Alicia Lini and her family have been making Lambrusco in Canolo (Reggio Emilia province) for more than 100 years. She’s one of my best friends in the wine business and one of the people I admire most.
April 5, 2020
Palm Sunday
Canolo (Reggio Emilia)
Dear Jeremy,
Here I am writing you a letter.
Nothing is obvious anymore. Nothing is the same, nothing we think of is like it was before. These days, everyone has something to say. But not me.
Continue reading
Earlier this week when I posted about the virtual tasting video series I’m working on, a ton of folks reached out and said they would put their shoulder to this wheel.
First and foremost among them was our good friend Katrina Rene (above) from Houston.
By day, she’s a super power lawyer. By night (and occasionally by day, too!) she runs the Corkscrew Concierge. Combined with her growing following on Instagram, it’s one of the top wine blogs in the country right now.
She created the video below for the Scarpa Cellar Dive series (Scarpa, my client, is offering to replace bottles that people use in virtual tasting videos).
Kat, you’re a great friend: THANK YOU for helping to support Italian wine by sharing the clip. :)
In coming weeks, I’ll be posting more of my own videos as well as videos by anyone who wants to share them with me. It doesn’t matter which wine you feature. Just make it Italian!
Check out this feature story about Katrina. And be sure to follow her blog.
As all of us hunker down for the ongoing health crisis, I hope this series will bring some light into all of our lives. We could all use a little joy these days and there’s some of that good stuff in every bottle of Italian wine.
Stay safe and isolate! Know that we’re all in this together.
Un abbraccio a tutti. Ce la faremo!
Above: Piero Mastroberardino grows grapes and makes wine in Irpinia.
Atripalada
April 2, 2020
Hardly a month ago, not even the most imaginative writer in the world could have come up with a screenplay like this: Most of the world comes to a stop, at the same time more or less, waiting for events to unfold.
We’re now living at a distance, thanks to technology. And when we encounter another person, during the few moments of the day when we are allowed to leave our homes, it’s a race to avoid contact.
Continue reading
The virtual Italian wine tasting series continues today at 3 p.m. EST (2 p.m. CST) when I’ll be doing a split-screen live story with Alberto Cordero from the Cordero di Montezemolo winery. It will be appearing over at on the EthicaWines Instagram.
I hope you can join us!
I’ve followed Alberto’s family’s extraordinary wines since 1999 when I first tasted them at a dinner at the Four Seasons in New York (back in the day!). But I’ve always been surprised at how few wine professionals beyond New York know and appreciate them.
I finally made to visit the winery in January of this year thanks to my client Ethica, who sent me on a tour of some of their estates. My conversation and tasting with Alberto that day was as fascinating as it was delicious. I’m especially eager to ask Alberto to share his thoughts about the modern vs. traditional dialectic in Barolo. I bet that many old line Nebbiolophiles will be surprised and impressed by what he has to say.
We’ll be tasting their 2016 Barolo Monfalletto and 2017 Barbera d’Alba. Please join the live story if so inclined. I Hope to see you then and THANK YOU for supporting Italian wines. Every click counts, every like matters.
Ever since graduate school, Italy has been my lifeline and my livelihood.
It started with a fellowship at the Italian Department at U.C.L.A. Then came my first non-service job as an Italian instructor and researcher. Later came a Fulbright and other grants and scholarships for study in Italy. And during four summers off from school, I made a living playing in a cover band in Belluno, Padua, and Venice.
After school, I shifted to commercial media when I got an assistant editor job at La Cucina Italiana in New York. That led to wine writing. That led to copywriting. That led to marketing consulting. More recent years brought a teaching position at the Slow Food University in Piedmont and a gig as an editor for Slow Wine.
For more than 25 years now, Italy, Italian culture, and Italian food and wine have helped me make a living.
And now Italy and Italian food and wine needs us more than ever before.
Just this morning, I received a press release from the Italian Federation of Independent Grape Growers outlining the Italian wine industry’s most urgent needs: debt relief, small business loans for wineries and restaurants, relaxed restrictions on retail sales and production limits, etc. It echoed an open letter to Governor Cuomo from a New York-based food and wine association that arrived last night. These were just two of the myriad pleas for help, support, and solidarity that have been flooding my my inbox.
We’re all facing similar challenges in this unprecedented health crisis.
That’s why I’m inviting you to open a bottle of Italian wine from your cellar and share it on social media. Tag me and I’ll share it, too.
My client Scarpa has just launched its “Scarpa Cellar Dive” program: open a bottle of Scarpa, share a video and they’ll replace the bottle.
My client Ethica Wines has asked me to lead a series of live tastings on its Instagram. Tomorrow (Wednesday, April 1) at 3 p.m EST (2 p.m. CST), I’ll tasting with Alberto Cordero from Cordero di Montezemolo (a super cool old-school estate that not enough folks in the U.S. know about).
And yesterday afternoon I shot my first virtual tasting video (below). My good friends at Folio Fine Wine partners generously sent me a care package of wines that Tracie and I have been enjoying over the few weeks of isolation (thank you Folio!). The Ricasoli 2015 Chianti Classico Colledilà Gran Selezione blew me away when I tasted it in Tuscany in January.
Buy Italian wine, drink Italian wine, order from your favorite retailer and/or restaurant (many states are allowing restaurants to sell wine with take-out orders). And if your finances don’t permit any of the above, open a bottle from your cellar and share the joy on social media (tag me and I’ll share it, too).
We can all use a little joy in our lives right now and Italian wine is a great way to find it.
Thanks for being here and thanks for supporting Italian wine.
Giancarlo Gariglio is the editor-in-chief of the Slow Wine Guide to the Wines of Italy, Slovenia, California, and Oregon. He lives in the town of Bra, where the Slow Food movement was founded in the late 1980s.
I was in America on February 21 when everything changed in Italy. That was when we became the first in Europe and the first outside of China to discover that the novel coronavirus was something more than the flu. It was something we had a read about in the papers, with a death rate of 1 percent. We tended to minimize the threat and even joke about it. Then everything changed in Italy. And it was immediately clear that despite our excellent public health system, it wasn’t going to be easy to face this disease.
Continue reading
Today’s virtual tasting is going to feature Scarpa Barbera d’Asti and winemaker Silvio Trinchero.
Please join me live on Instagram @DoBianchi at 10 a.m. CST (Texas time) when Silvio and I will be discussing life in Piedmont during the health crisis as well open a bottle of 2015 Scarpa Barbera d’Asti CasaScarpa.
This is the second virtual tasting I’m leading with my clients and friends in the wine trade. I’ll be doing more next week.
Please join us! Evviva il vino italiano!
At 11 a.m. CST today, I’ll be doing an live story with Aleš Kristančič of Movia on the @EthicaWines Instagram.
It’s the first of a series of virtual tastings that I’m leading with them. I hope you can join us.
Aleš and his family are great friends of mine and when I visited them in January of this year, we had a blast remembering when they brought my band Nous Non Plus to play a concert at the winery back in 2008 when we had a hit song in Slovenia (no joke!).
Please join us at 11 a.m. and please look out for more Ethica Wines tastings I’ll be doing.
See you shortly! We’ll be tasting four wines, including the Pinot Grigio Ambra.
Above: a vineyard in Brescia province, a photo taken nearly a year ago to the day.
In what’s become a daily ritual, there’s a late afternoon-late night call to Italy when a couple of middle-aged wine professionals — one an American in Houston, the other an Italian in Brescia province — catch up on the ongoing health crisis in their respective cities.
Yesterday’s call was grimmer than most.
“I see the number of cases has actually begun to fall in Italy today,” said the American, noting that there was a drop, however small, in the number of new cases and victims with respect to the previous day’s reporting.
“But not in Brescia,” replied the Italian.
His words were echoed in a story this morning on the front page of the New York Times website: “Dip in Italy’s Cases Does Not Come Fast Enough for Swamped Hospitals.”
“In Brescia,” write the paper’s editors in a caption for the lead image, “hospitals have been reporting hundreds of new cases a day.” The photo that appears at the beginning of the article was taken in the intensive care unit of the Spedali Civili hospital in Brescia.
While the numbers are beginning to level off, just barely, in the rest of Italy, the situation in Brescia and neighboring Bergamo province is getting worse. Bergamo and the Italian region of Lombardy where Bergamo and Brescia are located are the epicenter of the ongoing health crisis.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a concentration of suffering so intense,” says
Dr. Intissar Sleiman in a video the man from Brescia shared with his American friend during their chat. She’s a Brescia medical professional on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy.
“We’re not used to losing so many people in such a short period of time,” she says as she holds back her tears.
The video left the American wine professional with tears streaming down his face. Just a few months ago, he was there in Brescia province visiting his Italian friend. He was supposed to be in Italy this week. How he wishes he could embrace his friend in Brescia right now! Magari!
The wine professional from Brescia and his partners are donating proceeds from the sale of one of their wines to a fund that supports the struggling Brescia hospital system.
Walter Speller wrote about it for JancisRobinson.com this week.
G-d bless Brescia. G-d bless us all.
According to a report published just minutes ago by the Associated Press, “Italy, a country of 60 million, registered 2,978 deaths Wednesday after another 475 people died. Given that Italy has been averaging more than 350 deaths a day since March 15, it’s likely to overtake China’s 3,249 dead — in a country of 1.4 billion — when Thursday’s figures are released at day’s end.”
Above: Paolo Cantele, one of my best friends in the world and my client of many years, standing in front of his family’s winery in Guagnano in Lecce province. He calls me “Jar,” my nickname since I was a teenager.
Dear Jar,
It took me a little time to write you because, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t in the right mood for it.
Writing is supposed to be therapeutic. It’s meant to help you overcome you’re the fears and doubts that grip your brain even as your mind, despite its efforts to remain cool and collected, continues to focus on that damned list of infected and dead.
Continue reading
Do Bianchi 