It was probably inevitable that our family would be drawn into the hype about the “And Just Like That…” revival finale last week.

Some of the themes are arguably too mature for our girls, 12 and 13. But how could we refuse to let them watch it when they knew their mother had been following the once one-off mini-series and was excited for the last episode?

I missed all the shows except the last when our family gathered for dinner to watch.

As Tracie filled me in on all that had happened in my three-year absence, I couldn’t help but fixate on an episode of the original series, which aired when I was living and working in New York.

My first real job in the city was as an editor and writer in print media. My office was in the “toy building,” literally across the street from Madison Square Park where my co-workers and I would see them filming.

During those years, I was tasked with interviewing one of the earliest celebrity mixologists, Dale DeGroff, who was erroneously credited with inventing the Cosmopolitan — a cocktail recipe, he claimed, he poached from an Absolut vodka campaign. For anyone living (and dating) in the city at that time, Cosmopolitans, as seen in “Sex and the City,” were the cocktail of choice.

I had so many indirect connections to the show, including the fact that a boss at another job had a brother who worked on the show and the cast would party at the restaurant where I often worked the floor.

But the thing I remember more than anything else about the show was the 2004 episode (season six) where Mikhail Baryshnikov served Carrie a Barolo and would subsequently prepare a risotto while complaining that she didn’t have a proper “risotto” pan (whatever that is!).

Back then Barolo was hardly a household word. Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Napa (and maybe Brunello) were the go-to wines for entitled New Yorkers. It was the first time I heard the then esoteric (to most Americans) appellation mentioned on TV.

To me it was an unforgettable zeitgeist moment that made me think to myself, maybe Italian wine is going to become big in the U.S.

Some 20 years later, it’s incredible to think back on how Americans’ perceptions of Italian wine changed during those years. Thank you, Carrie!

Late on Thursday last week, the wire came in: the new tariff rate for all goods from the EU rose to 15 percent, a five-point increase from the 10 percent that had been imposed since April (before the current administration, the rate was 2.5).

For those inclined to read the fine print (read the entire White House statement here), there was also a vital piece of info: for European wines to avoid the new tax rate, they would need to be “on the water” by end of day on Wednesday, August 6.

As a result, Italian wineries and the partners are scrambling to get their wines to Livorno (where most wine is shipped from Italy) no later than 12:01 a.m. on August 7 (EDT).

The wine must arrive in the U.S. on or before October 5. In the case of a mishap or delay (caused by, say, rejected paper work), importers will be on the hook for the new tax. It’s risky.

And the danger is compounded by the fact that the dollar is growing weaker against the Euro.

I’m seeing numerous reports of importers asking their suppliers to lower costs to assuage the tariff pain. Today, they are counting on even more support from bottlers. On both sides of the Atlantic, actors are hanging in there. But there is a growing sense that the situation is not sustainable, especially now that the 15 percent tax will likely stay in place for a while as the dollar continues to decline.

In recent weeks, I’ve been asked by clients to join marketing/sales calls with Asia and northern European countries. Italians are increasingly looking to markets beyond the U.S. to rebalance their businesses.

Remember when Trump 1.0 essentially decimated the Burgundy market in the U.S. as growers pivoted to Asia? As supply dwindled, prices skyrocketed. In many cases (excuse the pun), only the ultrarich can afford the wines today. As Italians look beyond Trump’s America (which they increasingly disdain), similar patterns might emerge for italo-centric oenophiles.

There is so much uncertainty facing European winemakers and their U.S. partners today. The only thing they know for sure is that the European wine industry will be radically and indelibly reshaped by current U.S. policy and its wishy-washy execution.

When the subject of tariffs came up with a Trump-supporting friend the other day, she didn’t have the faintest idea of how it is decimating the European wine trade in the U.S.

Wow, she said, it never occurred to her that it would affect an industry that she otherwise took for granted.

Trump supporters are among my best friends and I get it: they voted for that outer-borough bastard crook out of their interest and not mine.

Yesterday, Trump and the EU entered into a nominal agreement that would set the tariff rate to 15 percent (before Trump it was 2.5). But as with all things having to do with the great American dealmaker (ha!), the devil is in the details.

As of today, it’s still possible that wine could be exempt. Steel, cars, and hi-tech are where what Trump cares about, after all. It’s also not clear whether or not the new tax will be applied to importers who “have their wine on the water.” Hopefully, these sticking points will be ironed out soon (excuse the mixed metaphors).

The bottomline, we may be closer to clarity and certainty but the future still remains cloudy and impossible to predict. This continues to be a huge issue for importers for whom long-term planning is key to their success.

The other hopeful news to arrive from Europe (although not reported by U.S. media) is that Italy has promised a billion Euros worth of subsidies to farmers there, including wine growers. The move was a necessary step to help keep the struggling wine industry alive (the U.S. is Italian wine’s biggest foreign market).

The best news comes from Houston: my good friend Stephanie Franklin launched her wine brand yesterday in our city. She has planted vines on her family’s land in Shankleville in Southeast Texas (about an hour north of where Tracie grew up).

Her story is as compelling as it is exciting and her first release, a fantastic Tannat (made from sourced fruit), was delicious last night.

Check out her story and how you can get involved here. Stephanie is a wonderful friend and a leader in our community. I am so excited for her and can’t wait to taste more!

Monday, Bastille Day, was my 58th birthday.

Tracie, the girls, and I spent the last two weeks in San Diego at my mom’s. She’s 91 going on 92 and is in good health, especially given her age. But we are all making extra time to be with her.

We spent most of the last 14 days filling her home with the girls’ music, laughter, and sweetness. More than one photo album was dusted off as she shared faded images of the past with her granddaughters.

The biggest news back in Houston is that Tracie’s success as a realtor continues to grow. She’s been working full-time now for nearly five years and her blood, sweat, and tears — and believe me, in real estate, it’s blood, sweat, and tears! — have paid off in ways that we couldn’t have imagined. Poo, poo, poo…

With the ongoing tariff war, my work is, well, to borrow an expression from Mel Brooks, “in the toilet.” (“I’m not going to the toilet! I’m getting into the wine business!”)

A handful of my most faithful clients have stuck with me. (Thank you!) But others have just stopped calling. Tracie’s so busy these days that I’ve taken over all household duties and kid care.

Before we left for California, the girls completed two weeks of music camp. Their final chamber performances were great but nothing could top the symphony performance they did on the final day in the gorgeous auditorium at the high school for the performing arts (where they both want to attend).

Tracie and I are saddened by the ongoing wars and suffering in the world.

We are sickened by the U.S. government’s ongoing cruelty, myopia, and incompetence.

The flooding in central Texas was tragic and I can’t imagine the catastrophe hasn’t touched every corner of our state. I know it’s touched our community. Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims’ families.

Workwise, I’m planning to expand our activist footprint. More on that later.

In the meantime, Tracie and I are praying for the vulnerable. And we haven’t lost hope that our kids can grow up in a better world than this.

G-d bless America, G-d bless us all, everywhere.

By the time I became a teenager in La Jolla, California, my family was in severe crisis. My home was fractured and I was drifting, taking a lot of drugs, and drinking heavily.

When a family of Mexican immigrants, who had only recently arrived in San Diego, invited me to spend the summer with them in Mexico, I thought it was because their kids, with whom I had become friendly, had asked their parents to take me along.

Many years later, I realized that this family — who was deeply religious and had a profound sense of charity — was trying to help me get through one of the worst times in my life. I did go to Mexico with them that summer and when we got back, I started spending more time at their house than my own.

The mom never mentioned that she was trying to help me. I only realized it years later. She never made that weigh on me. She just let me live my life in a safe and secure environment. Ultimately, I got my head back on straight, got my grades up again, got into UCLA, and got as far away from La Jolla as I could.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that family these days as we watch families in our own community being torn apart by the U.S. government. The stories I’m hearing from Southern California (where I grew up) and Southeast Texas (where I’ve lived for a decade and a half) are horrifying and heartbreaking.

I honestly don’t know where I’d be today without that family so many years ago in San Diego.

In other news, the Trump administration is using a classic Ku Klux Klan and Sons of Confederate Veterans tactic to re-institutionalize the names of military bases. As I read in the paper today, they are re-naming Fort Gregg-Adams as “Fort Lee,” but they are claiming the Lee in question was a Black soldier. No offense to the Black Lee but this move is as insulting as it is offensive.

In other other news, I also read that Trump is destroying the Fulbright scholarship program. I was a Fulbright scholar. I can only wonder how my life would be different today had I not had that opportunity.

This is not American greatness. It’s American rot.

Tracie, the girls, and I won’t be going to Italy this summer. That’s partly due to the fact that Tra is so busy with work right now (which is great).

But our absence from our spiritual homeland this season is owed mostly to the fact that we want to spend some extended time in California with my mom.

And… one of my bestest friends and brother by another mother, Jeremy (we even share a name!), is getting married. We are all so excited for him and his bride and we’re also looking forward to the party (Jeremy is part of a well known food-and-wine family and so we know the wedding celebration is going to be off the charts).

One of the things that I’m going to miss about Italy this summer is the perfectly draft beer.

Italians take immense pride in drafting beer properly. The photo of the beer above was taken in Piazza Vittoria in downtown Brescia, at a respectable but hardly noteworthy bar (what we in America would call a café). Despite the anonymity and convenience of the venue, the young person behind the bar delivered the perfectly draft beer.

I first experienced the burgeoning new beer culture and the second coming of unpasteurized beer back in the early 90s when I was playing in a cover band in Veneto.

Today, many of my Italian friends won’t even look at a beer that’s not unpasteurized. And all of them expect and take a good foam for granted.

In my experience (which is vast at this point), the foam enhances the flavor of the beer by making its aromas more prominent. I love drinking beer wherever I am. But a good head on the beer really makes the difference in my humble opinion.

It’s just one of those little things, like a good coffee or expertly sliced prosciutto, that I’m really going to miss.

What are you missing about Italy this summer?

Man, the tariff thing has really put a stranglehold on our industry.

And when times get tough — we all know the drill — people show their true colors.

Sometimes that means working together to find solutions.

Other times it means callously casting off people who have helped you for years and who genuinely believed you were an honest operator.

But there’s a golden truth in the world that keeps me going. As a good wine industry friend wrote me yesterday, “the great thing about being a real mutha fker and sticking to who you are is you never have to worry about changing the story. The wine world is filled with lazy ass posers. That’s why people who do the work seem like champions.”

Sometimes people really suck. But the show must go on!

Italian Wine & Pizza Party
Emmit’s Place
Houston
Saturday, June 7, 5-7pm
no cover

Please join me this Saturday, 5-7pm, at Emmit’s Place in southwest Houston where I will be hosting a kid-friendly Italian wine and pizza party. There will be house-fired pies, mocktails for the kids, and four different Italian wines to taste and enjoy.

And I’ll be your personal sommelier!

The best news is that this is a FREE event. You just have to cover the cost of the wines (moderately priced for the occasion), mocktails, and pizza.

Email me for more details (jparzen at gmail dot com) or just show up and enjoy some great wine and pizza!

Abruzzo Consortium Tasting
Il Fornaio
Beverly Hills
Wednesday, June 18, 12-3pm
open to trade

Then, week after next, I’ll be speaking at an Abruzzo consortium-Charming Taste of Europe event in Los Angeles, Wednesday, June 18, 12-1pm, seminar followed by lunch.

Click here to register.

I hope I’ll get to taste with you this weekend or later this month! Thanks for the support and solidarity. I need it now more than ever.

As it just so happened, a best friend of Marty’s showed up to his party in Chicago last Saturday night with a bottle of 2009 Colgin Cariad.

It goes without saying that the wine lovers among the guests were impressed by the generosity of the gift and eager to taste the wine!

The next day, as we reconvened for a family stroll and a pizza send-off for the out-of-towners, we gathered the wine glasses at our cousins’ Hyde Park apartment and mounted a semi-formal and super fun tasting for 10 of the adults — a proper minyan!

The wine had rich, opulent but elegant fruit, with wonderfully balanced acidity that kept it fresh on the palate and lithe in the glass. The finish was also fresh, with lingering notes of berry and earth. Tannin was still going strong but didn’t attenuate the vibrant flavors.

There was more than a bit of sediment in the wine and we would have been better served by letting the bottle stand upright for a few days before opening.

But the verve of the moment called for it to be opened à la volée! (Excuse the paronomasia.)

I’ve come to reconsider the iconic wines of Napa in the autumn of my oenophilic career. This bottle reminded me of how Napa has reshaped the world of wine, in so many ways.

The wine was delicious and a wonderful way to bring our family together over something truly special and unique, a benchmark for an American wine legacy. Chapeau bas to its producer.

Happy 80th birthday Marty Levy! How wonderful to see you surrounded by people who love you and what a great party! We wouldn’t have missed it for the world. We love you. Thanks for sharing the celebration with us.

A good family friend recently asked me if I thought their activism for the people of Gaza was an expression of anti-semitism.

My answer was an unequivocal “no, it is not.”

As someone who grew up in a country where they were frequently menaced with racist epithets and threats, they found it hard to understand, they said, that people level accusations of anti-semitism at them for their advocacy.

It’s still hard to wrap my mind around the fact that we need to be having conversations like that… that we need to have the courage to have conversations like that. But there’s no doubt that we do. And I understand the historical and present reasons why.

There is no “but…” in answering these questions. The Israeli aggression in Gaza is a horrific and morally indefensible human tragedy. And the Israeli military’s efforts to “destroy” Hamas have not achieved the two purported goals of the country’s government: hostages are still in Hamas’ control and Israelis don’t feel more safe. From everything I read, it seems that most Israelis, including high-ranking officials, disagree with their government’s war policies. In fact, the Israeli government’s policies have made Jews across the world less safe, just as we saw in Colorado this week, in Washington just a week or so ago, and in Pennsylvania during the Passover.

It was heart-wrenching for our family to read the news about the attack in Boulder. I have a longtime client there and Tracie and I have spent a lot of time walking the Pearl St. Mall where the violence took place. We know scores of Jews in that community. We are praying for them.

The people who were attacked in Colorado were merely expressing their solidarity with the hostages and their families. The couple slain in D.C. was simply attended a “mixer” with no political agenda. The family in Pennsylvania had innocently sat down to a holiday meal.

Pro-Palestinian advocacy is not wrong. And it’s not anti-semitism. Violence is wrong. We all must stand up to protect one another from violence both verbal and physical. The attacks on Jews will stop only when we rise up as a community against them.

Hank Van Slyke, the lifelong Orange, Texas, resident who manages the neo-Confederate memorial erected by the Sons of Confederate Veterans goes to the same church as my in-laws. I just saw him and his wife at Easter like I do every year.

His wife always makes a point to smile and say hello. Church in Orange, Texas is generally a friendly and warm affair. But not for good ol’ Hank: he pretends like he doesn’t know who I am even though every red-blooded male over 40 at that service knows who both of us are. Tracie and I have been protesting at the site for nearly a decade. (See an archive of our efforts here.)

I wonder how he reconciles his outward display of spirituality with his racist activism. What would Jesus say about a neo-Confederate monument newly raised in a community that is half Black? I guess his “Jesus” is cool with that. Still scratching my head on that one, Hank.

I couldn’t have been more thrilled to learn that my friends at Southeast Texas Impact Initiative, Adriana Smoak and Jennifer Clarke, are organizing a Juneteenth 2025 protest at the site.

You can bet that I’ll be there. Please visit and join the group’s public-facing group on Facebook (Southeast Texas Impact Initiative Outreach) and please visit their site at SETXimpact.org.

Here’s the Facebook link for the event.

You can contact the group at info [at] SETXimpact [dot] org. And please feel free to reach out to me directly for carpooling/promotion/media inquiries etc.

This is going to be a big one! Hope to see you there! Thanks for your support and solidarity.

We are never giving up this fight. Stay tuned for more details.

And to all of you neo-Confederate sons of bitches out there, why don’t you act like men instead of cowards and talk to us about how your monument is bad for your community and bad for your city. Oh yeah, I forgot, ya’ll are just a bunch of yellow-belly losers. That goes for you too, Granvel Block. If there were a man among you, I’d be happy to meet him any time.