Above: Barolo Castle, photo taken January 17, 2020, on my last trip to Italy before the pandemic shut down global travel.

In an era when truth and fact seem to have become relative terms, it was remarkable to read the breathtakingly candid assessment of the 2017 vintage in Barolo circulated last week by legacy grower and winemaker Alberto Cordero, the current generation of the historic Cordero di Montezemolo winery in La Morra (disclosure: I contribute to his importer’s blog).

An “intense frost… hit not only Piedmont but practically all of Europe,” in April of that year, he wrote, “causing extensive damage in every wine-growing area from Tuscany upwards [northward]. One of the largest and most devastating frosts ever recorded.”

He includes in his a report a photograph showing one of the affected vineyards on his family’s historic estate.

In its entire history, he writes, his family had never seen “damage so huge from spring frosts.”

His notes hardly jibe with the notes issued by the Barolo, Barbaresco, Alba, Langhe, and Dogliani consortium.

“The 2017 vintage growing year will be remembered,” wrote the authors of the report, “for its hot climate, and in particular sparse rainfall.”

There was “some frost damage,” they added, “though in the Langhe only the bottoms of the valleys and cooler slopes were affected.”

Alternate facts?

Italian wine trade observers generally concur that the 2017 vintage represents a climatic anomaly, even for a decade when climate change delivered a string of extraordinarily extreme weather events.

Above: 2017 Barolo in cask at the Cordero di Montezemolo winery.

“2017 – Hail, Frost & Heat…,” wrote Antonio Galloni on Vinous: “Whereas 2016 was an extraordinarily benign year, pretty much anything that could happen did happen in 2017.”

The editors of Jancis Robinson’s site have called the vintage “fairly dismal.”

“The 2017 vintage for Piedmont was difficult, to say the least,” wrote the editors of WineSearcher.com.

In November 2017, shortly after harvest had been completed, one of the consortium’s most prominent and politically active members wrote that the Piedmontese hadn’t seen such an extreme frost in half a century (I don’t want to name the winemaker, whose report still appears on their blog, for the sake of not pitting them against the growers and bottlers assocation).

Many years ago, I had the remarkable opportunity to ask one of Piedmont most celebrated growers about their impressions of Langhe vintages stretching back to the 1950s (again, for the sake of comity, I don’t want to name names).

They talked about how market concerns have often compromised vintage assessments. This was especially true, they said, in the 1970s and 80s, before the time of global warming, when Piedmont vignaioli were lucky to have one great vintage per decade, let alone a string of good if not exceptional harvests (a trend that began in the 1990s).

It wasn’t so long ago that a celebrated Langhe cooperative created a stir when it reclassified its 2006 cru-designate wines. The vintage was called “promising” at the time. But the release of the wines coincided with the peak of the financial crisis. The episode, controversial in some quarters, was the inverse of what typically happens: the bottler talked down the vintage because they wanted to justify the decrease in price.

Traditionally, February is the month when Italian wine pundits begin publishing their vintage notes for the year’s releases. And we should start seeing the 2017s from Langhe in the U.S. by May or so.

Some of the wines will be good, others very good, and some even exceptional. These days, it’s rare that a winery releases wines it doesn’t like (and given the technology available to those who choose to use it, it’s challenging to make bad wine).

In the case of the Langhe 2017 releases, there will just be less wine. As a famous Tuscan grower once noted, there are no bad vintages; there are just vintages when we make less wine.

It’s inspiring to read the brutally honest words of a grower like Alberto. Maybe it’s because he has a longer-term perspective that allows him to see this anomalous vintage as just one piece in a much larger puzzle.

Or maybe it’s because he knows that honesty is a key element in authenticity. This is especially true at a time when nearly everything in the world’s “constitution of knowledge” has come into question.

I applaud Alberto (who’s a really nice and extremely thoughtful guy, btw) for the candor and the earnestness. His report kind of reminds me of a “rare menu that tells the truth.” Please pass the orange beef.

Above: Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome, seat of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (counterpart to the U.S. House of Representatives). Image via Adobe Stock.

Although it wasn’t entirely unexpected, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte’s announcement yesterday that he would resign set into motion what the Italian media have called a grave “crisis in the dark” (a reference to the political turmoil of the 1970s when the country faced a complete economic meltdown).

The collapse of the Italian government comes as the country faces cascading health and economic challenges.

(See the links above for the New York Times coverage.)

For Italian winemakers, many of whom are relying on domestic sales to keep their businesses afloat as exports have dropped precipitously, the political infighting couldn’t come at a worse moment. With nearly all of the country under lockdown, Italian restaurants and wine shops are required to shutter their doors at 6 p.m. every evening. As a result, major supermarket chains and other national retail outlets, which are allowed remain open in the evening, are seeing a boost in sales. But because the chain retailers source their wines primarily from larger wineries, this shift leaves smaller estates, who depend on boutique shops and independent restaurants, without a means to sell their products.

Earlier this month, Andrea Terraneo, president of the Italian association of wineshop owners (Vinarius), sent an open letter to prime minister Conte and his health and economic ministers asking him to amend the restrictions crippling the independent wine retailer industry. The “discriminatory” 6 p.m. cut-off, he wrote, has led to a 30 percent drop in sales in a sector already decimated by the pandemic fallout.

The restrictions add to the woes of a hospitality industry already besieged by the pandemic.

For small-scale growers, the government collapse only exacerbates the economic pain felt across the nation. Tasting room closures and restrictions had already shut off one of their main sales channels. And now, with the government on hold, there is little hope that the restrictions will be lifted in the near future.

If Conte or one of his rivals (namely, the self-described “Machiavellian” Matteo Renzi), are unable to form a new coalition, it’s possible a technical government will be installed to oversee the country’s current covid response and the management of forthcoming financial aid from the European Union — another crucial element in the wine industry’s recovery. Although unlikely, snap elections would take months to be implemented.

Image by the Corkscrew Concierge, a regular attendee at Roma’s virtual wine dinners.

Like many independent concept restaurants across the U.S., the barely four-year-old Roma in Houston was eager to shift to virtual events as soon as the shutdowns began to be enforced across Texas in the early days of the growing pandemic.

At the time, prospects for the restaurant’s survival were dim. As for tens of thousands of American restaurateurs (and for hundreds of thousands across the world), business had ground to a halt. Regulars, mostly middle-aged professionals, were reluctant even to order take-out in those early days of the health crisis. And for a “neighborhood,” “date night,” and “special occasion” restaurant like Roma, the world of plastic containers and utensils was as distant as Mars. The expression curbside available, now a workaday locution in the American restaurant lexicon, was as exotic as H.G. Wells’ “Martian herbs and trees.”

When the owner was approached by an energetic supplier/sales rep (a salesperson for a locally based importer and distributor), he gladly accepted her offer to organize a virtual wine dinner and tasting. Her idea — as brilliant as it was simple — was to have a winery representative in Italy on the other line, as it were, while the guests tasted through a three-bottle flight of wine paired with regional dishes. Yes, it would be 2:30 in the morning for the estate ambassador, but the sacrifice of a little sleep was well compensated by the potential sales and brand building — especially considering how business had declined precipitously in the early days of the new normal.

The initial virtual gatherings were unsurprisingly (at least in retrospect) clumsy. Zoom links that didn’t work. Guests who didn’t know how to mute their microphones and the subsequent TMI intimacy. Seafood dishes that were cold and rubbery by the time the guests opened their containers at home.

But the turning point came when the featured guest, the enologist son of a legacy Italian winemaker, began to insult the restaurateur over the pairings — in Italian. It didn’t occur to the dim-witted nimrod (excuse the pleonasm, merited in this case) that one of the guests, who happened to work as the restaurant’s media manager, was fluent in Italian.

The disconnect issue was only compounded when another microcephalic brand ambassador joked to the guests that the proprietary name of one of the estate’s wines could be loosely translated as “end of the world.” Appropriate, he quipped, for the times (despite the fact that he was employed by the estate, he didn’t realize the name was actually a reference to the nec plus ultra of Homer’s Odyssey).

And that’s when it dawned on Roma’s owner: the dinner’s “content” was being driven by the supplier rep and the brand ambassadors on the other side of the Atlantic; and the brand ambassadors, often export directors with poor English skills, were treating the events as if they were “supplier meetings,” as they are called in the trade, educational affairs where the brand ambassadors share insights with sales reps from regional distributors.

It was mid-July and the restaurant was still struggling, literally teetering on the brink of failure, when the owner made a radical shift: he would only host virtual wine events, he decided, with “principals” from the wineries, the winemaker or an immediate family member, and the featured guests had to speak English well. He also brought on a moderator, a wine professional with experience in public-facing wine education and public speaking, a veteran events organizer.

And that was what turned out to be the key: instead of letting commercial interests shape the events, his team would choose the wines, the pairings, and — most importantly — the winemakers who would represent the wines. The idea was to deliver a media “product” that was as entertaining and engaging as it was delicious.

He also made sure to keep the cost moderate. By negotiating aggressively with the distributors, whom he approached as opposed to them reaching out to him, he made sure the price per person remained palatable. What he found was that distributors were so keen to “move boxes,” as they say in the trade, that there was ample flexibility in pricing, “sampling,” and other strategies to offset the wine cost.

Almost as if by magic, the attendance at the dinners grew rapidly from 10-20 guests to 40, 50, and 60. By the fall even though the events were held on a weekly basis, he was regularly fielding 70-80 diners every Thursday evening. By the time the restaurant hosted its last event of 2020, it counted 90+ guests including some of the city’s leading wine mavens.

The secret, says the owner, is that he gives the guests what they want and not what the distributors want. And dulcis in fundo, the distributor reps aren’t complaining (anymore) either.

I’ll be joined by three other leading Italian-focused food and wine professionals a week from Friday as we discuss the mechanics of running a successful virtual tasting event for a webinar hosted by the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce South Central. See this link for registration details. All are welcome.