Category Archives: de cibo

New York stories

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N.B. this post will be thoroughly more enjoyable, if you click the YouTube below for the post’s soundtrack.

Next week, I’ll post on the Apulian tasting that Charles Scicolone and I presented at the New York Wine Media Guild luncheon on Wednesday. In the meantime, here are some images from my quick trip to the Big Apple (well worth it if only to party in Harlem the night of the election!).

Bar Milano is my new favorite NYC hang. My buddy and colleague Jim Hutchinson and I hit it up Wednesday night. We had the 2006 Nosiola by Cesconi, which showed well and was reasonably priced, and the sardine in saor (sardines in a sweet and sour sauce), a classic Venetian dish, were the best I’ve had outside the Veneto. Owners Jason and Joe Denton just know how to do it right and they have got to be the coolest dudes — in every sense — on the NYC restaurant scene.

On Tuesday, Greg Wawro and I celebrated his milestone birthday at our favorite steakhouse Keens, always a winner in my book. I treated Greg to the 1998 Corison (yes, a Californian wine!). Keens has a slightly picked-over vertical of Corison but there are still some good ones left. I’ve always found the wine judiciously made. The 10-year-old Cabernet paired beautifully with the porterhouse (which we ordered black and blue, of course).

Before dinner on Wednesday, I visited Alice and snapped this pic of what has got to be New York City’s most talked about toilet. Alice often writes about her toilet in her blog. (Click on the link and read her NY Times Modern Love piece. I was there the night of the 1977 Monsanto but I cannot reveal the name of her admirer.)

Forget NYC: Tracie B is coming to LJ tomorrow! What music will Benoit play at the JG? Stay tuned…

Rolling with MZ at Jaynes

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From the “I may not be a rock star but I get to hang out with rock stars” dept…

Above: we paired Ca’ del Bosco 2001 Annamaria Clemente — one of the greatest vintages for this wine, said Maurizio Zanella — with steamed Baja mussels at Jaynes last night. It’s a tough life, but someone’s gotta do it, right?

Flew in from Austin yesterday and rolled right into dinner with rock star winemaker Maurizio Zanella at Jaynes Gastropub last night. Friend and fellow wine rocker Robin was also in attendance.

I’ve met and tasted with Maurizio a number of times (and I recently tasted a 1979 Ca’ del Bosco disgorged à la volée at his winery). He is a true rock star among winemakers and his appetites and lust for life are stuff of legend. He’s also just a really cool guy who likes to talk about his experience as a student in Europe in 1968, about music, and about what it means to make real wine in a time when the marketing so often overshadows quality among sparkling wine producers.

I was geeked to ask Maurizio about the now legendary trip he made with Luigi Veronelli to California in 1981 (check out my post on Veronelli and new oak aging from October 2007): Veronelli wrote 1982, but Maurizio told me 1981 last night).

    “The real reason behind the trip,” Maurizio said, “was that [the great Friulian winemaker] Mario Schiopetto was suffering from back problems and had to go to Minneapolis to visit a specialist doctor. So, we decided to go with him and help him and from there we decided to California. We got off the plane in Los Angeles and headed right to Spago on Sunset Blvd. When the waiter took our order, I told him that we wanted ‘every thing on the menu.’ There were only four of us. So, Wolf[gang Puck] came out and said who are these guys? We ended up eating everything on the menu and Wolf and have been friends ever since. We asked him which was the best restaurant in Los Angeles and he sent us to Piero [Selvaggio] of Valentino. And it was Piero who organized our trip to visit all the great Napa valley wineries. I was completely amazed by the fact that the Californians were using the same winemaking practices that I studied in France [in Burgundy and then in Bordeaux]. I went back to Ca’ del Bosco and changed everything.”

Giacomo Bologna was with them, too. Bologna returned and created Bricco dell’Uccellone — probably the first and definitely the most famous barrique-aged Barbera. Maurizio made the first Italian barrique-aged Chardonnay. And Veronelli exhorted Italian winemakers to use new oak in his Catalogo dei vini d’Italia and he invited André Tchelistcheff to lecture at Palazzo Antinori in Florence.

Modernity had arrived. All because Mario Schiopetto had a bad back…

Yo, MZ, I like the way you roll…

Some how, some way, you just keep coming up with funky ass shit like every single day…

Live guest blogging: Salone del Gusto 2008 Turin

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This just in from my friend and colleague Carla Ranicki who’s working at the Salone del Gusto in Turin today.

Thursday at Salone del Gusto is always fairly calm, with everyone gearing up for the huge crowds that will pack into Turin’s Lingotto exhibition center over the weekend.

The buzzwords this year are sustainability and education, with separate trash cans for paper, compost, plastic, etc. prominently placed next to displays about the importance of reusing leftover food, and lots of posterboards promoting the new eco-friendly Salone and exhorting consumers not to buy strawberries in December.

But ultimately it was still all about an excess of every possible kind of food and drink from all over the world, with everything on offer from raw fish at the Japanese stand to raw reindeer at the Norwegian restaurant next door.

The unusual cheeses of Marayn de Bartassac from Gascony were proving very popular, while the extravagant display from the Prosciutto di San Daniele consortium looked like some kind of conceptual art installation.

Photos by Carla Ranicki. Thanks Carla!

The great Brunello debate and please keep Austin weird

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Above: sopecitos at Fonda San Miguel, one of the many excellent Mexican restaurants in Austin, Texas.

Just a quick reminder: Franco and Ezio Rivella will face off tomorrow in the great Brunello debate in Siena, 3 p.m. local time. You can watch the debate live at http://www.vinarius.it/. I’ll be watching, of course, and will most certainly post about it here and at VinoWire. Franco will be presenting the case for Brunello di Montalcino to remain 100% Sangiovese while Rivella will argue that appellation regulations should be changed, allowing for other grapes to be used as well.

Above: Dale Watson did an awesome show at the Broken Spoke the other night in Austin.

In other news…

Tracie B. and me did us some more honky-tonkin in Austin this week. I’ve really been impressed by how Austin still has many family-owned and run music venues and restaurants. Especially coming from Southern California, where the landscape is dominated by fast food chains and strip malls, I’m happy to know that there is an America where folks are still keeping it real. Keep Austin Weird is a grass-roots movement that promotes general “weirdness,” as they put it.

I’ve been enjoying some of that weirdness and I really dug Dale Watson’s version of Pop a Top the other night at the Broken Spoke (my second-favorite honky tonk after Ginny’s Little Longhorn).

Pop a top again
I just got time for one more round
Sit em up my friends
Then I’ll be gone
Then you can let some other fool sit down

I’d like for you’d to listen to a joke I heard today
From a woman who said she was through and calmly walked away
I’d tried to smile and did a while it felt so outta place
Did you ever hear of a clown with tears drops streamming down his face.

Pop a top again
I think I’ll have another round
Sit em up my friend
Then I’ll be gone and you can let some other fool sit down.

Home for me is misery and here I am wasting time
Cause a row of fools on a row of stools is not what’s on my mind
But then you see her leaving me it’s not what I perfer
So it’s either here just drinking beer or at home remembering her.

Pop a top again
I think I’ll have another round
Sit em up my friend
Then I’ll be gone and you can let some other fool sit down
Pop a top again.

What to serve with home-smoked ribs in Austin TX? Produttori del Barbaresco, what else?

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Above: what else would I pair with home-smoked ribs? 2004 Produttori del Barbaresco Barbaresco (classico), of course. I’ve tasted this wine a number of times since I first tasted it in NYC at a Vias portfolio tasting with Alfonso, Alice, and winemaker Aldo Vacca early last year. Over the last few months, it’s been in what I call a “state of grace”: a period of sensational drinkability before it shuts down again for the long-term. The bottle we opened on Sunday night in Austin showed signs of tightening up again but was delicious nonetheless.

Italian wine bloggers — me, Tracie B., Alfonso, and Wolfgang — converged on Austin last weekend for the Austin City Limits music festival and some general honky-tonking.

My festival highlight was Erykah Badu: man, that lady is one bad-assed mother… (and I mean that on multiple levels: played an amazing show, rocked a great percussion solo on with her digi trigger, and how many months pregnant is she?). We watched her set with my friend, roomate, and licensing agent Michael Nieves. He and I raised a beer to toast the phat placement he did for our song Fille Atomique on Gossip Girl on Monday.

Alfonso, Tracie B., and I were the guests at the home of Misti and Nathan, Tracie B.’s good friends. Nathan smoked pork ribs — one rack with a spicy rub, one with a bbq sauce finish, and one plain. He began smoking them in the morning, keeping them at about 200° F. all day long, using chips from old whiskey barrels (Franco would agree with me that this would be an excellent use for barriques! Nathan said, however, he prefers pecan). Misti made steamed corn with jalapeño rounds and a great potato salad (with olive oil instead of mayonnaise). Lena and Dean were there, too. Nathan’s a pretty mean guitar player and so we traded some riffs and played Beatles and Bruce Springsteen into the night (on the ladies’ request).

Above: what do Italian wine bloggers drink when they get together? Mexican beer, of course! Wolfgang and Alfonso at Güero’s Taco Bar in Austin. I wasn’t sure about getting fish tacos in a land-locked taco joint so I went with the roast pork, which was very good, but the sides were just so-so. The salsa bar was excellent if meager and I love the way they serve the beer with small, old-school glasses, like the ones you find in Mexico.

Above: Tracie B. at Ginny’s Little Longhorn, my new all-time favorite honky tonk. The night we were there, the caliber of the playing just made me want to go sell my geetar at a pawn shop. Tracie B. moved back to Austin earlier this year from Ischia where she wrote her fantastic blog, My Life Italian, about Italian food and wine and the life of a Texana in Campania, Italy. She’s a little shy on camera but, man, that girl’s got the prettiest eyes this Italian wine blogger’s ever seen!

*****

Post scriptum

Strappo and Marco: we missed you at the Italian wine blogger summit, Austin, 2008 edition.

Feeling fat and stinky (and that’s a good thing)

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Above: fat and stinky. I can’t say where it came from or who shared it with me (since it’s illegal in this country), but this Ami du Chambertin was fantastic yesterday evening at my buddy’s place. This week I’m feeling just like that cheese.

When I first moved to NYC and got a job as a magazine editor, one of the graphics guys was a Russian. Slava was his name, very talented dude and a good friend. Every time he’d see me laugh or smile, he’d say, “Jeremy, suck a lime.” In other words, stop smiling because unless you don’t something bad will surely happen.

Well, I’m throwing caution to the wind because it’s been a good week and I’m feeling fat and stinky like that cheese.

Found out yesterday that Nous Non Plus’ Fille Atomique (from …Nous Non Plus self-titled) will be featured on the show Gossip Girl on Monday (8 p.m. Pacific, check your local listings).

Our new album, Ménagerie, is being printed as I write this and will be out in January.

This week I’m finishing the final edits on my behemoth translation of a Guide to Italian Cinema for Princeton U. Press. I’ve been working on this book for a few years now and it’s great to see it come to fruition.

And this weekend I’m headed to Austin, Texas to hang out, relax, and listen to some good music during Austin City Limits. Maybe I’ll even get to dance with a pretty girl… I can just hear Slava saying it, suck a lime…

In other news…

I really like this post today by McDuff: one of the things I like about his blog is the way he balances the human aspect of our business with great tasting notes and informed background. I was just talking to some colleagues about Vajra last night and lo and behold, David posted on the winery today.

Italian Wine Guy is back from Italy and shared with me this updated list of the now 41 Italian DOCGs (a few new ones were added this summer). Alfonso, looking forward to seeing you this weekend in Austin, man!

The virtual sommelier strikes again: Castell’in Villa ’82

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Above: 1982 Castell’in Villa at Dell’Anima in Manhattan.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them: I’m just “keeping the world safe for Italian wine.” A number of my friends have suggested that I use the line as a tagline for Do Bianchi and maybe one day I will.

In the meantime, I recently received an email from John, who lives in San Diego but was headed to Dell’Anima in Manhattan for a special dinner with his wife:

    I recall reading something about a friend of yours emailing a picture of the wine list at a place in San Francisco, and you gave some sage advice. I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but I was wondering if you could take a look at a list and see if anything jumps out at you. We’re back in NYC for one night this Friday (Sept. 19), and are eating at Dell’Anima.

I took a quick look at owner Joe Campanale’s excellent list and there were a number of great options, at different price points. But the wine that really spoke to me, at a palatable price point, was the 1982 Castell’in Villa Chianti Classico.

Today, John writes:

    We had a great dinner at Dell’Anima Friday night. I’ll save the complete report for when we meet in person, but Joe came up to greet us … and then we decided on the Castell’in Villa ’82, which he poured a bit of into our glasses and then decanted. An Amazing Wine Experience! … It evolved beautifully for the whole hour it took to drink.

    I finished The Accidental Conoisseur on the flight back, and it was fun to see Rosenthal’s quotation on p. 210: “Are there any great Chiantis anymore? There’s Castell’in Villa, okay – but practically nothing else.”

That’s what we do over here at Do Bianchi… just keeping the world safe for Italian wine, one wine lover at a time.

My dinner with the Weinsteins

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BrunelloWire: light rain today and so no picking.

Strappo reports from Montepulciano: “Still a way from harvest in Montepulciano. But they are about 600 m above sea level here.”

Above: no, that’s not the Weinsteins… that’s Melanie and Noah. Noah and I go way back: we even went to Hebrew School together! Today, he’s a leading German scholar and she a writer of non-fiction, critic, and poet.

No, I didn’t really have dinner with the Weinsteins. But that was the joke the other night when my good friends Melanie Rehak and Noah Isenberg (above) took me to Weinstein, a wonderful traditional German wine bar just off the Helmholtzplatz in their neighborhood, the Prenzlauer Berg, in Berlin (note the über-hip extension “.eu” in the Weintstein URL).

Riesling is a lacuna in my enological formation and so I was in pig heaven, so to speak, between a great flight of Rieslings poured by excellent sommelier Marc Metzdorf and my Wiener Teller (“Viennese platter,” including delicious cured suckling pig among other delicatessen) and Königsberger Klöße (pork and veal — if I’m not mistaken — dumplings).

The star of the evening was the 1995 Dr. Loosen Urziger Würzgarten Riesling Auslese, which Marc pours by the glass. Being the neophyte Riesling-lover that I am, I put myself in Marc’s hands and I was really impressed by the care and devotion he and his colleague, Claudia, showed for these wines. Weinstein’s list is impressive and stretches back to the 1970s, with roughly 250 lots. Good stuff…

On the plane back to LAX from Berlin the next day, I read Noah’s new tome on the film noir classic Detour. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it.

*****

Earlier in the day, Melanie and I paid a visit to the “legendary” food department at KaDeWe, where German cuisine is featured alongside cuisine from all over the world. Melanie’s finishing edits on a book about her experience working in farm-to-table restaurant in Brooklyn. I can’t reveal the name but I’m looking forward to its release sometime next year. Here are some pics from KaDeWe…

I love anything marzipan. The more kitsch, the better.

Cured heaven…

Please don’t feed the eels…

The “American” section was really a joke… an irony in the context of the fantastic traditional German, French, Italian, and Japanese counters. But Melanie and I had fun perusing the candy canes, Pop Tarts and Swiss Miss.

Anteprima da la Terza (a first look at third)

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This just in from the “life could be worse” department…

Above: Executive chef Gino Angelini and chef de cuisine Gianpiero Ceppaglia at La Terza on Third in West Hollywood.

David Schachter and I met up last night at La Terza, Gino Angelini’s restaurant on Third (hence the name) where Gino and his chef de cuisine Gianpiero Ceppaglia were debuting their new fall menu. We were also joined by LA chef-about-town Walter Manzke and wine industry veteran Enrico Nicoletta: needless to say, some great bottles were opened as we sampled the new repertoire.

Don’t try this at home. We paired David’s 2001 Raveneau Montée de Tonnerre with the spaghetti with lobster. Gino’s seafood is always fantastic, the long noodles were perfectly al dente, and the Raveneau was simply singing…. a great pairing…

Architectonic food has always fascinated me and the theme has pervaded my research in Italian Renaissance cuisine (see my translation of Maestro Martino): I loved this take on baked macaroni, “Vesuvius.”

Gianpiero and Gino matched this beautiful scallop with porcini mushrooms, an unusual pairing that worked swimmingly well. The crostino took it over the top.

David and I got into a fist fight as to whether or not fregola can be called Israeli couscous. I guess it’s the self-loathing Jews in us. The seafood medley with fregola was delicious nonetheless and paired well with a “simple red,” Mick Hucknall’s Etna Nerello Mascalese Il Cantante 2001. I liked the wine despite the dumb name.

Quail over polenta was tender and moist. Definitely a standout… Does it show that I’m a fan? Life could be worse…

La dolce vita, after all

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Above: a pensive moment at dusk outside La Pineta, a fantastic seafood restaurant where I dined with Cinzia Merli and Luca d’Attoma last week, in Marina di Bibbona, on the Tuscan coast (photo by Ben Shapiro).

Strappo is sure to remind me that Fellini’s labyrinth of semiosis often led him to revise his explanations of signifier and signified in his films. But I believe the great Romagnolo director was telling the truth when he said that the expression la dolce vita referred not to the glamour of the Via Veneto but rather the sweetness that we find in life, even in our darkest moments of existential crisis.

[SPOILER: if you’ve not seen La dolce vita, I am about to reveal the final sequence!]

As Ben and I were waiting to meet our dining companions, Cinzia and Luca, the other night at La Pineta in Marina di Bibbona on the Tuscan riviera, I took a stroll alone and gazed out at the sea in one of those “what’s it all about, Alfie?” moments.

Just over a year ago, my life fell into turmoil when my mid-life crisis hit me like a freight train and I wished that I had gone straight but was side-swiped by a simple twist of fate. Today, I find myself in the Munich airport, on my way back to the States, exhausted but invigorated, excited about music and work, thankful to have so many wonderful folks in my life — some of them my oldest friends, some of them my newest.

Marcello turns his back on Paola, the young girl he met one day in a seaside trattoria. But before he returns to the party, he looks back and sees her irresistible smile — sweetness in his otherwise bankrupt existence. Maybe it’s the sweetness in a young girl’s smile, a plate of wholesome pici with ragù, a bunch of Greens dancing to Nous Non Plus in a forgotten border town along the Polish-East German border, or maybe it’s the waters of March. I believe there is a sweetness in life, to be revealed when you least expect it.

You don’t need to speak Italian to enjoy the clip below. Marcello has been partying all night with a lascivious crowd and the revelers find their way to the beach shortly after dawn…

In other news…

Yes, you can now add R.D. to my post-nomial Ph.D.: I was recently ordained as a Rock Doctor in the Universal Life Church and I’ll be officiating at the wedding of Jayne and Jon next Saturday.

*****

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
then I guess it’s wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
what will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more,
something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed you’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk let your heart lead the way
and you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie.

— Hal David and Burt Bacharach