Click here to check out my new blog at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo and learn more about the master’s programs in Wine Culture (where I begin teaching next month) and Food Culture and Communications. And please check out the Master’s in Wine Culture intro video below.

A few months ago, I was contacted by my good friend Michele Antonio Fino (above), the director of two master’s programs at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo (Piedmont): Wine Culture and Food Culture and Communications.

Michele had already recruited me as an instructor in the Wine Culture program. And I will be heading to Pollenzo at the end of October to lead a series of seminars on wine writing and wine blogging there (more on that later).

But on this occasion when he reached out on behalf of UNISG (University of Gastronomic Sciences), it was because he wanted me to join their team as a blogger and ambassador for the program(s) with a focus on English-language media geared toward the U.S.

I couldn’t have been more thrilled. As they say in Italian (and the expression couldn’t be more a propos), this was pane per i miei denti (literally, bread for my palate or colloquially put, right up my alley).

My professional life started in academia. And in many ways, my new partnership with the university — as an instructor and blogger/ambassador — represents a return to my beginnings, a peripeteia (as it were) that brings me full-circle back to my early professional aspirations.

In 1989, I complete a bachelor’s degree with honors at the Department of Italian at U.C.L.A. and then embarked a graduate program there that ultimately led to a Ph.D. and a doctoral thesis on Petrarchan prosody and Renaissance transcriptions of Petrarch’s Italian songbook. By the time I was awarded my doctorate in 1997, I had spent many years living and studying (and playing music) in Italy. And my interest in Italian culture, language, and literature had continued to expand over the course of my adult life (I was 30 at the time).

But after moving to New York City that same year, I quickly learned that Petrarch and my interest in Italian versification weren’t going to pay the bills. And so I shifted my focus to Italian gastronomy and food culture. And not long after I landed a job as an editor at the newly launched English-language edition of La Cucina Italiana in Manhattan, I started to concentrate on wine writing.

Today, nearly 20 years later, after a rewarding career as a wine copywriter and blogger, it’s great to return to the academic world that I’ve missed sorely for these last two decades. I’m finally “back where I belong,” you could say.

For the next six months, I will be blogging on the UNISG site as an English-langauge ambassador for the university. Not only will I be writing about my experience as an instructor and “an American in Pollenzo,” but I will also be sharing my insights into and impressions of the master’s programs at UNISG.

If you’re considering applying to UNISG, please feel free to shoot me an email with any questions and/or thoughts (by clicking here).

And please check back soon here on the blog for updates and news from UNISG, Pollenzo, and the world of Italian wine and food.

Thanks for being here and thanks for your support! Stay tuned…

Here’s a link to my newly launched blog over at UNISG. And below you’ll find a video intro to the Master’s in Wine Culture program.

It was SO MUCH FUN for me to host Franciacorta producer Cristina Ziliani last Friday in Houston.

That’s her (left) with my friend and client Tony Vallone (right) and Tony’s general manager, Annie Balest, also a good friend of mine.

I hate to say it but Houston still gets a bad rap among people who don’t know our vibrant food and wine scene. And it was wonderful to see Cristina’s eyes light up with delight and surprise as I showed her around the city and introduced her to some of our enogastronomic highlights (and we only scratched the surface).

She came to see some accounts where they are pouring her wine and (I’d like to think that) she left with a better sense of the role that Houston and Texas play in America’s wine renaissance.

Barely a week goes by that I don’t receive an email from a producer or an importer asking me how to break into the Houston and Texas markets.

My advice is always the same: come to Houston and get a feel for the market; connect with restaurateurs and wine buyers and try to wrap your mind around what they’re interested in and what works for them. That’s the secret to success in the hard-to-crack Texas wine market imho. And over and over again, I see examples of winemakers who have invested their time here and the return it delivers.

On a plane right now to Vegas where I’ll be pouring Franciacorta for my Franciacorta consortium gig from 1-3 p.m. at Ferraro’s. Come out and taste with us if you are in town. Between the wines I’ll be pouring and the distributors who are joining me, this could be the largest flight of Franciacorta wines we’ve presented during my two-year campaign.

Taste Franciacorta with me in Las Vegas, Monday October 17, 1-3 p.m. Click here for details. Hope to see you there!

What a stunning flight of wines from Edi Kante poured for me the other night by Kante’s Italian sales rep Edi Tapacino here in Houston!

Stupendous, really.

When I met Edi T (who was visiting Texas for the first time) and we tasted through this extraordinary flight, I couldn’t help but think back to 1999 when I was living in New York and the Italian wine renaissance was just beginning to take shape.

At the time Edi Kante’s wines were part of the new wave, as it were, and they were positioned and poised — thanks to the powers that were at the time — to become one of the next big things.

But a series of mishaps (let’s just leave it at that) led to Edi K’s wines falling off the radar. It’s great to see that Edi T is injecting the brand with some new energy in the States. I’ve always been a huge fan and I am thrilled to see that they are starting get the attention they deserve here in the U.S. Look out for them if you can…

Semi-related: Karst is the English word for Carso, btw. Just saying…

In other news…

This week, I was also stoked to taste the Tenuta Santa Maria alla Pieve 2010 Amarone with Giovanni Bertani who was in town to work the market with his new Texas importer/distributor.

Old-school and classic in style, this wine had that lightness — that unbearable lightness — and that lithe character that real Amarone has to have imho.

I really enjoyed the wine and had a blast (excuse the pun) discussing space exploration with Giovanni who had been down to NASA earlier in the day. A kindred spirits of sorts!

Great to see these wines finding their way to Texas and expand the availability of authentic Italian wines here.

In other other news…

Broccoli raab, yo! One of the dishes I made Tracie P this week for her birthday (below, one of her favs).

Thanks for being here everyone. Have a great weekend and come and see me in Vegas next Monday if you can. And Bob Dylan deserves the Nobel, people! I have a lot of thoughts to share on the matter but am too slammed for that today… Rock on!

It felt like a brick hit me in the gut this morning when I learned that Dario Fo, theatrical genius and one of the all-time greats of political and social activism, has died at age 90.

Click here for the New York Times obituary of the Nobel prize winner.

And even if you don’t read Italian, click here for the Repubblica cover-story devoted to his passing. It will give you a sense of the larger-than-life role that he played in Italy’s literary arts and the country’s collective social conscience.

Dario Fo, his wife and partner Franca Rame, and the plays he wrote and produced have shaped my intellectual life since I first read one of his works as an undergraduate student of Italian at U.C.L.A.

His brilliant 1958 farce “Non tutti i ladri vengono per nuocere” (typically translated as “Not All Thieves Come to do Harm” but perhaps better rendered as “Burglars Aren’t All Bad”) was one of the first modern-era plays I read in the original Italian (after Pirandello). His deft hand at parodying the western bourgeoisie, its bigotry and hypocrisy, blew my mind (by means of both style and substance) and sent me down a path that led to other pivotal texts and discourse (by him and others) that formed and informed much of my view of the world.

As California sits on the verge of legalizing marijuana (creating a de facto “confederacy of state-regulated marijuana use”) his 1975 farce “La marijuana della mamma è la più bella” (“Mom’s Pot is Always Best”) couldn’t be more topical. “The rich consume drugs,” he wrote, but “drugs consume the poor.”

One of the most thrilling moments of my first year at university in Italy was seeing him and Franca Rame perform in Rome and meeting them both in the lobby before the curtain came. When I asked him to sign my program and told him I was an America fan of his plays, he smiled that grand smile and those unforgettably wide eyes sparkled. That starstruck night was the first of many for me in search of unpalatable truths made less bitter by his brilliant and deliciously unforgiving humor.

Dario Fo, as day breaks in America, I wonder to myself: how can the sun come up without you? It must not know yet that you are gone.

And may G-d bless America.

See you in a few days…

Above: yesterday, our daughters, Lila Jane age 3 and Georgia age 4, were enchanted by their visit to the Japanese Gardens at Hermann Memorial Park in Houston where we have lived for two and a half years now.

I grew up in a familial environment that was shaped, sullied, and shamed by the awful life choices of a serial abuser of women. I have known, firsthand, the emotional legacy left behind by authors of such transgressions, even long after the abuser has moved on to a new life and reality. Sadly, the scars and fallout from that time in my own personal family history continue to affect me and people I love dearly. Never fully healed however cauterized, those lacerations were only made more deep by the media attention devoted to them at the time. Now is not the time or place to go into it, but anyone familiar with this episode in my life (which emerged in the late 1970s) would agree that it was an early instance of the sensationalization of the family tragedy in the contemporary era of mainstream media.
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It’s always pretty nifty to read your name in the LA Times. And even cooler when the topic is pizza and what wines pair best with it…

I was entirely stoked to be included in veteran wine writer Patrick Comiskey’s post yesterday for LA’s paper of record on “What Wines to Drink with Pizza.” (Patrick’s long-awaited book on California’s Rhône-variety movement, American Rhône: How Maverick Winemakers Changed the Way Americans Drink, was published this month by University of California Press, btw; check it out here.)

It’s still not up on the Sotto website but I swear I will be hosting a guided tasting of by-the-glass selections from the new Sotto fall wine list on Tuesday, October 25 at the restaurant (in Los Angeles, that is). I’ll post details and registration info as soon as it becomes available and would love for you to join me if you are so inclined.

And if you stay for pizza afterward, I’ll pour you a glass of my personal favorite pairing (I don’t kiss and tell so you’ll just have to come press the flesh to find out what it is).

Thanks for being here and all your support. It means the world to me. Buona domenica a tutti…

From the department of “the Ph. in Ph.D.”…

A funny thing happened the other day on my way to everyone’s favorite wine bar in Houston.

Well, it actually happened after I had sat down with roughly 30 other Houston wine professionals for a seminar and tasting of Greek wines with Canadian Master Sommelier Élyse Lambert and Houston restaurateur and Greek wine expert Evan Turner. They were presenting 12 Greek wines at a Houston Sommelier Association gathering (a twice-a-month affair where collegiality and liberal views on wine trump the Texas status quo).

The wines had been selected by them and shipped to Houston especially for the event. I’ve tasted a lot of Greek wine ever since the Greek wine wave hit the U.S. about 6 years ago, landing first in NYC. But I only knew three of the producers in the flight.

I could feel a bead of sweat roll down the side of my face as my fellow tradespeople and I tasted through the excellent pours: was it just a matter of minutes, I thought to myself, that the Big Wine Police would burst in like the Untouchables and arrest us all for our adventurous and Hellenic sensorial spirit? None of the wines on offer came through the major two channels of wine distribution in our state. Goodness gracious! It might as well have been a Planned Parenthood meeting where condoms were distributed!

Luckily, the Big Wine Gestapo was busy investigating reports of sommeliers picking their noses while decanting Screaming Beagle.

Oh, and that funny thing that happened, you ask, on the way to the forum agora?

We must have been three wines into the flight when I received an email from my friend Christina Boutari, above, left, with Evan at his excellent restaurant Helen Greek Food and Wine.

“I’m in Houston and I am pouring our wines at Helen from 3-6,” she wrote. “Please come and taste with me.”

Boutari is one of the few top Greek producers who make it to Texas through government-sanctioned channels and so I knew it was safe to connect with her.

The 2007 Santorini Reserve Kallisti (in the first photo, above, a current release for this legacy estate) was thoroughly stunning, with nuanced layers of dried fruit and nutty character. Wow, what a wine! And so lovely to see Christina, one of her country’s greatest ambassadors for its superb (and value-driven) wines. She’s in town to pour her family’s wines this weekend at Houston’s Original Greek Festival, which turns 50 this year.

When I first moved to Texas eight years ago, I never would have imagined that Houston would become an epicenter for Greek fine wine in this country. In the face of our state’s wine oligarchy, Houston continues to expand its spirit of wine freedom, corrupting our wine youth in the best ways imaginable.

Buon weekend a tutti! Thanks for being here and thinking subversive wine thoughts. And in case you missed it, check out Louis Menand’s excellent essay on Karl Marx in this week’s New Yorker. “Marx is a warning about what can happen when people defy their parents and get a Ph.D.,” he writes.

From the department of “then as it was, then again it will be…”*

Last month on my Facebook, I shared a post on Barolo/Barbaresco numerology by my friend and client Giovanni Minetti, CEO of Tenuta Carretta, a veteran and homegrown Langhe tradesman.

In it he ponders the question of vintages that end in the number 6. Will 2016, he asks, break the cycle of less-than-extraordinary vintages that end in 6?

The post was met with disbelief and protest by some of my favorite Nebbiolo collectors. And today, I’ve excerpted their comments and Giovanni’s response on the Tenuta Carretta blog (check it out).

I remember all to well when Produttori del Barbaresco decided not to release its single-vintage wines from the 2006 vintage. At the time, it wasn’t clear whether the decision was based on market factors (in 2010 the financial crisis was at its zenith); or whether the growers didn’t feel the harvest was up to snuff (here’s my post from 2010).

I haven’t even begun to touch the 2006 wines that I put down in my cellar at the time. Maybe it’s time to open a few. With ten years gone, only time will tell.

Check out thoughts on the 2006 vintage, including Giovanni’s response, here.

* Play it loud.