostages are still in Hamas’ control and Israelis don’t feel more safe. From everything I read, it seems that most Israelis, including high-ranking officials, disagree with their government’s war policies. In fact, the Israeli government’s policies have made Jews across the world less safe, just as we saw in Colorado this week, in Washington just a week or so ago, and in Pennsylvania during the Passover.

It was heart-wrenching for our family to read the news about the attack in Boulder. I have a longtime client there and Tracie and I have spent a lot of time walking the Pearl St. Mall where the violence took place. We know scores of Jews in that community. We are praying for them.

The people who were attacked in Colorado were merely expressing their solidarity with the hostages and their families. The couple slain in D.C. was simply attended a “mixer” with no political agenda. The family in Pennsylvania had innocently sat down to a holiday meal.

Pro-Palestinian advocacy is not wrong. And it’s not anti-semitism. Violence is wrong. We all must stand up to protect one another from violence both verbal and physical. The attacks on Jews will stop only when we rise up as a community against them.