Category Archives: de oenographia

Scenes from Boondocks Road, life on the bayou

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Sometimes on the highway of life, there are certain roads you just have to go down…

Driving back from East Texas yesterday, Tracie P and I decided on a whim to find out what lay at the end of Boondocks Road. Yes, Boondocks Road.

A sign told us about Leon’s Fish Camp. But we knew there had to be more to the story.

What we found was a beautiful bayou and friendly people who waved and smiled at us.

Because of the flooding that hurricane season inevitably brings, the houses are on stilts and many are connected to Boondocks Road by bridges.

The extreme weather of East Texas will most certainly put the fear of G-d in you.

Of course, everywhere you go in Texas, folks are proud of their state.

Until recently, as I discovered this morning on the internets, Boondocks Road was called Jap Road. The road had been named to honor early-twentieth century Japanese settlers who had taught their neighbors how to farm rice on the bayou. Today, rice is the predominant agricultural crop of this area. The locals greatly appreciated and recognized Yoshio Mayumi for what he had done for their community. But he and his family were forced to leave between the two world wars when the U.S. government forbade foreigners from owning land in our country (the 1924 Immigration Act; sound familiar?). Jap was not a racial slur at the time and was a commonly accepted abbreviation for Japanese (the historical entries in the Oxford English Dictionary provide hard evidence of this). In 2004, after more than ten years of lobbying, local activists were successful in their campaign to rename the road. The road’s residents chose Boondocks, after a catfish restaurant that had once operated there. (You can find all of this in the Wiki entry, including references to articles in the Christian Science Monitor and on the CNN website.)

Another hour down the highway of life, Tracie P had lox and latkes and I had white fish salad at our favorite Houston deli, Ziggy’s. Cousins Joanne and Marty and Aunt Holly and uncle Terry and cousin Grant joined. The white fish was delicious.

I’m glad they changed the name of Jap Road. But I wish they would have renamed it Mayumi Road, to remember the farm and the people that reshaped the agricultural landscape of East Texas in a more innocent and more earnest time.

But, then again, if it weren’t called Boondocks Road, we probably wouldn’t have felt the irresistible urge to go down it.

BTW, with this post, I’ve added a new category to Do Bianchi: de rebus texanis. Buona domenica ya’ll!

Lady kisser Pelaverga aphrodisiacal wine for an East Texas Thanksgiving

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We had a great Thanksgiving yesterday in Orange, Texas with Branch and Johnson and now Parzen families. Mrs. B’s roast turkey; smoked turkey; spiral sliced ham with pineapple, brown sugar, and Coke; Uncle Tim’s cornbread dressing; Memaw’s deviled eggs; sweet potato pie, mashed potatoes; eight-layer salad; Tracie P’s shaved Brussels sprouts salad; pecan torte; and lots more. I wanted to share this story about my favorite wine pairing for this year, Pelaverga by Castello di Verduno, and the somewhat saucy story behind the name. For those with PG13+ status, read on…

The year was 2006 and I was working in New York as the media director for a high-profile Italian restaurant group that also happened to be a direct importer of Italian wines. Earlier that year, I had made the annual trek with my colleagues to the Italian wine fairs, where we met and tasted with a young winemaker at the natural wine fair, Vini Veri: Mario Andrion of Castello di Verduno, producer of awesome Barolo and Barbaresco and a then relatively obscure grape called Pelaverga. I’ve always loved Mario’s traditional-style wines (like his excellent Barbaresco) but all of my colleagues and I agreed that his Pelaverga Basadone was one of the most original wines we’d tasted that year: light in body, bright with acidity, and rich with fresh red fruit flavors, complemented by a gentle “white pepper” note. Later that year, a prominent colleague asked me what my Thanksgiving pick was and I whispered, Pelaverga, the perfect wine to go with wide variety of foods we eat for the holiday, from roast turkey to cranberry sauce.

Don’t ask me how but this vital piece of information was somehow whispered into the ear of the then New York Times restaurant editor Frank Bruni (remember him?). The rest is history: when he picked this wine as his top choice for Thanksgiving 2006, it made Mario’s Pelaverga a household word (at least in Manhattan).

And it’s a highly interesting word at that! No one knows the true origin of the grape name but on face value it means branch scraper, from the Italian pelare (to peel) and verga (branch). Most believe the name has to do with vine training techniques that were used to cultivate this rustic grape.

Of course, verga (and those of you who speak Spanish will immediately see the linguistic kinship) can also denote the… ahem… the male sex. Back in Verduno (Piedmont), the locals say this spicy grape has aphrodisiacal properties and that’s why Castello di Verduno calls it Basadone, the baciadonne or lady kisser.

Tracie P and I hope you had a great holiday! Thanks for reading!

The one I love loves mozzarella

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Some women want diamonds and jewelry, others covet big cars and houses, others yet seek power and fame…

And then, there is the woman I love… and she loves mozzarella…

And not just any old mozzarella. I’m taking about buffalo’s milk mozzarella shipped in from Campania… the real deal…

Last night, I surprised Tracie P with some good Campanian mozzarella from one of our local cheese mongers.

To watch her enjoy it with a glass of Falanghina was to fall in love all over again. She ate the whole thing!

Looking in her eyes, I remembered what Petrarch said to Laura: tu sola mi piaci… You alone please me…

She’s been blogging again, delivering a wonderful series of posts about the wines of Campania, btw.

Tracie P and I have had an amazing year, personally and professionally, and we have so much to be thankful for… so much, so much more than I could ever imagine or hope for, to be thankful for…

We’re heading out shortly for our family Thanksgiving but I just wanted to thank everyone for keeping up with the blog and to wish ya’ll a happy, happy Thanksgiving.

We’ll see you in a few days…

New York Stories 7: Beaujolais with Eric the Red

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The final installment from my “dates with the City”…

Another highlight of my New York sojourn was my obligatory pilgrimage to The Ten Bells, my favorite wine bar in the U.S., where even the grouchiest among the grouchy wine bloggers would approve of owner Fifi’s selection of Natural Wines by the glass.

The weather had turned cold(er) and as Eric the Red noted on the Twitter, “at The Ten Bells. No place better on a chilly night, or any other.”

(You may remember how Eric got his name “the red” back in August 2008.)

Partly mocking the Beaujolais Nouveau marketing scam here in the U.S. and mostly celebrating how fantastic Beaujolais can be, for the last two years, Fifi has run a cru Beaujolais by-the-glass program concurrently with the advent of the consumerist collusion concocted by Georges Duboeuf in the 1970s. (Tracie P and I actually made the tail end of the festival last year.)

This year he offered 19 cru Beaujolais.

Eric and I tasted the Fleurie 09 Dubost Sans Souffre and the Morgon Descombes 07. Brilliantly savory and delicious…

Topics of conversations were wide and varied but I was thrilled to get a preview of Eric’s new book, “a manifesto and memoir,” in which he will dispel the notion that intellectualism is required to understand and enjoy wine. I’ll drink to that!

Talking about Eataly and the arc of the Italian food and wine renaissance, we remembered his 1993 review of Mario Batali’s Po on Cornelia St.

It took a little digging but I found it in the paper of record’s archive here.

“It turns out that the name Po refers neither to the Italian river nor to the Italian word for ‘little bit,’ but derives from a Polaroid photo taken of the site by a friend of the co-owners, Mario Batali and Steve Crane. The name, with its happy Italian resonances, stuck. The restaurant will, too.”

Mario’s father, said Eric, credits him with discovering the clogged one.

I had visited Eataly earlier in the day: how amazing to reflect on Batali’s legacy (like it or not) since 1993!

And I’d have to say that Eric the Red has done pretty well himself since then… Check out his article in today’s paper on tasting 2005 Barbaresco with Levi…

New York Stories 6: lunch with Antonio Galloni at Marea

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Above: The cuttlefish crudo at Marea.

There are many in our field who claim to be the world’s greatest experts on Italian wine. You certainly don’t need me to tell you who they are: they have publicists for that!

To my mind, Antonio Galloni is the greatest English-language authority on Italian wine in the U.S. today.

That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of others important writers to whom we need to listen. But the clarity and purpose of Antonio’s voice and the aequitas of his approach make him stand out among the field of the merely so-called as well as the bona fide Italian wine experts.

Above: Sommelier Francesco Grosso’s list features a lot of the usual suspects (and you don’t need to tell you who they are) but it also includes many gems for the Italian wine geeks among us, like this Blanc de Morgex et La Salle by Pavese.

Antonio was leaving the next day for Italy and the list of producers he is visiting… well, it would make you drool, too.

I cannot conceal that I was thrilled to get to meet him and to talk shop. We discussed Bartolo Mascarello, Beppe Rinaldi, Gianfranco Soldera, Angelo Gaja, and many others, and his insights are always fascinating to me (whether delivered via the Wine Advocate these days or a voce, in this case).

I followed his excellent newsletter Piedmont Report since its early days in 2004 (the original Italian wine blogger ante litteram?) and I think his knowledge and experience in Piedmont in particular are remarkable. His vintage notes are especially vital to our field.

“Every element of traditional winemaking in Barolo is present in Beppe Rinaldi,” he said making reference to the winemaker he goes back to every year and one of his favorites. This was just one of the gems that I took away with me that day. Man, I’d love to taste those wines with him.

Above: The spaghetti were excellent, although the crab and sea urchin sauce was a little too spicy.

I learned that his parents owned a wine store in Florida when he was growing up. I discovered that he’s a jazzer (studied at Berkeley) and a opera tenor (studied in Milan).

But the coolest thing was to learn that this dude, however revered and feared he is by nearly every Italian winemaker and wine publicist in the world today, is a really mellow guy who just digs Italy, Italian wine, and Italian food.

It can’t be easy to work with and for “Bob Parker” and to manage all the pressure and scrutiny that come along with the gig. But somehow Antonio seems to never have lost site of his original mission. He just loves Italian wine. (He speaks Italian with native speaker proficiency, btw.)

The power of the wine press may be excessive at times. But thank goodness that there are folks like him who somehow (miraculously, really) manage to balance the yin and the yang of it all.

Whether tasting with Gaja (yin?) or Rinaldi (yang?), Antonio put it best: “I’ll just never get tired of traveling to Italy,” he said, “and tasting wine and eating great food.”

Ubi major, minor cessat.

New York Stories 5: 3 Jews, a Scot, a Piedmontese, a Turk, and 2 Swiss walk into a vertical of cult Barolo

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One Manhattan evening, top New York sommelier (and I mean, king of the hill, top of the heap) Levi Dalton (center, standing, my personal Philip Marlowe of wine) did a true mitzvah: knowing what a wonderful thing it would be for McDuff (left), BrooklynGuy (seated, center), Lyle, and me to get together, he managed to finagle a seat for each of us at vertical tasting and dinner at swank Alto with Peter Weimer, German Swiss cult Barolo producer, owner of Cascina Ebreo (Jew Farm) in Novello (Barolo).

Peter’s importer was also there, Dino, a simpatico German-speaking Turk and New York wine scene character, who also brought of a bottle of Giacomo Conterno 2002 Monfortino (see Lyle’s notes on the Monfortino).

Peter’s Torbido! is an aggressively traditional wine, made with native yeasts and long maceration, unfiltered. I thought 1999 showed beautifully and the 2004, however youthful, promises to be a superb wine. The big hit of the evening was 1998, which I also loved.

It was thoroughly great to see the Jew crüe and speculation as to why the farm is called Cascina Ebreo led to colorful exegesis.

Peter and Dino took many smoke breaks during the event, prompting me to recall an old Italian joke: who smokes more than a Turk? Two Turks!

I was happy to see Dino (whom I’ve known for many years) and to get to chat and taste the wines with Peter.

And wow, whatta mensch, that Levi Dalton, for getting the gang all together…!!! It was, as Lyle put it, a “Mt. Rushmore of wine bloggers,” or, in the words of McDuff, a “meeting of the menches“…

New York Stories 4: amazing seafood lunch with BrooklynGuy

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I had the extremely good fortune to be invited to Saturday lunch in the home of BrooklynFamily, where lucky guests are greeted with a glass of sherry.

Black Tuscan kale and watermelon radish salad.

Seafood for their home is sourced at the Grand Army Plaza weekly farmers market.

BrooklynGuy delivered his noodles al dente with the deft hand of a seasoned pro.

We joked about how when wine bloggers like us get together, it’s like when we were teenagers and went over to our friend’s house so said friend “could play his records” for us. An apt analogy!

Same-day catch flounder dredged lightly in fine cornmeal and flour and sautéed gently in extra-virgin olive oil, Savoy cabbage and celery root slaw on the side.

Dessert was utterly earthy and delicious.

BrooklynGuy’s blog is my number-one resource for finding great value in Burgundy and Champagne. If you’re not following, you don’t know what you’re missing!

A new Prosecco category emerges: colfòndo

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Above: Costadilà is a member of new group of winemakers who make “Prosecco colfòndo.” Note the sediment at the bottom of the bottle (photo taken on our dining room table).

Thrilling news of a new group of Prosecco producers who make their wines colfòndo (con il fondo, i.e., aged on their lees and thus with sediment) came to my attention via Mr. Franco Ziliani’s brand spanking new blog devoted to the world of Italian sparkling wines, Le Mille Bolle (A Thousand Bubbles).

In many ways, Prosecco is the wine that started it all for me so many years ago when I started writing about wine. Back in 1998 when I got my first gig as an enojournalist, it was with a feature story on Prosecco. I know the appellation well because I spent three summers touring the provinces of Treviso and Belluno with a cover band.

To my palate, lees-aged Prosecco is the real Prosecco (not the yeasted banana candy crap that we see too often in this country). Lees-aging gives the wine the saltiness that makes Prosecco raised in Valdobbiadene stand apart from the crowd. I love it and am dying to taste more.

Above: That’s me in the middle rehearsing in the famous Birreria at Pedavena where we played 4 sets a night, 3 nights a week (no kidding). I was in my 20s and the music and beer (often unpasteurized, btw) flowed all night long. How do you like the hair?

Dulcis in fundo (pun intended): one of the producers, Riccardo Zanotto, used to come hear us play back in the day and we shared more than one beer together…

Che bei ricordi! What great memories of rock ‘n’ roll with the Dolomites as our stage and salty, gritty, utterly delicious Prosecco!

Burgundy and (homemade) pizza and NYC’s most famous bathtub

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Arrived La Guardia last night and after leaving my blackberry in the cab (something I never did in over 10 years living here!) and then recovering it (!) thanks to the next fare (a super nice guy on the Upper East Side who wouldn’t take reward money, a true New Yorker Samaritan), I made my way over to Alice’s place for some old-school kibitzing, excellent 06 Burgundy (above) and delicious homemade pizza.

One topic of conversation was Alice’s famous kitchen bathtub, immortalized in the local paper first in 2004 and more recently in the society pages, where she discusses the myth of quotidian bathing in the Big City (scroll down to the bottom of the article for her quote and note the sliced bread on the side of the tub above).

Of course, there was no way I was going to miss an opportunity to use what many consider the most famous WC in Manhattan (if not the entire U.S.).

Hey, is that Anthony’s guitar pick on the floor?

Nuthin’ but a G thang: an updated list of DOCGs

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I will spare you my Derridian dissertation on the différance that a G makes between the DOC and DOCG designations (nor will I comment on the superfluousness of the recent political jockeying that resulted in a DOCG boom for Italian winemakers).

As one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century once said, it ain’t nuthin’ but a G thang.

I will, however, point you to an updated list of DOCGs authored by Alfonso (above).

In other news…

Sunset yesterday in La Jolla where I’ve been busy delivering wine for my wine club Do Bianchi Wine Selections and visiting with mama Judy and Parzen brood (jamming out with nephew Cole after dinner last night, him on upright piano and me on guitar, was a highlight).

How does the song go?