Above: “Fruit, Flowers, a Ceramic Dish and a Vase on a Stone Ledge Beneath a Grape Arbor, with Two Women Gathering the Bounty” (oil on canvas) by Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo (Naples, 1629 – 1693) and Luca Giordano (Naples, 1634 – 1705), currently on display at the Robert Simon gallery in New York.

Please join me on Thursday, October 13 in New York where I’ll be presenting readings from Italy’s oldest book on viticulture and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron at the Robert Simon gallery on the Upper East Side.

Some beyond the New York art scene will remember Robert: he was the researcher who proved that the painting “Salvator Mundi” was indeed by Leonardo da Vinci. That canvas later sold for a record $450 million, a work that some have called the “world’s most expensive painting.”

The event is being organized by my friend and dissertation advisor, Italian poet and scholar Luigi Ballerini, and his wife Paola Mieli, a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and writer.

The readings, mostly from my translation of Pietro de’ Crescenzi’s Ruralia commoda and related passages in Boccaccio, will be accompanied by a guided tasting of three grape varieties that appear in the 14th-century works.

I am super geeked about this, in part because I haven’t been back to the city (aside for a quick business lunch) since 2019 — for reasons all too familiar.

Here are the details. It’s a benefit so it’s not a cheap date. But I promise not to disappoint. How could I when I have Robert’s gallery as the setting? I hope to see you there. And thanks for checking it out.

And btw, I’m also preparing notes on the above painting, currently on display on East 80th St. Isn’t it grand?

A Wine for the Worst Kind of Thieves

Wine Tasting and Medieval Readings with celebrated Wine Historian and Sommelier Jeremy Parzen.

Thursday, Oct 13, 2022 at 6:30 PM

Robert Simon Fine Art
22 East 80th Street • Fourth Floor
New York NY 10075

Tickets: $150

Taste three wines as Jeremy shares three colorful readings from Italy’s oldest book on wine and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The event includes a guided tasting of three native Italian grape varieties that were popular during Boccaccio’s time and are still widely enjoyed today.

Additionally, enjoy a special preview of the exhibition: “Beyond Boundaries: Historical Art By and Of People of Color.”

All proceeds from the event will be donated to Animal Zone International, a Greek-based non-profit devoted to the sustainability of the environment through the protection and control of animals.

Click here to reserve.

Above: Colline Teramane (Abruzzo) grower Bruno Nicodemi built an artificial pond on his family’s property in the 1970s. At the time, it was intended to foster biodiversity. Today, it’s a lifeline.

As Italian grape growers faced extreme heat and prolonged drought in what could have been an existential threat for many of them in the 2022 vintage, there was ample talk across the peninsula about the need to build artificial ponds and loosen restrictions on so-called “emergency irrigation.”

In fact, emergency irrigation has become the norm, not the exception, in central and northern Italy as the wine industry comes to terms with the impact of climate change.

In the second half of the 1990s, a string of warmer and less rainy than usual vintages seemed to herald a time of more regularity and increased prosperity for Italian winemakers.

But today, the unrelenting heat of recent summers, drought that persists through the growing season, late spring frosts, and intense weather events that can wreak havoc on ripening fruit have created a “new normal” in terms of the challenges that growers face.

Above: Lake Garda as seen from the vineyards of Ca’ dei Frati in Lugana.

In northern Italy, many farms have already outfitted their vineyards with permanent irrigation systems — where they are allowed — because the authorization for emergency irrigation is no longer an exceptional event. It’s not a question of if anymore. Now, it’s a question of when the call will be made.

In central Italy, one winemaker told me that they would have irrigated if they had the means to do so. They had never irrigated before, they told me, and so they had no infrastructure in place to water their wines once the authorization arrived.

Another grower in central Italy told me that the authorization is something they have come to expect. But this year, something unexpected happened as well: there simply wasn’t enough water to go around. Authorities, they told me, only turned on the taps for a few hours each morning and grape farmers essentially had to compete with their neighbors for their allocation.

In appellations like Lugana in Italy’s Veneto region, water allocation is not an issue thanks to nearby Lake Garda (see above).

But in places like Abruzzo or Tuscany, the ongoing drought conditions are prompting winemakers to build artificial lakes, an approach that has been publicly advocated by prolific Italian winemaker Andrea Lonardi.

Even with the creation of these reservoirs (invasi, as they are called in Italian), there will still be a question of water management: who will get the water and when.

During my recent trip to Italian wine country, a number of growers told me they are planning to build such ponds and some of the country’s top consortia are working with their members to plan and authorize their construction.

Above: Pergola-trained Garganega clusters in the heart of Soave. Note permanently mounted irrigation hose.

One of the most telling moments of my trip came when I asked Roberto Anselmi when the Soave consortium had authorized emergency irrigation this year.

He laughed and reminded me that he had famously left the appellation more than 20 years ago.

Not only are his vineyards equipped with irrigation systems. He also recently hired a rhabdomancer to help him find a water source atop one of most important vineyards, thus ensuring an independent source for challenging vintages like 2022.

Thanks to this foresight, his yield will be in line with normal years and new vines that he planted have ample water to make it through their delicate early years of growth.

“Emergency irrigation is one of the few smart things they actually did in the [Soave] consortium,” he said.

But the problem now, he pointed out, is that some have natural water resources while others don’t.

Irrigation has been a dirty word in Italian viticulture for a generation. Dry farming, it has long been held, was a key element in true “terroir expression” and “sense of place.”

But as wine growers in Italy have come to discover, if they don’t loosen the regulations on irrigation — and abandon the taboo — there might no longer be a terroir to express or a place to taste.

The above figures come via vineyard consultant, publisher, and writer Maurizio Gily’s excellent online and print journal MilleVigne.

“Harvest 2022: +5 percent growth with respect to 2021 in spite of drought?” he writes in the title.

The table below reports official-channel predictions for must and wine production in Italy in thousands of hectoliters.

While the numbers don’t paint a rosy picture for all regions, they reveal that the disastrous scenario that many expected never materialized — a relief to all, no doubt.

I have a lot to report from my recent “harvest 2022” trip to Italy. I’m still working on putting that together. But in the meantime, I wanted to get this info out asap. Thanks for being here and please stay tuned.

Above: Turbiana grapes photographed last week (September 14) in the Lugana appellation south of Lake Garda. Note the permanently mounted irrigation hose in the bottom of the image. “Emergency irrigation” was allowed across Italy in efforts to counter a drought that began in winter and persisted throughout the summer. Combined with prolonged, extremely high temperatures, it could have represented an existential threat to this year’s crop.

“The harvest is safe. Now we need to address the market situation.”

That’s the title of an e-blast sent out today by the Corriere Vinicolo, the official voice of the Unione Italiana Vini (UIV, the Italian union of grape growers and winemakers).

The missive, including assessments from Italian wine industry leaders, paints a cautiously optimistic picture for this year’s grape crop. Just a month ago, some trade insiders were predicting catastrophe for Italian growers. But early August rains, like a deus ex machina, changed the mood from despair to relief.

“Once again,” said UIV president Lamberto Frescobaldi, borrowing a metaphor from the world of basketball, “the vine has proved to be our team’s center. It has shown that even with high temperatures and drought, we can make high-quality wines in ample quantities.”

“The harvest currently underway is delivering grapes that range from good to excellent in quality,” said Riccardo Cotarella, president of Assoenologi (Italian enologists association).

But as the editors of the Corriere point out, the short-term challenge ahead is market uncertainty.

“Demand [for Italian wines] in foreign markets seems to be holding even though it’s not as strong as 2021” according to Fabio Del Bravo, director of ISMEA (the Institute of Farming and Food Market Services), who is also quoted in the report. “But in the domestic market, there are signs of dropping sales.”

Please join me next Tuesday at Vinology in Houston as we open three wines from Montalcino and discuss Montalcino subzones, including the classic and the new, and I share notes from my harvest 2022 trip. Click here to reserve. Thank you for your support.

After I posted a note about how I came to discover Montalcino wines, a lot of people asked me about Bagno Vignoni, a very special Medieval hamlet that lies about 30 minutes south of the hilltop city in Siena province.

That’s a shot of the main square/piazza in Bagno Vignoni — the bath amidst the wines. What piazza, you ask?

Bagno Vignoni is virtually unique among its village peers because instead of a main square, it has a hot springs (thermal) bath in its main public space. It is said that St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) frequently bathed there.

In the photo above, you see the bath as it probably looked during the Renaissance (about 200 years after Catherine). It’s no longer open to the public. But there are public baths as well as an upscale hotel where there is a gorgeous private thermal swimming pool and spa. (That’s where my friend the sommelier in the story used to work — his family owned the hotel.)

I’ll be talking a little about Bagno Vignoni at the Montalcino seminar I’m leading next Tuesday at Vinology here in Houston. And we’ll also be looking carefully at three Montalcino subzones. And lastly, I’ll be sharing harvest notes from my trip through central and northern Italy (just got back last night).

And dulcis in fundo, Tracie will definitely be joining us that night and we will all hang out at the bar afterwards and probably order a few pizzas. It’s going to be a great night.

It’s not a cheap date at $50 per person. But the pricing reflects the caliber of the wines. I hope you can join us. Thank you for your support!

Above: a photo of mine from Montalcino, taken seven years ago (nearly to the day). Wine lovers and not, italophiles will tell you that the Orcia River Valley is — how to say this? — irresistibly delicious to the eyes.

Montalcino is where my turn as a wine lover began more than three decades ago. Well, actually, not Montalcino but Bagno Vignoni — the bath amidst the vines — just to the south of Montalcino on the Cassia, the ancient road that leads to Rome. That’s where it all started to come into focus for me.

A Hollywood friend (a composer of note and my Italian student) had lent me the keys to his apartment in Bagno Vignoni where to this day, a Renaissance-era thermal bath still sits in the center of the 14th-century village square.

Not long after arriving in this achingly beautiful Tuscan hamlet, the weary traveler was befriended by the town sommelier. And the latter proceeded to open many, many bottles for his newfound American friend.

At the time, Americans had hardly heard of Sassicaia or Ornellaia — two of the sommelier’s favorites. And only a handful of my compatriots knew the wines of Biondi Santi and Costanti (his top two Brunello) and Casanova dei Neri (he had served his mandatory time in the Italian military together with Giacomo). It was like he was predicting my future.

On Tuesday, September 20, I’ll be opening a flight of Montalcino wines for a small group of wine lovers and friends at Vinology.

You can imagine how geeked I am to get back to the “floor,” as we call it in the trade.

The $50 cost per person reflects the quality of the wines we’ll be tasting. And I can’t imagine we won’t be hanging out at the bar following the event as we catch up and visit over something groovy. Who knows? Tracie P might even make an appearance.

Please join me as we revisit Montalcino together. Click here to reserve. Thank you for the support.

(And for those of you who used to take part in our tastings at the unmentionable restaurant with the asshole chef, won’t it be grand to be reunited again? I hope you can join us.)

Above: a bas relief at the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan.

It’s hard to say why a wine scribbler like me would be so obsessed with the tale of a wild boar that was trapped in Milan’s canal system for two weeks despite a heroic attempt to save her. My guess is that the story is an allegory for humankind’s alienation from the natural world. But that’s just me.

It all began earlier this week with a blog post about wild boars — feral hogs — destroying a small farm’s grape harvest in northern Italy. The story reflected a growing problem for humans and hogs in Italy: driven by lack of natural resources, the animals are increasingly turning to commercial farms and even urban centers in their search for food. In Rome, broods of wild boar are commonly seen navigating the streets as they forage through uncollected garbage.

After a university-years friend in Milan saw my post, she shared an anecdotal account of the boar’s tragic arc. But she missed an important detail. Mindless authorities didn’t try to kill the animal, as she told it. In fact, driven by compassion, the city’s civil servants did everything humanly possible to save it.

What started out in my mind as a Kafkaesque yarn about a wild beast cheated of life and liberty by heartless bureaucratic machinery had become a narrative plucked out of a neorealist documentary film all’antonioniana — an achingly poignant tale of humans unable, despite Herculean effort, to spare and revive the emaciated sow.

Here is an excerpted translation from a story in the Milanese edition of Italy’s national daily La Repubblica, dated August 18, shared with me by friend Andrea Gaviglio, a native of the Ambrosian city who owns and runs a legacy wine shop there, Vino Vino dal 1921. The hog was first sighted on August 4.

Local police, public safety officers, and Metropolitana Milanese city engineers were all involved efforts to save the boar. They had dubbed the animal “the swimmer” because of its “excellent swimming ability,” which made its capture difficult following the first sighting according to firefighters. For nearly 15 days it seemed to have “disappeared” in a canal in Milan connected to the Darsena di Milano.

(The Darsena is a humanmade urban lake that serves as a hub for the city’s vast canal system. The word darsena means dock.)

Agents from [Milan’s] fire department, together with agents from the city’s departments of fish and wild life and emergency management, had tried nearly everything in their efforts to “capture” the animal. A few days ago, they set two traps and video cameras at the canal entrance and exit (just before the Alexander Langer bridge near Piazza Tripoli. But the ungulate had seemed to have disappeared without a trace and its whereabouts were unknown for days. But then it would reappear as it ate the bait without ever being ensnared in the traps. That was when agents tried using the “trail of breadcrumbs” technique.

When they did finally “capture” the Swimmer, they were unable to resuscitate her.

In my view, the boar is a victim of humans’ wanton exploitation of the natural world. She probably fell into the canal, authorities believe, while drinking or looking for food around one of the city’s humanmade lakes. Her bitter fate proved too challenging for the humans: they were helpless in their struggle to free her from the very urbanity they themselves created.

As a famous Roman poet once wrote, naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. You can chase nature away with your pitchfork, but it always returns [and reveals you for who you are].

Above: Brett Zimmerman, founder of the Boulder Burgundy Festival, presents the Friday night dinner at last year’s gathering.

It gives me great pleasure to share the news that our good friend Elaine Brown will be a featured speaker at this year’s Boulder Burgundy Festival (Nov. 11-13).

She will be joined by Esther Mobley, San Francisco Chronicle wine columnist, and Carlin Karr, wine director for Frasca Food and Wine, for the long weekend’s first seminar, “Sustainability in Burgundy.”

And she will also be moderating the Sunday morning seminar, “Burgundy’s Rising Stars: Chassagne Montrachet & Volnay.”

But the coolest thing will be getting to rub shoulders and raising a glass with her throughout the three days of tasting and breaking bread — and many snails — with her and a simpaticissimo group of Burgundy collectors and lovers.

If you’re reading a wine blog right now, Elaine needs no introduction.

She’s someone who reshaped the way we think about wine blogging as she pushed the envelope of digital enography over the course of more than a decade.

First through her groundbreaking work as an illustrator and then her reimagining of the blogosphere as a medium for personal, thought-provoking and socially conscious narrative, her voice has become a model for a new generation of wine-focused creators.

Over the years, she’s always been keen to remember back to an early blogger trip to Friuli where her own new voice found its cadence. One such occasion was Jancis Robinson’s announcement that Elaine had joined her corral of top wine writers in 2015. In that post, they share a deeply moving early essay by Elaine that many veteran enonauts will remember fondly. I highly recommend it.

Check out the festival site for more info and registration. Hope to see you there! Happy Labor Day Weekend.

“The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.” – Karl Kraus.

Image via Nick Saltmarsh’s Flickr (Creative Commons).

A conversation at last night’s Italian Trade Commission dinner in Houston led to a discussion about the Italian word infinocchiare (to cheat or to swindle someone) and its relation to wine and wine tasting.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: wine sellers did not doctor their wine with fennel (finocchio in Italian) or fennel seeds in the Middle Ages or Renaissance.

What they did do (and we have ample knowledge of this from primary sources) was to serve certain foods like fennel before customers would taste wines they were considering buying. They did this, it is now well known, to impair the buyers’ ability to perceive the aromas and flavors of the wine. (Fennel seeds were widely used in the preparation of salumi in the Middle Ages but that was an unrelated practice.)

And while the first known mention of fennel used to deceive wine buyers dates back to the 15th century (Corniolo Della Cornia’s La divina villa), the foods that were primarily used for this purpose were walnuts and cheese (Crescenzi mentions this in the early 14th century and Corniolo also mentions this a hundred or so years later; English speakers will find all of this info in Massimo Montanari’s excellent book Let the Meatballs Rest, And Other Stories About Food and Culture).

But today, philologists are relatively certain the word infinocchiare does not come from this practice (although Montanari seems not to be up on the current philological dialectic with regard to the lemma).

Instead, they believe (and I concur), it most likely came from the Greek word φένᾱξ (phénāx) meaning liar or cheater.

The word finocchio (commonly used in the plural, finocchi, to avoid equivocation), comes from the Latin foeniculum (the perennial herb was a popular vegetable in Roman times).

So to say that infinocchiare comes from a medieval practice of doctoring wine with fennel is entirely erroneous.

Neither of these terms is to be confused with the Italian homophobic slur finocchio.

The etymology of this ugly epithet is unknown. The one thing we know about it was that it originated in Florence, probably in the early 20th century. The most plausible etymology, embraced by many philologists today, is that it came from the name of a mask used in 19th-century Florentine theater. There’s no hard evidence of this. But it is believed to be the most likely etymon among experts in the history of the Italian language.

What’s important here is that three terms — finocchio (vegetable), finocchio (homophobic slur), and infinocchiare — are probably not related and should be considered separately in terms of their cultural significance.

Making flippant jokes about their homonymity only propagates an ugly cultural trope that gay people are in some way “deceiving” those around them.

Next on deck: the difference between lasagna and lasagne and cultural swindlers like so-called “chef” the Kevin Bryant at Roma restaurant in Houston. Yes, I have a bone to pick there as well, pun intended… stay tuned.