That’s Serena Gusmeri with me in the photo at Operawine week before last in Verona. She’s the winemaker behind Vecchie Terre di Montefili in Panzano in the heart of Chianti Classico.

Serena won’t be with me next week but I will be presenting three of her wines on Tuesday evening 4/18 at Rossoblu in downtown LA.

We already have a great crowd lined up for the event but we’re trying to sell it out.

It’s an amazing deal at $150 per person including tax and gratuity. And we’ve just added a sixth label, the 2017 Bruno di Rocca by Serena, the estate’s large cask-raised Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s a truly extraordinary wine and I’m geeked to be sharing it with the group next Tuesday.

Here’s the link to reserve. Menu follows below.

Please join us. Deadline to reserve is tomorrow. If this one goes well, we’ll be doing one a month. So please come out and support me next week. Thank you for the solidarity!

Welcome: Chicken liver toast – cipollini agrodolce, chive
La Civetta Prosecco (Glera, Treviso, Veneto)

Grilled Monterey calamari – frisée salad, heirloom tomatoes, basil
Ronco dei Tassi Pinot Grigio Il Tasso (Pinot Grigio, Collio, Friuli)
Vecchie Terre di Montefili Rosé from Sangiovese (Sangiovese, Panzano, Tuscany)

English pea cappellacci – ricotta, mint, pea shoots, Parmigiano Reggiano
Benazzi Sisters Bardolino (Corvina, Lake Garda, Veneto)

Sangiovese-braised short ribs – sunchoke purée, crispy sunchoke, gremolata
Vecchie Terre di Montefili Chianti Classico (Sangiovese, Panzano, Tuscany)
Vecchie Terre di Montefili Bruno di Rocca (Cabernet Sauvignon, Panzano, Tuscany)

Coconut Nutella cake – vanilla crème anglaise

As the young woman introduced him, her voice bubbled over with the joy of presenting one of her idols.

When she was deciding on her career path many years ago, she told the group of wine professionals, her father gave her one of the speaker’s books. Read this before choosing your future, he told her. The insights and wisdom she found in those pages led her to choose a life in wine.

Today, she is the marketing director for one of the largest importers of Italian wine in the world and a widely respected figure in the trade.

My Vinitaly hadn’t officially started when I managed to snag a spot at that importer’s sales retreat at the swank Villa Sparina in Gavi. The featured presenter that day was none other than Oscar Farinetti, Italy’s celebrity entrepreneur cum pop philosopher cum motivational speaker.

In north American, he’s known primarily as the founder of Eataly and one of Italy’s richest people. But in Italy he’s a genuine megastar — Malcolm Gladwell meets Tony Robbins.

He was there to talk about wine and more specifically, his wines, which said importer imports to the U.S.

But instead of talking about his wineries, he gave a colorful speech about the art of selling Italy.

Everyone should go out and buy themselves a copy of Dante and Boccaccio, he advised in his opener. Those early Italian works, he said, reveal the richness and breadth of Italian culture and its many treasures.

He then launched into one of his famous litanies of figures and facts. Italy, he pointed out, covers only a small amount of the world’s land surface. But it is home to more iconic works of art than any other country in the world, large or small.

You couldn’t be more fortunate, he exhorted the group, to be selling western civilization’s greatest cultural resource.

He also made some interesting observations about how organic foods and wines are perceived by the market. The word organic will increasingly be interpreted as an antonym for death, he predicted. An extreme but well pondered consideration.

My official Vinitaly wouldn’t start for another two days. But on that overcast chilly day in Gavi, I was reminded of how small the big world of Italian wine really is.

Happy Passover, everyone!

According to this excellent post by Chabad.org, “matzah is called ‘impoverished bread,’ bread that lacks taste – for it is a remembrance of spiritual impoverishment.”

“Wine, however, has taste and is enjoyable. It is a ‘remembrance of the liberation and freedom’ ultimately achieved by the Jews.”

Both will be served for this year’s Passover Seder, a meal in which each dish symbolizes part of the story of Exodus.

One lacks yeast.

The other is transformed by yeast.

Long before we began to understand the role of yeast in two of the world’s nearly universal foodstuffs — bread and wine — fermentation was considered a miracle by our ancestors.

It is still a miracle today.

Have a great Passover!

Chag Pesach kasher vesame’ach!

[Wishing you a] kosher and joyous Passover!

There are so many ways to wish someone a happy Passover — in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. Check them out here on Chabad.org.

Dateline Brescia.

Posting on the fly this morning as the Italian wine trade gears up for its annual trade fair, the BIG enchilada, Vinitaly.

One of the gatherings I’m most looking forward to is my session with industry legend Tuscan enologist Luca D’Attoma, winemaker for my client Amistà, producer of Nizza DOCG.

He and I will hanging out from 10 a.m. until noon at the Ethica Wines stand — hall 10, stand A3.

In case you’re not familiar with Luca, he’s the deft hand by some of our generation’s most critically acclaimed Tuscan wines. His partnership with Amistà is his first in Piedmont, where he’s making biodynamically farmed, unoaked Nizza DOCG. It’s a super exciting project and I’m super stoked to be part of it.

If you have a moment on Monday morning at the fair, please stop by to taste and chat. There should be some cool writers stopping by as well. Please come and see us.

And in the meantime, buon Vinitaly! Have a great fair!

P.S. see you tomorrow at Operawine and the afterparty…

One of the best chapters of my career spanned the seven years that I worked with Chef Steve Samson (above) in Los Angeles.

Chef and I met on our junior year abroad in Italy and we’ve been close friends ever since that time. In the meantime, he’s gone on to become one of California’s most followed and beloved culinary professionals.

Steve, his partner (and better half) Dina, and their group are about to add another destination to the roster. Their Superfine on the west side of the city will open any day now.

When he opened his first restaurant in Los Angeles, Sotto (another favorite of the Pulitzer-winning author), I wrote the list and we did countless wine dinners together.

I could not be more thrilled to be working with Chef Steve next month when I’ll be presenting a wine dinner at his Rossoblu in downtown.

Jonathan Gold had nothing but praise for Chef Steve’s ode to his hometown of Bologna, Rossoblu (“Jonathan Gold says Rossoblu may make you wish you knew a Bolognese grandmother,” Los Angeles Times, June 2017).

It’s really that good, folks.

We still don’t have the menu lined up, but you can already reserve your spot here.

I’ll post an update with the menu and wines soonest.

Please join me on Tuesday, April 18, as I pour some of my favorite wines paired with the Rossoblu menu. I am so looking forward to this! I hope you can be there.

Image via Chef Steve’s website.

Above: one of the best executions of carbonara I’ve ever had was prepared by a Roman using guanciale and Pecorino Romano. The cook in question is one of the most brilliant and informed writers in Italy I know. But does he know the origins of his city’s synecdoche dish?

“A philologist looks behind the ‘holy books,’” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols (1889), “a physician behind the physiological depravity of the [believer]. The physician says, ‘incurable,’ the philologist says, ‘fraud’…”

This line came to mind over the weekend after a number of gourmand friends and gourmet colleagues sent me a wonderful Financial Times profile of Italian food historian Alberto Grandi entitled “Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong.”

Grandi “has dedicated his career to debunking the myths around Italian food,” writes Marianna Giusti for the paper.

In his 2021 book Denominazione di origine inventata (Invented Designation of Origin), Grandi points out:

that most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s, for example, or that carbonara is an American recipe. Many Italian “classics,” from panettone to tiramisù, are relatively recent inventions… Some of DOI’s claims might be familiar to industry insiders, but most are based on Grandi’s own findings, partly developed from existing academic literature. His skill is in taking academic research and making it digestible. And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture — a food scene where cappuccini must not be had after midday and tagliatelle must have a width of exactly 7mm.

Sounds like my cup of caffè corretto!

Anyone who follows my blog knows that I have written extensively about the origins of dishes like carbonara and puttanesca. And one of the major red threads of my research has been the debunking of myths, like the one about puttanesca being invented by sex workers and carbonara being named after purveyors of charcoal.

In case you missed the piece, check it out here (paywall).

I’m leaving tonight for Italy and plan to pick up a copy of his book while on the ground there. I can’t wait to read his book! Report forthcoming!

In the meantime, wish me luck and wish me speed. Lufthansa is on strike but I still hope to get to Italy by dinner tomorrow…

Above: I’m hoping to get an invitation to the blogger and social media party that my friends and colleagues have hosted over the years at the Abruzzo consortium stand. It’s always a great time.

After missing Vinitaly last year, I am super stoked to be heading back for this year’s main event.

If you’re planning on attending, let’s connect and taste!

I’ll be at the fair on Sunday and Monday (heading back to Texas on Tuesday because Passover starts on Wednesday night, April 5).

And if you’re free on Monday, come and see me at the Ethica Wines stand (hall 10, stand A3). I’ll be hanging there for a few hours with enologist Luca D’Attoma. We’ll be tasting his latest project, Amistà, producer of Nizza DOCG (my client). Luca is a towering figure in the world of Italian wine and I’m super psyched to be tasting with him.

Of course, I’ll also be making the rounds to see as many of my friends and taste as many wines as possible.

If you’re heading to Verona next week, let’s taste. I’m also going to be at Opera Wine this year.

DM to connect. And travel safe! Looking forward to seeing everyone!

Earlier this week, a lively conversation with a group of west coast wine buyers proffered an anecdote for the viticultural ages.

A guest, recounted a young and gifted sommelier, had asked them to pour an organic wine for the table. Being the consummate wine professional that they were, they presented said guest with an organic wine. With wine in glass, said guest then offered the following consideration.

“This wine doesn’t taste organic,” they said to the sommelier with an unconcealed note of disappointment and distaste.

What was the sommelier to say? The customer is always right, as the Hippocratic oath of hospitality goes.

Is “organic” a character, a nature that can be described through sensorial observation? Even the most ardent organic enthusiasts would be hard-pressed to make the argument that it can.

No one disputes that organic farming can deliver wines of high quality. It’s equally true that conventionally farmed wines can achieve the same level of quality. It’s also worth noting that the broader organic movement has prompted many wine growers to incorporate organic practices in their approach to viticulture, sometimes with spectacular results.

But a divide as wide as the Atlantic Ocean spans the perceptions of well-intentioned consumers, the winemakers who grow and transform the grapes, and the service professionals who serve to bridge the gap between producer and consumer.

The seductive power of the “organic” brand has also led countless unscrupulous bottlers to claim wines are organically farmed when in fact they are not.

I’ve heard many prominent grape growers say that truly organic wines are a myth. It’s impossible to avoid the residue of chemically based farming, they point out. Some have even argued that without the larger scale conventional farming by big wine (which restrains the spread of vine disease), small-scale organic farming wouldn’t be possible.

There are so many arguments to be made for and against the way we perceive organic wines. Ultimately, the sommelier found a wine that the guest approved of. But the great rift between the sacred (organic) and the profane (conventional) does no other service than to prop up our vanity.