Three books I read as a teenager shaped my awareness of historic institutionalized racism in our country.

Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (I wanted to do a book report on it at the time but my high school English teacher wouldn’t let me).

The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

And Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s book on the civil rights movement in America.

I’ll never forget how one of my parents’ friends, a man I worked for at the time in La Jolla where I grew up, dismissed King as a “communist” and questioned the value of reading the book.

That was San Diego, California in the early 1980s. Now I live in Houston, Texas in Trump America. Much has changed in the meantime but, sadly, much has remained the same.

Earlier this month, the conservative journalist and cultural commentator David Brooks wrote about “the populist ethno-nationalists” in the incoming administration.

Isn’t it time that we stop euphemizing the politics of bigotry that defined Trump’s road to the White House and call it what it really is?

I hear so many people say that they voted for Trump because of the economy, because of jobs, because of immigration, because of trade, because of government corruption. Fair enough. If you believe that his policies are really going to change America for the better, I hope you are right (although I doubt that you are). He’s about to become the president and his party controls both chambers of the U.S. congress and we are all waiting anxiously to see what comes to pass.

But anyone who claims that Trump’s campaign wasn’t rooted in bigotry and racism has conveniently and tragically turned a blind eye to his repeated racist outbursts. And anyone who ignores the fact that he has filled his administration with political agents who are either insensitive or outwardly opposed to the civil rights movement is equally blind to the new Trump America.

On this day celebrating the life, legacy, and achievements of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., I ask you to:

– think about how your black neighbors feel when they see a Confederate flag on your other neighbor’s porch or truck;

– think about how our fellow black Americans feel when they have an incoming president who told them that they should vote for him because “what do you have to lose?”;

– think about your grandparents’ parents’ feelings about race and racism and how your own feelings about race and racism have evolved in your lifetime.

This year, on the eve of the federal holiday commemorating the historic civil rights movement’s greatest figure, Trump injuriously libeled and insulted a man who literally marched with King and who has served our country ever since. He’s one of the most respected politicians of our lifetime.

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2017, I ask you not to turn a blind eye to the bigotry that surrounds us. Only we can know what we feel in our hearts, unless we decide to share what we feel with our sisters and brothers.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

Image via Wikipedia Creative Commons.

Just a quickie this very busy Thursday morning as the food and wine world seems to be finally getting back online.

I opened the above bottle of Selvapiana Chianti Rufina 2014 four nights ago and drank two glasses with dinner over the last three evenings.

And man, the very last glass, which I paired with rotisserie chicken and a baked potato (dressed simply with extra-virgin olive oil, Kosher salt, and freshly cracked pepper), was the best of all.

I was just blown away by how vibrant and how varietally expressive this wine was. It wasn’t just hanging in there on the third night. It was actually even better than the previous evening.

What a great wine and what a great value… All things considered, for the price (around $17 in my market) and quality and availability throughout the U.S., this is one of my all-time top wines. Definitely in my top 5 for greater Chianti. It also paired gorgeously with Tracie P’s Neapolitan-style ragù on nights one and two.

That’s all I have time for today… more tomorrow… Thanks for being here.

Above: the sale of legacy Barolo grower and producer Vietti was one of the most talked about stories of 2016. But there were many other stories that dramatically reshaped Italy’s viticultural landscape.

“The year came to a close with another major loss,” wrote Italian wine critic Monica Larner last week in her excellent almanac for 2016 on RobertParker.com:

The Felluga family of Gorizia in Friuli Venezia Giulia announced on December 27 that their much-celebrated patriarch Livio Felluga had passed away a few days prior. He was 102 years old. Mr. Felluga’s extraordinary life saw two world wars and Italy’s post-war economic boom. He shaped the wine identity of Northeast Italy and championed the concept of quality Italian white wines that would spark an important export phenomenon. Among Mr. Felluga’s most important contribution is his approach to farming. He famously refurbished previously abandoned vineyards and painstakingly brought old vines back to prime production health. He implemented modern trellising, high density planting and systems to guarantee low yields.

Felluga was just one of three Italian icons who transhumanized in 2016, to borrow Dante’s neologism. Stanko Radikon and Giacomo Tachis, both of whom Monica remembers in her piece, were two others. In their own ways, each of them radically re-envisioned and re-routed the trajectory of Italian wine. Their lives form a triptych of the Italian wine trade’s transformation since the end of the Second World War.

When future observers of the Italian wine trade look back on the fateful year of 2016 (a year of radical social-political-and-cultural upheaval throughout the world), they will also remember the “all-out land-grab,” as Monica put it, in Italy’s premium-brand appellations. 12 months ago, no Cassandra could have predicted what has been widely called the “Burgundization” of Italians most prominent appellations.

“Some have dubbed it the ‘Burgundization’ of Italian wine,” wrote Monica, “because like in Burgundy, there is simmering resistance and palpable discomfort in Italy over foreign and corporate capital in local wine.”

The Vietti sale to an American investor was arguably the most talked-about. But Biondi-Santi, Cerbaiona, and countless other leading high-end and high-profile brands in Langa, Bolgheri, and Montalcino changed hands in 2016. Many of the properties went to foreign investors and many went to the growing number of Italy’s corporate winery groups.

(It’s behind a paywall but Monica’s is such a great overview of this transformational year in Italian wine. I highly recommend it to you.)

The year’s necrology and its feudalization will be the elements that will be remembered most by future observers of the Italian wine trade. But there were other stories that will have far-reaching implications for Italian wine.

In 2016, Langa winemakers handily crushed greater Piedmont’s attempt to create a Piemonte Nebbiolo DOC. It was one of the most pitched battles of the year for Italian winemakers.

“The Langhe have won the Nebbiolo war,” wrote leading Italian wine writer Luciano Ferraro for the national daily Corriere della Sera after the dust had settled.

Above: my friend and UniSG colleague Michele Fino. In widely read and reposted editorials last year, he wrote in favor of a Piemonte Nebbiolo DOC and against changes in the Asti DOCG that would allow producers to write “Secco” on their labels.

Another Piedmontese conquest, scarcely noticed by the American wine media, was the move by Moscato d’Asti producers to allow bottlers to include the word “Secco,” meaning dry in Italian, on their labels.

In a September 2016 post entitled “Why ‘Asti Secco’ Is Unacceptable” for Intravino, my UniSG colleague and legal expert Michele Fino (above) explained (my paraphrasis): Asti, Marsala, and Franciacorta are the only Italian DOCGs where producers are not required to write “DOCG” on the label; as a result of the new appellation regulations, bottlers will now be able to write “Asti Secco” on their labels.

Many, like Fino, see this linguistic contortionism as an attempt by Asti bottlers to take a greater slice of the ever-more lucrative and ever-growing Prosecco market.

Prosecco bottlers have lobbied aggressively to block adoption of the new rule but the Italian agriculture ministry is expected to approve the changes next week.

It’s likely that Asti producers will present the new labels this spring at Vinitaly and Prowein.

What Cassandra could have imagined that Target and Walmart shoppers would see “Cupcake Asti Secco” on the shelves next holiday season?

In the wake of 2016, when the world witnessed a truly epochal shift in political and cultural currency, it seems that no deal is off the table.

Happy 2017, everyone! Thanks for being here and thanks for reading. I’m looking forward to another year in Italian wine with you. Stay tuned…

Above: three Austin-based wine professionals who attended last year’s Texas stop on the Slow Wine Guide Tasting Tour. The Slow Wine editors traveled to each stop by van. Hearing their stories of eating salad at Burger King during their “coast to coast” trip was equal parts hilarious and tragic. Taking them all to see Dale Watson at the Continental Club in Austin that night was one of my proudest moments as a Texan.

So many super cool Italian wine events happening this month in Texas between Houston and Austin. I’m happy to report that I won’t be presenting at any of them: I’ll just be enjoying them as a fan, lover, and student of Italian wine. I hope to see you there!

Vietti Wine Dinner with Luca Currado
January 18 at Tony’s in Houston

Tony is my friend and client (I manage media for his restaurant group) and I’m looking forward as much to his menu as hearing Luca’s thoughts on recent vintages.

Here are details and registration info.

Benvenuto Brunello
January 19 in Houston

The fact that Benvenuto Brunello is coming back to Houston for a second time reflects the city’s upwardly mobile status in the national wine community. As the price of oil continues to rise, so will the flow of Brunello’s garnet gold.

Here is registration info.

Slow Wine Guide Tasting
January 30 in Austin

As an adjunct professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, I’m part of the Slow Food/Wine team and universe. But even beyond my professional bias, I think it’s safe to say that this is an extraordinary tasting and gathering of Italian wines and winemakers.

Here’s the list of presenting wineries and a link for registration.

Dale Watson is scheduled to play that night at the Continental Club. If I miss you at the tasting, meet me for a shot and a beer back at the show. Should be fun times (always is).

And looking down the road toward the horizon…

In early March, I’ll be one of the presenters at Taste of Italy Houston, the third annual trade and consumer food and wine festival organized by the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce Texas.

That’s Chamber director Alessia Paolicchi (below, far left) and deputy director Maurizio Gamberucci (second from right). I’ve been working with the Chamber for nearly a year now and really love and thoroughly enjoy our partnership.

Celebrity sommelier David Lynch and Houston Chronicle columnist J.C. Reid will also be panelists this year. It’s a great lineup and I’ve been impressed in years past by the caliber of the exhibitors.

Here’s a link to pre-register.

The “Carbonara: Pecorino vs. Parmigiano Reggiano” panel and tasting is sure to be a highlight from this year’s gathering.

2017 is already shaping up to be a great one in Italian wine and food. I hope to get to taste with you this month!

I really loved Eric Asimov’s Champagne “cheat sheet” this year for the New York Times. Check it out. The glossary is great, too.

Like so many things in the new Trump America, the sparkling wine options for New Year’s Eve this year in Houston seem to have been reduced to a zero-sum game: either you drink Champagne and spend a buttload of money to sit courtside; or you drink Prosecco and sit in the nose-bleed seats where you figure you might as well have stayed at home and watched the game on your own big-screen TV.

And like so many other things in the new Trump America, the bogus Champagne vs. Prosecco dichotomy is a bunch of bullshit meant to keep you believing that aged, bigoted, overweight, rich white people who can’t spell are going to save you from the wretched life you live…

Click here to read my sparkling wine tips and recommendations for the Houston Press.

Happy holidays from the Parzen Family!

Happy holidays from the Parzen family!

Thanks for being here in 2016. And looking forward to another year in blogging in 2017.

Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season and a new year full of good health and joy.

It had to have been 2003 when someone graciously offered to take me to dinner at Alain Ducasse at the Essex House. At the time Per Se wasn’t online yet and Ducasse was New York City’s only three-Michelin-star restaurant (remember all those articles about whether or not Michelin-style restaurants would take hold in the city?). Even though the restaurant had been open for 3 years, it was still one of the sexiest and most difficult reservations to obtain. Henry Kissinger was in the dining room the night we ate there.

We were seated in the back, near the restroom, not that that mattered. It was a beautiful restaurant and there literally wasn’t a bad seat in the house.

I had been asked by the host to select the wine and when I spied the 1996 Poderi Colla Barolo Dardi Le Rose on the list for great price (around $130 if I remember correctly), I couldn’t resist ordering it.

The sommelier took my order but then returned to inform me that she wouldn’t be opening the wine for me.

“It’s too young,” she said, “and it isn’t drinking well. We’ve selected a different bottle for you instead.”

She had picked a new-barrique-aged Barbera d’Asti instead. It wasn’t the time or the place to make a fuss (in part because I was someone’s guest). And so, in the spirit of not interrupting the brio of the evening (we could hear Kissinger’s voice booming from the main dining room) and to go with the flow, I bit my tongue (an apt expression!) and didn’t say a thing.

One of my early mentors, the Italian wine maven Charles Scicolone, had first told me about Poderi Colla and the legacy of Beppe Colla, his brothers, and his family’s legacy as winemakers.

You don’t me to recount that story here. Many before me have written ably of Beppe Colla’s herculean contribution to the evolution of the Piedmont wine trade and the many benchmarks that he has set over the arc of a career well spent and a life well lived.

See, for example, Charles’ excellent post from earlier this year here. And see this wonderfully informed winery profile by British wine merchant John Hattersley.

What I will tell you is that until you tread the gorgeous vineyards of this farm and breathe in the salubrious air atop the estate’s Bricco del Drago (“Dragon’s Hill,” in the first photo above), you only know half the story of this magical estate and its enchanting wines.

When I visited in the spring, Tino Colla talked at length about organic farming and why his family doesn’t farm organically. It’s all about creating balance in the vineyards, he explained (just look at the flowers growing between the rows in the Bricco del Drago above!).

He laughed as he told our group about a recent visitor from California who was obsessed with organically farmed produce. When she was served an estate-grown peach at the end of a lunch at the estate, he said, she was horrified to find a worm on the piece of fruit. When he tried to explain to her that the worm was a sign of a healthy farm and the absence of pesticides, she wasn’t having it — figuratively and literally.

As he shared his bemusement over her misconceptions about organic growing practices, I remembered the disconnect (literal and figurative) between that first bottle of Colla and me. Looking back, I wonder: was the wine not ready for me or was I not ready for the wine in the sommelier’s opinion?

I hope that that sommelier someday makes it to Poderi Colla. Then she’ll realize that the people who make these wines make them to share with people who want to learn what Langhe wines really are.

I must have visited 20 wineries over the last 12 months and 9 trips to Italy in 2016. Poderi Colla was a visit of a lifetime. The luncheon, the eye-opening tasting, the winemaking museum, and the breath-taking hike through the vineyards. I can’t recommend the estate and the wines highly enough.

Incredible to read this story in the Times after hearing my friend and client Tony Vallone tell it over dinner. I’ve tasted those cannelloni. They are delicious…

HOUSTON — They still talk about the Saturday night here 27 years ago when Donald J. Trump partied with former President Richard M. Nixon.

Dressed in tuxedos, they sang “Happy Birthday” to Texas royalty — former Gov. John B. Connally and his wife, Nellie, whose birthdays were a few days apart — as Nixon played the tune on a white baby grand piano. They dined at Tony’s, the “21” Club of Houston, and Nixon was so fond of the cannelloni pasta that he asked the owner, Tony Vallone, to write the recipe for him on a yellow legal pad. And when it was all over, Mr. Trump flew Nixon back to New York on his 727 private jet.

It happened one weekend in March 1989…

Click here to continue reading “When Donald Trump Partied with Richard Nixon,” from today’s New York Times…

This year on December 24, humankind will witness an epochal event of a lifetime (if you’re a millennial): The first night of Chanukah will fall on Christmas Eve. That’s only happened one other time in my lifetime (I belong to Generation X), in 1978. And it only happened one other time in the last 100 years, in 1940.

The first night of Chanukah has fallen on Christmas Day twice over the last 100 years, in 2005 and 1959. And Christmas and Chanukah (a historic festival and not a religious holiday for self-aware Jews) often overlap. But when the first night of the Jewish festival of lights aligns with the vigil for the birth of Jesus Christ, it just feels different — magical as if there were some type of confluence of cosmic forces. It can literally take a lifetime for the two to coincide (if you were born in the 80s).

The date for Christmas is determined by the Gregorian Calendar and the date for Chanukah, like all Jewish holidays and festivals, is determined by the Hebrew Calendar, a lunisolar calendar (based on the moon phase and the tropical calendar).

If you’re wondering how I figured this out, it was actually easy: I used HebCal.com.

Christmas and Chanukah aren’t historically related, even though they often overlap. Only in America is Chanukah associated with Christmas as a gift-giving occasion (a contamination of the Hallmark gift card military-industrial complex). In most countries, children may receive dreidels (dice with spindles) and coins for Chanukah. But gifts are not exchanged.

Sephardic Jews often make and serve donuts during Chanukah. That’s because donuts are fried in oil and oil is central to the Chanukah story: According to Jewish tradition, the amount of olive oil needed for one night during the rededication of the Second Temple (in Jerusalem in 165 BCE) miraculously lasted for eight nights.

Ashkenazi Jews serve potato latkes or potato pancakes, which are fried in oil. Many Texans will recognize potato pancakes as part of their own culinary tradition: Early German settlers in Texas, many of whom came here seeking religious freedom in the 19th century, also enjoyed potato pancakes.

And that’s why, in the spirit of coming together and sharing our rich cultural diversity in Trump America, my number one recommendation for wine this Chrismukkah (the bogus pop-culture intermingling of religious rituals) is German-speaking wine.

Click for for my 10 recommendations for the Houston market. Happy Chrismukkah, ya’ll! This only happens once in a lifetime (for most of us). So let’s make it a good one with a memorable bottle of wine!

This just in: Vietti winemaker Luca Currado and my friend and client Tony Vallone will be presenting Luca’s family’s wines on January 18, 2017 at Tony’s in Houston. I’ll be there. Please join me. It’s going to be a night to remember, for sure.

New York-style pizza and pepperoni pizza in particular are among my greatest guilty pleasures.

In the decade that I lived and played music in New York City, I came to learn all the best spots for late-night Manhattan slices as my band’s drummer and I lugged our gear back uptown from our downtown gigs. Oh man, who doesn’t relish a hot slice at 2 a.m. after a night of drinking flat beer and strumming a Telecaster???!!!

Today, the question of pizza and the existential question of pepperoni or regular? play a new and outsized dialectical role in my life: our youngest daughter prefers “cheese” while our oldest waivers between her allegiances to pepperoni and cheese.

The joy, alone, in hearing the word pepperoni uttered by a child, with its trochaic mellifluence, is truly priceless, btw: peh-peh-ROOOOOOH-nee.

My parental pondering of pepperoni pizza led me recently to reflect on the origin of the nomenclature. After all, in Italian, peperoni denotes what we call bell peppers in English. If you ordered a pizza ai pep[p]eroni in Italy, they’d bring you a pizza with bell peppers and not with thinly sliced, slightly spicy sausage.

A Google search prompted by my curiosity led me to a lovely 2011 article by Julia Moskin for the New York Times (our president-elect’s favorite paper!), “Pepperoni: On Top.”

In it she writes:

What, exactly, is pepperoni? It is an air-dried spicy sausage with a few distinctive characteristics: it is fine-grained, lightly smoky, bright red and relatively soft. But one thing it is not: Italian.

“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title: “How Italian Food Conquered the World.” “Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Apulia are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mr. Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.

Evidently, the sausage name is a corruption of the Italian peperoncino, as in the little peppers used to impart heat and color to the salami.

Digging a little deeper into my philological neuroses, I discovered that the earliest known printed reference to pep[p]eroni sausage actually dates back to 1888 (the year Nietzsche began to lose his mind) in the Times of London.

This early mention of pepperoni in a list of types of dried sausage leads me to believe that pepperoni might not be an Italian-American invention but rather a food product that is Italo-Britannic in origin (something that is highly plausible).

But I found an even more significant and telling mention in the United States government Yearbook of Agriculture for 1894 (published by the U.S. Government Printing Office), a mention that appears some 25 years before Mariani’s editio princeps.

The author of the entry for sausage wrote the following:

A mealtime and snacktime favorite of millions of Americans, sausages include a wide assortment of seasoned and processed meat products… Some sausages are dried during processing. Dried sausages like pepperoni, thuringer, and dry salmi are quite firm, very flavorful, and normally do not need to be refrigerated.

Herein lies the rub, as it were. Pizza, as we knew it in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s before the pseudo-Neapolitan pizza craze of the 2000s, probably emerged during the “Me” era (that’s the 1970s for you millennials). We think of pizza as an ancient food form. And it is. But the pizza of the 1960s probably didn’t resemble the pizzas pictured in this post, for example. It was the rise of canned tomatoes and processed cheese in the post-war boom of the 1960s that probably made pizza as-we-knew-it possible in the decades that followed.

The passage from the 1894 yearbook reveals that pepperoni sausage was already popular (at snacktimes and mealtimes) in the U.S. by the dawn of the 19th century, long before the great waves of Italian immigration began to take shape in north America. And its popularity was probably owed in some measure to the fact that it didn’t require refrigeration.

Ding! Ding! Ding! That’s probably why it became such a popular pizza topping: it was easy and inexpensive to store.

Regardless of its origins and its linguistic and cultural disconnect, pepperoni pizza is one of America’s great gifts to the world imho. There’s just nothing like a late-night slice after a gig and there’s nothing like the smile on a child’s face as she contemplates: cheese or pepperoni?