Above: My friend Wayne Young, whom I met in 1998 in New York when he had already been working within the then-expanding Bastianich empire for three years. In the photo, Wayne is standing atop the amphitheater growing site where the top wines for the Bastianich winery are grown in the Colli Orientali del Friuli.

Babbo changed everything. It was “a fine-dining Italian à la carte restaurant below 14th St.,” as Joe Bastianich put it when I first met him in 1998 (when I was working as an editor at La Cucina Italiana in the City).

Ruth Reichl’s watershed New York Times review of the place in April 1998, “A Radical Departure with Sure Footing,” marked a point of no return for pseudo-Italian restaurateurship in the U.S.

I remember that Wednesday in August 1998 well: it was the day that Italian gastronomic irony died and the newly minted craze of Italian regional cuisine took firm hold in North America. Whether you liked Babbo or not (and who didn’t want to get a table at Babbo?), from that day forward, if you cooked Italian food in the U.S., you had to do it earnestly: your food was only as good as the authenticity that stood behind it.

Above: Alfonso tasting with the COF2011 blogger team and winemaker Emilio del Medico and winery GM Dennis Lepore.

Wayne Young and I first met back in those heady days of New York’s Italian food scene. We all knew a revolution was taking place even though, from the eye of the storm, we didn’t realize its portent. Today, Wayne — who has worked as a sommelier at Bastianich outposts Becco and Babbo — serves as the Bastianich winery’s “special ops” man on the ground in the Colli Orientali del Friuli (the blogger project there was his idea). He is involved in every aspect of the operation, from winemaking (a wasp in his pants is what gave him the idea to call the winery’s flagship white “Vespa”!) to sales (ask him what it’s like to sell wine in Serbia!) and marketing (he is the only Friulian winemaker to author a winery blog).

Wayne is a remarkable man, with great generosity of heart and a warm gentleness. I’ve never heard him say a nasty word about anyone and I admire him for the way he lives his life perfectly integrated into Friulian society where he is welcomed and beloved by all we met. Despite his nordic locks, everyone calls him “a local” up there in northeasternmost Italy.

Above: In our tasting last week at the winery, my favorite wine was the 2009 Sauvignon Bianco. Fresh and clean, with balanced aromatic character and that bright acidity that I want (and need), it should retail for under $20 in the U.S. The Bastianich Sauvignon has a screw cap, a feature that allows the winemaker to add a smaller amount of sulfite to the wine, because the screw cap allows less oxidation (where a cork, an organic substance, would allow more).

Like Wayne, the Bastianich family has been welcomed in the Colli Orientali del Friuli as winemakers. President of the COF consortium Pierluigi Comelli told us the story of how Joe and mother Lidia came to him asking for advice on where to buy property and set up their facility. Ultimately, on his advice, they revived a winery that had abandoned after the owner’s untimely passing. And they bought uncultivated growing sites where they cleared the woods themselves to make way for vineyards. After a week in the COF, I had a clear sense that winemakers there appreciate the expanded exposure and bandwidth that the Bastianich brand brings with it. “Everyone rises with the tide” seemed to be the consensus.

Above: On Friday evening, the last of our trip in the COF, we took time out to celebrate with a beer in Cividale del Friuli. You can’t really help but smile when you’re around Wayne — it’s contagious. That’s Nicolas, David, and Alfonso to the right.

Spending the week tasting and comparing notes with Wayne (who, as a local winemaker, shared a lot of interesting insights with the group), I couldn’t help but think back to 1998, when we first met and none of us really understood what was about to happen. As Eric the Red recently pointed out to me, it was a time of Italian gastronomic “innocence” (it is Eric whom Mario Batali’s father Armandino credits for having “discovered” his son’s talent in 1993).

I’m glad to know that the fame and the celebrity hasn’t changed my old friend Wayne.