Category Archives: de vino

What to pour for Alice Feiring in Austin?

Posted on by

In a remarkable confluence of cosmic events, Comrades Howard and Alice both found themselves in Austin last night: he, to speak at the Austin Film Festival; she, to talk about Natural wine and her new book today at Whole Foods Market (Lamar) and tomorrow at Vino Vino.

When we all met for dinner last night at one of our favorite restaurants in the world, Fonda San Miguel, it was only natural that we would drink López de Heridia. After all, Alice wrote “the book” on the winery.

It may seem facile to pair Mexican cuisine with Spanish wine (for the overly obvious reasons). But the fact of the matter is that the attenuated fruit in the López oxidative style works gloriously well with the intense flavors of great Mexican cooking. The wine paired brilliantly with our mole, for example, where the gentle astringency of the wine played counterpart to the chocolate in the mole.

Tracie P and I are thrilled that Fonda San Miguel wine director Brad Sharp has continued to support these unique wines, even in a world where 99% of his guests ask regularly (and nearly exclusively) for Chard, Cab, Merlot, or Pinot.

After dinner, perhaps inspired by the brio of the evening, Alice insisted that we make a pilgrimage to the chicken coop out back behind Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon.

Last night was 100% irony-free at Ginny’s and Sarah and The Tallboys, a country outfit out of Chicago, played a smoking set (imho).

Ginny and daughter Sharon are so sweet to me and Tracie P whenever we visit.

But their wholesome Texas hospitality reached its limits last night when Sharon had to kick out a couple for getting to frisky! Never a dull moment at Ginny’s…

Alice Feiring in Austin Sunday & Monday

Posted on by

It seems like a lifetime ago that Tracie P and I met Alice on our first trip to Europe together. Tracie P and I were in Paris to play with Nous Non Plus and Alice was there to write a piece on Natural wine and our paths happily crossed.

I’ve known Alice for more than 10 years and she’s one of our dearest, dearest friends. A big sister, a mentor, and one of the most fun people to be around on this planet, no matter what mischief we’re up to.

Alice has a new book, Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally, and she’s coming to Austin for a few readings: Sunday at Whole Foods Market on Lamar and Monday at Vino Vino. Both events are being presented by the Wine and Food Foundation of Texas.

Tracie P and I will be at both events, of course, and I hope you can join us to hear Alice read from her new book and taste some Natural wines with us.

Beyond our deep friendship, I support Alice in her cause to spread the word about Natural wine not just because I enjoy Natural wines but because I believe that Natural wines and the people who make them (and drink them) can save the world from the ills of our increasingly industrialized food chain.

In other news…

I’m making one last trip before Baby P arrives: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings of next week, I’ll be pouring wine on the floor at Sotto in Los Angeles where I’ve curated the wine list this year.

We’ll be debuting one last flight of wines for the fall before I take a break for daddy duty, including one of the best wines I’ve tasted this year… More on that later…

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

Gaia Gaja’s cowgirl boots (and my first Alba truffles of the season)

Posted on by

Yesterday found me back in Houston where I had lunch with my friend and client Tony and Gaia Gaja.

To mark the occasion of her Houston, Texas visit, Gaia donned the cowgirl boots she had picked up on her previous visit (above). As the saying goes, you can take a girl out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the girl. After all, she does come from a town where they didn’t have running water until 1964.

As you can imagine, Tony pulled out all the stops for the luncheon: I’ve posted my complete notes on the meal and the wines over at his site here.

I wasn’t surprised by the Gaja 2007 Barbaresco: however strange (by virtue of the fact that there was no winter to speak of), the 2007 vintage was generous to Barbaresco and everything I’ve tasted so far has been great to phenomenal (remember when Tracie P and I tasted 2007 Asili and Santo Stefano with Bruno Giacosa?).

But it was Gaia’s family’s 2008 Barbaresco that really blew me away. In a challenging vintage, Gaja was blessed with very juicy, well ripened fruit. Green harvesting and southern exposure of their vineyards delivered mature grapes, said Gaja, and allowed them to pick before inclement weather arrived. The floral notes on the wine were fantastic and although still very young in its evolution, it had that zinging acidity and powerful tannin that makes Barbaresco such a unique appellation imho and one of my favorite wines in the world.

My favorite dish of the meal was the branzino and poached potato tartar topped with caviar and paired with the 2009 Gaia & Rey Chardonnay (a guilty pleasure, I must admit).

Click here for all of my notes, including the 2005 Sperss, and images of the dishes…

Thanks again, Tony and Gaia!

Another oaky, buttery Chardonnay (a negative review)

Posted on by

This summer, when I asked “Should wine bloggers write about wines they don’t like?” the subsequent dialog and debate led to a lot of soul searching at casa Parzen.

In one of the threads that grew in the wake of a follow-up post, Eric the Red — the Solomon of wine writing and blogging in my view — wrote that:

    As for saying negative things, reporters, critics and bloggers cannot ignore them. Yes, in my wine panel columns we list our 10 favorite wines. But I always address problems that we found in the wines, even if I don’t go through them bottle by bottle. And I generally do mention particular bottles if they are well known and highly regarded.

I took his guidance to heart: yesterday, over at the Houston Press, I posted about a “well known and highly regarded” wine that made me gag (literally).

Of course, I couldn’t and didn’t say gag but I’ve taken the leap into negativity.

Snowcone, a wine blogger based in Houston, commented:

    Confession: I hate oaked Chardonnay. There are one or two that occasionally strike my fancy, but I look for unoaked wherever I go. (There’s a great one from Knapp Winery–in the FLX [Finger Lakes], natch!) My husband loves the stick o’butter/2×4 variety, and it’s the only place where our wine palates diverge.

Click here for the post. Thanks for reading!

Italian nuclear family dinner

Posted on by

My friend Stefano Spigariol and I have known each other for more than 20 years, since I first came to Italy to study Italian philology in Padua where he studied Latin. Like many of my friends from university days, he works in the publishing industry in Milan, as a publicist for a top scholastic publishing house.

He’s one of my best friends in Italy and our confabulatio always ranges from the erudite to the rock ‘n’ roll, from the sacred to the profane.

He, his wife Anna (a lawyer), and daughter Matilde live in a one-bedroom apartment near the center of Milan.

Last night, they had me over for dinner: cheese and charcuterie, bread and taralli, roast chicken legs, Veneto-style braised cabbage, and a caponata, paired with a bottle of 2009 Sordo Dolcetto — an old-school expression of the grape variety that Stefano picked up for less than Euro 10 at his local wine shop.

I can’t think of a better meal for my last night in Italy…

Thanks again, Anna, Matilde, and Stefano… I love you guys!

Picking the last grapes in Brescia #ewbc

Posted on by

And so it’s time to say good-bye to Brescia… The European Wine Bloggers Conference is over and it’s time to begin the journey homeward to Tracie P and the place where I belong…

The tradition of urban vineyards continues here in Brescia and as it turns out, yesterday the bresciani picked the last grapes of the vintage, Invernenga, a local variety, white, in the vineyards that face the Castello di Brescia atop the city.

Laura and Giovanni sent me these photos.

I love my friend Giovanni

Posted on by

It’s been a long and rewarding trip to Italy but I’m glad it’s coming to end. I’ve been away from home and Tracie P for way too long and I can’t wait to get home.

As much fun as I’ve had here in Brescia for the European Wine Bloggers Conference, the nearly unbearable homesickness and lonesomeness of being on the road have been assuaged by my amazing friend, Giovanni Arcari — winemaker, champion of the small grape grower, activist, blogger, and a force of life that (happily) cannot be stopped.

Few know that it’s thanks in great part to Giovanni that the conference was hosted here in Brescia, his hometown. It was Giovanni who approached vice president of Brescia’s council for city projects, the delightful Laura Castelletti (who also heads the city’s opposition party, a lapsed socialist), and convinced her that this would be a great opportunity for Brescia and the wines of the province.

But I think that Giovanni brought the conference here just so that he and I could spend a few precious evenings together, listening to music, talking about wine, and laughing as hard as men can laugh when men drink good wine together.

The other night Giovanni and I shared a bottle of one of my favorite Franciacorta producers, Gatti, over dinner at a wonderful restaurant called Novecento (filled with 20th-century nostalgia) next to the Teatro Grande in Brescia.

I sure am glad to be heading home the day after tomorrow… but, man, I’m going to miss Giovanni…