From the department of “problems come and go but the sunshine seems to stay”…

You can’t imagine my joy when an old friend from New York, Kevin Russell, wrote me a few weeks ago to let me know that the company he works for, Vine Collective, is importing the wines of Dario Prinčič.

I’m a huge fan of the wines and try to taste them every time I go to Italy (here are some posts on the wines).

As far as I know, the wines had never been available in the U.S. before. Back in 2008, when I asked Dario if he planned to sell the American market, he said that his Japanese importer was already buying up his entire export allocation. I’m not sure why that’s changed but I’m entirely geeked to know that I’ll be able to find them in our country’s more liberal wine markets.

The wines are not available in Texas and, as you know if you follow my blog at the Houston Press, it’s illegal for New York retailers to ship wines to end users in the state where I live.

So Kevin kindly offered to ship me a few sample bottles (along with a few other labels that I’ll review in coming weeks).

I’d never tasted Dario’s Ribolla Gialla and I was thrilled to discover how light in body it was and how low in alcohol (12.5%).

As much as I am fan of the other Oslavia (Oslavje) producers of skin-contact wine, I’ve found that the wines can been intensely tannic and often too muscular in their youth.

This wine was moderately tannic but its lightness and its balance of astringent flavors and ripe stone fruit seemed to capture my mood and the vibrations I was feeling. It made me think of the Gil-Scott Heron song, “A Lovely Day.”

Yesterday was such a lovely, cool day here in Austin and after I finished doing the taxes (an unavoidable and tedious chore that I loathe), Georgia P, Tracie P, and I spent the afternoon playing and just doing silly stuff.

After we put Georgia to bed, we opened the bottle of Ribolla and its balance of fruit, savory, sweetness, and tannin made me think of a line from the song that I love so much… the problems come and go/but the sunshine seems to stay…

It’s such a special time in our lives (Tracie P is about twenty weeks) and whenever those shadows dark and gloomy come a-calling, I can hear the vibrations saying, “Hold on, brother, just you be strong”.

The flowers woke up bloomin’
And put on a color show just for me
The shadows dark and gloomy
I told them all to keep the hell away from me
Because I don’t feel like believin’ everything I do gon’ turn out wrong
When vibrations I’m receiving say
“Hold on, brother, just you be strong”

Yes and all I really wanna say
Is that the problems come and go,
But the sunshine seems to stay

You can read about Dario Prinčič here and here.

Thanks for reading and buona giornata a tutti, happy Monday yall!

Giampaolo Venica and I first met back in September 2010 when I snapped this photo atop the Ronco delle Mele, one of his family’s top growing sites on their estate in Dolegna del Collio (in the province of Gorizia, Friuli).

He’s on his way to Texas as I write this: in anticipation of his visit, we opened a bottle of his family’s 2011 Collio Sauvignon Ronco delle Mele on Friday evening.

At first sip, the wine was so intensely aromatic and muscular that I decided to recork it and give it a night of rest.

By the time we revisited the wine yesterday evening (Tracie P is not drinking these days, of course, but she does always taste), it had come into brilliant focus, its power balanced by luscious white and stone fruit and electric acidity. Tracie P noted that it had this wonderful viscousness, an ethereal mouthfeel that made it one of the most moreish wines I’ve tasted this year, killing me softly…

We’re going to connect with Giampaolo later this week… In the meantime, buona domenica, happy Sunday, yall…

Above: Frank Cornelissen, who produces wine on Mt. Etna, is one of the signatories of the following open letter. On Saturday, Italian journalist and wine industry observer Jacopo Cossater noted on his personal blog that the editors of the Gambero Rosso has managed to do what no one could until now: they have united the often discordant field of Natural winemakers in Italy.

On Friday, the popular Italian-language wine blog Intravino published the following “open letter” undersigned by a confederation of “natural” winemakers in response to a series of negative (and some would say blindly and wildly pompous, misinformed, and misguided) editorials on Natural wine published by the Gambero Rosso in its January issue (click the link for my excerpted translation).

The author of the Intravino post, Jacopo Cossater, notes that the editors of the Gambero Rosso have no intention of publishing the rebuttal.

I have translated the letter in its entirety below.

*****

Open Letter to the Gambero Rosso
February 1, 2013

Dear Sirs,

We write to you in the name of hundreds of wineries — both affiliated with appellation associations and consortiums and indepedent — that produce natural wine. We were dismayed to read the editorial by Eleonora Guerini (“The Natural Obsession”) and the observations by Bettane and Desseauve (“Have We Got Natural Wine For You!”) published in the January issue of your magazine.

To be honest, we have the distinct impression that you are not really up to speed with what has been happening, for years now, in the wine world. Your tout court accusation that “natural” winemakers produce only defective, oxidized, stinky wines is absurd. Your magazine regularly reviews and often rewards wines produced by wineries widely accepted as members of the natural wine orbit.

The technical part of your argument is wholly indefensible. What are the “new, ‘natural,’ and innovative” methods utilized to stabilize natural wines? Extended lees aging (a practice used for centuries, from Mt. Etna to the Loire Valley)? In Bettane and Desseauve’s article, the authors state that with natural vinification, “all of their grape varieties and terroirs end up resembling one another because the nasty native yeasts with which they are made — yeasts that greedily cannibalize the good yeasts if the vinifier allows them to do so — are the same yeasts that you find all over the planet”! From the implicit thesis of this singular affirmation, it would follow that a “selection” of yeasts — or rather, a small part of the entire population of the yeasts themselves — generates a “variety” with greater effects. You’ll have to excuse the irony, but this would mean that we need to eliminate all the black keys from the piano (those which have been “altered”) in order to compose more complex musical pieces…

And let’s not talk about the vineyards, where — as you yourself write — the will to greatly limit or entirely exclude herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers is a simple act of common sense.

We are the first to acknowledge that there is no wine that is completely and exclusively “natural” and that wine is a product of culture, the fruit of interaction between man and nature. Perhaps the term “artisanal” is better suited to our ideas: wine should be the fruit of choices made by those who work in the vineyards and those who transform the grapes into wine.

But we also believe that it is sensible, even fundamental, to discuss the greater or lesser “naturalness” of a given wine because the law allows winemakers to add a daunting number of substances — dozens and dozens — to wine must. If it were possible to list additives to wine labels (or even the substances that a given producer decides not to use), everyone would have all the tools necessary to effectively evaluate whether or not a wine is natural.

But guess what? This is not allowed. And no one ever mentions it.

And yet, the more substances that are added, the less the wine is spontaneous and digestible. This is what’s happening today: many wine drinkers and lovers — perhaps tired of the “obssession with the best wine there is” and the “obsession with the best vintage of the century” — shift away from the most manipulated wines and move instead toward more spontaneous products that don’t give you a headache, wines easier to digest and more food friendly.

Continue reading →

Here’s a link to a clip from our Good Day LA appearance yesterday.

Thanks to everyone who came to our show last night in LA. That was a BLAST!

See you at Rickshaw Stop tonight in SF!

Above: A new American gothic? Kevin O’Connor from Lioco.

Conversation with Lioco’s Kevin O’Connor last night over dinner at Sotto (where I co-curate the wine list) in Los Angeles spanned the heady days of his tenure as wine director at Spago and his years prior in New York when the current renaissance began to explode.

It was truly moving to hear him speak of the legendary Los Angeles sommelier Michael Bonaccorsi, one of his mentors and a rising star on the U.S. wine scene when he succumbed to a heart attack at 43 in 2004.

We’ve worked with a lot of Kevin’s wines at Sotto since the restaurant opened. And while we included the winery’s entry-tier Chardonnay on our inaugural list, I had always found it to fall on the softer side of the Chardonnay spectrum.

After I tasted his 2011 vintage, we talked about the shift Lioco’s winemaker has made toward a more muscular and acidity-driven wine. He talked about how they are now balancing large-format cask fermentation with stainless steel and how all the wines continue to be aged in stainless steel (and some cement, he said).

I was blown away by his 2011 Russian River (one of the higher tier in the Chardonnay line). It was rich in the mouth but retained that lightness of body that I look for in fine wine and its acidity sang out over a rhythm of white and stone fruit.

A Russian River Valley Chardonnay that I loved? I bet you never thought you’d hear me say that!