Last week while in Los Angeles for work, I attended the Gambero Rosso Tre Bicchieri tasting. For those who have never been to one of those events, it’s a huge Italian wine industry schmooze fest. For the most part, it’s all about hugs and high fives and catching up with people who work in our trade.

Among so many other colleagues and friends, I ran into a prominent importer of Italian wine whom I’ve known for years. We’ve eaten dinner together, we’ve been on panels together, and we even share friends beyond the world of wine.

For whatever reason that day, when conviviality should have been the byword, he decided to give me an earful about our lives in Texas. No matter what I told about how we live here, he was determined to instruct me on the evil character of our geography. He even went as far as to insinuate that we live our lives in Texas because we enjoy our segregation.

When I pointed out that my native state, California, is the most segregated place I’ve ever lived, he dismissed my claims as MAGA propaganda.

When I told him that my politics and activism land on the hard left of the spectrum, he countered that he was so far left that I wouldn’t even come close to his political rectitude.

When I asked him to consider all the Black and Brown people who live in Texas — by choice, just like us — he wrote me off as a denialist and revisionist.

Ever since I moved to Texas to be with the woman I love and raise a family with her, people from California and New York have continuously and tirelessly given me shit about being a Texan.

Even my own immediate California family derides me for it. One sister-in-law told me she was “scared” for her sister who moved here. Another asked me “how can you live there with all those awful people?”

This country is never going to find its way out of its moralistic morass until we begin to understand — to comprehend truly — that Texans and all southerners are human beings, too. State boundaries do not represent monolithic ethical, moral, and aesthetic divides. There are all kinds of people in Texas, just as there are all kinds of people in California (including plenty of ultraconservative racists, among others, in my home state).

Stop judging me by my geography. Stop telling me I’m a bad or morally failed person because I live here. The false moral superiority of my ex-friend is a mirror and equally insidious reflection of the ultra-right conservatives he pigeon-holes us with.

That’s a photo of my wife Tracie and our two daughters, Georgia and Lila Jane, above. Tracie was born in Texas. Our girls were born in Texas. I am an adoptive Texan. Yes, we are concerned about our family’s reproductive rights. We are concerned about our voting rights (we were gerrymandered this year, no joke). We are concerned about our right to free speech and gun safety.

But we are also living, breathing human beings who hope, dream, and work for a better world. And we share in those aspirations with our community, including Black, Brown, Asian, and White, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim people among many others.

As the saying goes, I know you like to think your shit don’t stink, but lean a little bit closer…

Above: producers of Sicilian pistachio cream at last year’s Taste of Italy in Houston.

One of the super cool things about this year’s Taste of Italy trade fair and festival in Houston is that it’s the first time the gathering will include international producers.

I’m super geeked, for example, to taste a flight of Uruguayan wines that will be presented on Monday at the Omni hotel in my adoptive hometown.

I’m also looking forward to the Calabrian gastronomy panel I’ll be moderating with a Calabrian food expert and a Calabrian chef on the morning of the festival.

And of course, who can resist the Italian wines and Texas BBQ seminar that I’ll be leading together with Dale Robertson, wine writer for the Houston Chronicle, and Tom Dobson, the Italian buyer for Spec’s, the behemoth Texan chain of wine retail outlets. Pit master Ara Malekian will be doing the smoking. Every year, he’s one of the most compelling speakers at our gig. And the wines Tom selected are über cool.

Lastly, don’t forget the grand tasting where more than 50 producers, including the Uruguayans, will be presenting their foods and wines.

Click here for all the details and registration links. I hope to see you on Monday in Houston! Thanks for supporting the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce, the organizer, and thanks for loving and drinking Italian wines.

One of the great pleasures of returning to my old stomping grounds in New York City has been reconnecting with my old boss and friend, Nicola Marzovilla, legacy restaurateur and now Chianti Classico grape grower.

But an even greater delight has been that of meeting and spending time with his extraordinary winemaker, the indomitable Serena Gusmeri.

She’s from Brescia, another connection we share. Before working with Nicola at his Vecchie Terre di Montefili estate in Panzano, she had never made a red wine in her life. But now she’s one of the hottest enologists in Tuscany, with astronomic scores from the opinion-making mastheads.

As Nicola likes to say, “I used to hate the critics but now I love them!” (When Nicola met Tracie for the first time many years ago, he told her that she needed to get glasses, just to put this in context.)

I visited Serena and the historic Montefili estate in September of last year, just a few days before the Sangiovese harvest was to begin there. I was blown away by the farm, the highest in Panzano. The village is Italy’s first organic biome: every farmer in the commune now farms there organically.

The property hadn’t been abandoned when Nicola took it over a decade ago. But let’s just say that it hadn’t been “updated.”

Today, Serena works closely with a leading biodynamic consultant to align her farming practices with the soils’ biodiversity. In other words, they survey the flora and soils’ nitrogen levels etc. to understand how best to grow the grapes.

The results have been spectacular.

Last week when I was in town, my client and I dined at Nicola’s new and impossible-to-get-in Manhattan restaurant, Nonna Dora’s Pasta Bar, where he opened his most coveted expression of Sangiovese for us, the 2018 Vigna Vecchia — 100 percent Sangiovese made from vines that are more than 40 years old, raised in galestro and alberese-rich soils. Remember the post I did a few weeks ago, “Chianti 101: galestro and alberese”? The images came from my September visit to the farm.

This wine, still very young in its evolution, is rich in body and texture, with vibrant acidity that keeps its heft in balance. The flavors tend toward the darker fruits and the savory character that you find in the greatest of Sangiovese.

We paired it with Nicola’s mom Dora’s orecchiette with rabbit ragù.

Believe me when I say it: it was great to be back in the city.

Thank you again, Nicola! And great to see the old I Trulli crew!

Even after all these years, I still hadn’t ever made it to Aldo Sohm’s super wine bar in midtown Manhattan. But that lacuna was rectified when I convened there last night with my client and his crew.

When I say that his joint is everything you could dream of in a wine bar, the reason is plain and simple: as soon as our party of four sat down, I asked our server to pick our first bottle and a round of appetizers and before you knew it, our glasses where full and beautiful food appeared before our hungry eyes.

That may seem like a mundane occurrence. But it’s rare, especially these days when staffing is a major challenge for concept wine destinations, that the servers can deliver food and wine happiness with such confidence and élan.

It were as if Aldo Sohm, arguably the top sommelier in New York and undeniably one of the leading wine professionals in the country, had imparted his grace and knowledge to his team through osmosis (not reverse osmosis, I may add for the the wine-hip crowd).

From the moment we handed our coats to the host (it’s cold in NYC this week!) to the last glass of wine we drank and bite of food we ate, Aldo’s team gently and elegantly guided us through the deliciousness of the list and the menu.

I loved the globally creative dishes and the verve of the mise en place. Grilled avocado and white Burgundy were followed by a beautifully stuffed red pepper (“one of chef Eric and Aldo’s favorites”) and a perfectly executed bánh mì paired with Billecart-Salmon rosé (thank you, Francesca and Michele!).

We couldn’t have enjoyed it more and I highly recommend it, especially to theater goers who will surely agree that’s it’s the perfect pre-show destination. The wine list is the best that you’ll find in this part of town for sure. After all, who needs another martini at Sardi’s?

Thank you Aldo and team! What a perfect way to show off the city to a group of jet-lagged Italians!

With the annual wine trade fairs around the corner, wineries across Italy are gearing up by refreshing their “tech sheets” or “fact sheets” — the scheda tecnica in Italian.

A number of my clients rely on me for the English renderings of this so-called technical data. And the recent rush of requests for new translations and edits has had me scratching my head: why do we insist on including “suggested serving temperatures” as part of the tech sheet canon?

And for that matter, what good will knowing the pH of a certain wine help a sales rep who’s trying to place a wine at a pseudo-Italian restaurant where the buyer is more concerned with pleasing their clientele and making a decent margin for their bottomline?

One of the anachronisms that strikes me as particularly superfluous, especially today, is the entry for “training system.”

Back when Italian wine was still fighting to find a place for itself next to its transalpine counterpart, the note on training system was meant in part to distinguish the old head-trained alberello vines from the more modern cordon- and Guyot-trained vines. It was a sign that the winery in question had made the necessary investment to upgrade its growing practices. As if that would make the difference between a decent wine and a great one. Today, in fact, it’s actually cooler and more progressive in some circles to have head-trained vines!

And don’t get me started on “suggested pairings.” My favorite recent pairing suggestion was evasive. We’re not including suggested pairings, the author wrote, because everyone has their own tastes. It underlined, at least in my mind, the superfluity of recommending foods to eat with a given wine. After all, people who live in New York eat different things than people in Texas. People who live in Asia eat different things that people in Europe. What’s the point of recommending vitello tonnato for a Barolo when the end user might be a vegetarian?

The great 20th-century Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda used to say that pronouns are the lice of thought. My belief is that tech sheets are the lice of our wine times.

When are we going to revisit these antiquated conventions of industry and start writing about wine in a more purposeful and thoughtful way?

In December of last year, the wine route took me back to Piedmont where I visited vineyards in the heart of the Nizza DOCG.

Italian wine professionals are (or should be) well aware that Nizza — the commune of Nizza Monferrato and the surrounding villages — officially became its own designation in 2014.

But what they might not know or realize is that historically, this small area in Piedmont wine country has been home to some of Italy’s most iconic wines and wineries for generations.

Over the last few decades, italophile focus in the international wine community has shifted to the Langhe where Barolo and Barbaresco are raised.

But if you dig back through the guides and Italian wine books from the 1980s, you’ll find that a handful of pioneering growers and winemakers had recognized the immense potential of Nizza Monferrato where Barbera — not Nebbiolo — has its spiritual home.

One of the things that set this subzone of Barbera d’Asti apart is the fact that the soils there are identical to the soils found in La Morra, the largest commune for the production of Barolo. The little known Bricco di Nizza, a ridge that runs from the town of Nizza Monferrato to the west toward the village of Moasca, has the same ancient marl (limestone and clay) and clay subsoils that have helped to make Barolo so famous.

And I was there to take pictures of dirt.

Luckily for me, I arrived not long after the vineyards had been tilled. And the subsoils were easy to spot.

Those are clay-rich soils above. And below, you’ll see limestone-rich soils in a newly planted vineyard there.

Note the deep brick color in the first photo and the grey-whitish hue of the second.

People familiar with the vineyards of La Morra and other parts of Barolo could easily mistake them for land in Langa.

I was also there to speak to Barbera-whisperer Massimiliano Vivalda, the man showing me the Masnaghetti/Enogea map of the Nizza DOCG above.

He metaphorically walked me through all the historic wineries there and their vineyards as we studied the map together.

He talked to me about the gold rush of investment that is sweeping over this appellation as some of the top winemakers in Italy are buying property and building winemaking facilities in around Nizza Monferrato along the Bricco di Nizza.

And we tasted wines that come in part from a farm he and his family have managed for decades.

I had first heard of a new Nizza DOCG estate called Amistà through a client of mine. And when I met the son of the owner, a student at the Slow Food University of Gastronomic Science where I teach every year, he extended an invitation to visit.

The thing that intrigued me the most about this new but storied property, where some of the vines are 60+ years old (see the gnarled plant above), was that the owner, a lovely gentleman from Turin named Michele Marsiaj, had decided to break with a tradition established by a handful of his famous neighbors.

Instead of aging the wine in French barriques, he had decided to make a Nizza DOCG raised entirely in large cask. When I had tasted the wine on campus (thanks to the student) back in the fall of 2022, I was blown away by its elegance and purity.

Connoisseurs of Piedmont wines will immediately recognize the significance of this stylistic choice. The use of barriques (as opposed to large-format botti) transformed Barolo and Barbaresco in the 1990s as winemakers reached for a “modern” expression of their grapes. Similarly, Nizza growers began “barriquing” their wines as early as the 1980s.

Amistà really impressed me with its clarity and varietal expression. And I’m ever more convinced that you’re going to be hearing a lot about it this year. That’s in part because Michele, a man I admire greatly, has asked me to be Amistà’s U.S. ambassador for 2023. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be working on such a compelling project and I love and am proud to be part of the super team that Michele has assembled.

A new chapter begins! And there’s so much more to tell. Thanks for being here and stay tuned…

Man, it was so great to be back in NYC last week talking about groovy wines at the UN (no joke) and at a chic downtown Italian dining spot!

I was in town for a couple of new clients of mine (more on that later this week) and it was a blast to be tasting and sharing notes with super wine people.

With Vinitaly around the corner, it feels like everything is falling back into place.

On Thursday of this week, I’ll be pouring and talking about some of my favorite expressions of Chianti at Vinology. It’s always a simpatico group and the staff there put together a phenomenal flight of wines. Thursday evening, February 2. Click here to reserve.

On Wednesday of next week, I’ll be leading three seminars at Eataly Dallas, including Moscato d’Asti (one of my favorite talks I do), Pinot Grigio (I think a lot of folks are going too be surprised by the wines), and Abruzzo (one of the regions I’m the most excited about right now). Wednesday morning, February 8. Click here to reserve.

And dulcis in fundo, Taste of Italy, now in its 9th year, is scheduled for Monday, March 6 at the Omni in Houston. Click here to reserve for the walk-around tasting (see the list of exhibitors here). Click here to reserve your spot at the Italian Wine and Texas BBQ seminar, featuring smoked meats by celebrity pit master Ara Malekian (Harlem Rd. BBQ). That’s just one of the events I’ll be emceeing that day.

I’m so proud of the work we do at Taste of Italy, a project I’ve been involved with since its second year. So many of our exhibitors have made meaningful connections and placements over the years. It’s a great event.

Thanks for your support and solidarity! It’s so great to be back. Hope to see you soon!

Photo above by filmmaker Russell Peborde. Thank you again, man!