A number of friends from across the U.S. and Italy have written asking us how they can help us during the ongoing extreme weather, electric grid failure, and now water shortage in Houston.

My recommendation is to give to the Houston Food Bank. I’ve done a lot of events with them over the years and they do an amazing job. Right now, people simply don’t have enough food to eat: between the electric and cold temperature crises this week, people haven’t been able to get out of their freezing homes to shop for food and now we are facing food shortages because of shipping challenges (it’s an accumulation of things, including icy weather, gas shortages, and electric outages).

Here’s a New York Times list of resources for helping to feed people across Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.

The Houston Food Bank will get food and water into people’s hands right away (they were open again as of yesterday, at least according to social media posts).

Tracie, the girls, and I have had power for the last two days and our water pressure is just starting to come back. And we’re praying for no busted pipes but so far so good. We could all use a hot shower but we managed to make through. Not everyone has been so fortunate.

Thanks for all the notes, wishes, thoughts, and prayers. Our children, ages seven and nine, have now lived through Hurricane Harvey, Tropical Storm Imelda, the global coronavirus pandemic, and now a human-made crisis.

Governor Abbott, you can blame this on windmills, you can blame it on Democrats, but there’s no doubt about this: it happened on your watch, man. People across Texas have died because of your administration’s ineptitude, negligence, and sheer callousness (spurred and cheered on by a Republican-dominated state government). Why is it that the buck never stops with you? I love living in Texas, I love being a Texan, I love raising our children in Texas. We deserve better from our elected officials.

Parzen family update: we have been without power, heat, phones, or water for the last 24 hours. Temperatures were in the 10s last night. Power, cell. service, and heat just came back on about an hour ago. No water yet. Last night was brutal but we all slept together in the girls room (with the dogs and every last blanket in the house). Not sure how long we’ll have power today but we have it for the moment (people are getting power back only to lose it again, at least that’s what we’re seeing on social media). NEIGHBORS: we have water and food and heat for anyone who needs or wants to warm up while we still have power. Thanks to everyone for all the messages, thoughts, and wishes. Texas needs the prayers! And thanks to everyone who is waiting on emails and work from me. I’ll be in touch soonest. Hoping everyone is safe, healthy, and warm. And big shouts-out to the girls who been real troopers throughout their umpteenth natural disaster. 

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.