Given the current political climate, it was all the more moving to hear legacy restaurateur, chef, and author Lidia Bastianich talk about her own family’s experience as immigrants in this country last night at the Wine and Food Festival in the Woodlands, a swank northern suburb of Houston.

I had the great pleasure of introducing her and moderating her Q&A.

Festival-goers were eager to pose for selfies with an original American food celebrity who has reshaped the culinary landscape in this country and achieved unrivaled success without ever forgetting her humble origins and beginnings.

She also talked at length about the origins of Italian-American gastronomy and how it reflected the lives of early Italian immigrants in this country.

No reference to politics or policy was made. But her even, just slightly accented English spoke volumes.

Lidia, thank you for coming to Houston and your brilliant talk. You make our city an even better place when you join us here. I couldn’t have been more thrilled to be part of the evening.

Earlier in the day, I had been invited to join a fantastic blind tasting of domestic “true” (as opposed to saignée) rosés by the Drunken Cyclist, aka Jeff Kralik, an east coast emigré who recently immigrated to my adoptive city.

Our lively group of Houston-based bloggers romped through a flight of no fewer than 29 American rosés that had been culled together by Jeff especially for the occasion.

Gary Farrell and Rodney Strong were the top scorers but considering the brio and spirit of camaraderie, I’d say that the real winners were the tasters themselves.

Thank you, Jeff, for making me part of it (and for the rocking playlist). I can’t wait for the next time you and I sit down in front of a flight of great wines.

All in all, it was a pretty swell day our city, where we are enjoying unseasonably mild weather.

But the sweetest moment yesterday came together when Tracie P took a break from her skin care business to join me and the girls for our morning outing at our newly refurbished planetarium.

Our daughters love navigating space as much as I do. But there’s no other place that I want to be than Houston, Texas…

A restaurant professional recently told me that she had been instructed by a Master Sommelier (as in the Court of Master Sommeliers) to always place the cork on the guest’s table after extracting it from the bottle. She had been attending a seminar in the Society of Wine Educators “Certified Specialist of Wine” program.

I was really surprised to hear this. And so I looked up the Court of Master Sommeliers Service Standards wherein it is clearly states that the cork should be presented. But it also clearly states that the cork should be placed on an “under-liner” before being placed to the right of the guest on the table. In other words, it should be presented on a small tray.

The bottle is also supposed to be placed on an under-liner. And the last step of “standard service,” according to the document, is to ask the guest if the cork may be removed.

One of my pet peeves in casual wine service today is when servers: 1) smell the cork at the table before placing it on the table; 2) place the cork on the table without an under-liner; and 3) leave the cork on the table throughout the meal, sometimes accumulating more than one cork that can roll around precariously as the meal is served.

In casual wine service today, presentation of the cork is often an affectation of a practice that has little or no bearing on the guest’s enjoyment of the wine or confidence in the server’s ability and performance.

In another era, the cork was presented to the guest as evidence of the bottle’s provenance. Especially when serving older, rare, and expensive wines, authenticity is vital and the cork and the branding and/or printing on the cork are key elements in determining its provenance (I often get emails from auctioneers who ask me to review the text on corked pulled from rare bottles of Italian wine, for example; and btw, by branding I mean that the text is literally branded on the cork using a hot iron in some instances).

In the photo above, you can see the corks extracted from a flight of rare Italian wines at a lunch I attended in New York a few years ago. After the sommelier opened the bottles, he placed them on an under-liner and presented them to our party. After we examined them, he removed and reserved them in case we wanted to revisit them.

But when a sommelier is removing a cork from a bottle of young, fresh Cerasuolo di Vittoria or a current-release Bardolino, the question of provenance or authenticity is generally inconsequential. Over the course of a shift, a server or sommelier will remove a number of corks from youthful, inexpensive wines and the question of provenance should be resolved — in my view — before the bottle is presented to the table. When’s the last time you remember a guest in a casual restaurant inspecting a cork and saying, excuse me but this bottle of Pinot Grigio has a counterfeit cork in it?

The cork can tell you something about the fitness of the wine. But this generally only holds true when it comes to older wines.

More importantly, and this is one of the greatest misunderstandings about cork presentation in my experience, smelling the cork doesn’t reveal whether or not the wine is corked or otherwise defective or damaged. Just because a cork smells rotten doesn’t mean that the wine is corked. In fact, wine can be corked even when the cork is in perfect shape and vice versa, the wine can be in good health even when the cork is in bad shape. As I wrote yesterday, you determine the fitness of the wine by smelling the wine (and if needed, by tasting it). Not by smelling the cork.

I agree with the Court of Master Sommelier’s steps of standard service and I have the utmost respect for the court’s over-arching level of professionalism and the generally high caliber of its educational components.

But when it comes to wine service in casual restaurants and the presentation of young, fresh wines where the question of provenance and authenticity has little bearing, I believe that the cork shouldn’t be presented unless the guest expressly asks to examine it. And when it is presented, it should be presented exclusively on a small tray and the server should ask to remove it once the guest has inspected it.

The guest is always right, as the saying goes. And if a diner feels compelled to challenge the provenance of her/his current-vintage by-the-glass Pinot Grigio, then fair enough. But this anachronistic and — in my view — affected practice has no place when everyday wines are concerned.

Francesco Cirelli’s entry-tier Trebbiano d’Abruzzo is one of our all-time favorite wines. Whenever the Texas allocation lands, the rep always jokes with our wine merchant: “Please let Jeremy and Tracie know. They’re thirsty!”

We buy it by the case and we serve and drink it as both an everyday wine and our Saturday night wine. That’s how much we love it. It’s varietally expressive and classic in style. And it’s one of the most wholesome wines you can drink in the under-$20 category.

But the other night we opened a bottle that was corked. We know this wine so well and drink it so often, that it’s easy for us to discern when it’s not right.

But how can a screw-cap wine like this be corked, when there is no cork involved?

Many years ago, one of my wine mentors and friends, Nicola Marzovilla, taught me that corkiness isn’t only about cork taint, in other words, the presence of the nefarious chemical compound TCA.

As Nicola put, corkiness can be about cork taint. But the more important telltale sign of a corked wine is the absence of fruit — even when there is no cork taint.

To borrow a line from another wine mentor and friend, Darrell Corti, wine is made from fruit and it should smell and taste of fruit. When it doesn’t, it’s likely that the wine is off.

The fruit aromas and flavors of a wine can be muted or even eclipsed entirely by cork taint. But there many other factors that can kill the fruit in a wine.

When I was first working in the wine trade in the early 2000s in New York, it was rare to see a bottled sealed with screw cap. Today, it’s commonplace. In some ways, you could say that it’s anachronistic to call a wine like this “corked.” But what would the contemporary wine lexicon be if not a metachronistic compendium of bygones?

One of the early problems facing winemakers who bottled their wines with screw-caps was that the seal would often break when the cases were stacked on top of one another. The weight and pressure of the bottles on top would compromise the seals on the bottles below. A lot of progress has been made in ensuring the sturdiness and integrity of screw-cap seals. But just a slight fissure, even invisible to the eye, can allow oxygen to be introduced into the bottle.

The same thing holds with cork because the tree bark used to make corks is a porous material that can allow small amounts of oxygen to be introduced into the bottle. And different types of taint — even TCA — can come into contact with the wine without affecting the cork itself. That’s why a cork-sealed bottle can be corked even when the cork doesn’t smell tainted.

Screw-caps have undeniably helped to deliver more robust fitness in wine today. But as I see it, opening a bottle of wine is always a gamble. It’s a wager that can reward the drinker with ineffable joy or disappoint with a broken and unfulfilled promise.

You win some and you lose some: this bottle is destined to donate its sugar for the sake of a salsa al pomodoro for pasta and to deglaze more than one sauté pan for chicken breasts and pork chops al vino bianco.

Our souls shudder, our hearts ache, and our prayers go out today for our beloved sisters and brothers in England…

I give you a toast Ladies and gentlemen
May this fair land we love so well
In dignity and freedom dwell
While worlds may change and go awry
There’ll always be an England
While there’s a country lane
Wherever there’s a cottage small
Beside a field of grain
There’ll always be an England
While there’s a busy street
Wherever there’s a turning wheel
A million marching feet
Red, white and blue
What does it mean to you?
Surely you’re proud
Shout it loud
Britons awake!
The Empire too
We can depend on you
Freedom remains
These are the chains
Nothing can break
There’ll always be an England
And England shall be free
If England means as much to you
As England means to me

“There’ll always be an England,” song by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles.

Image via Michael Jeffries’ Facebook.

Perhaps the greatest compliment came from my friend Barbara in Emilia-Romagna, the region that inspired the menu at Chef Steve Samson’s new downtown LA restaurant, Rossoblu where I am writing the wine list.

When she saw that I had posted this image of the Rossoblu salumi board on my social media, she commented, “are you in Modena?”

I’m biased, of course: not only has Chef Steve been my friend for nearly 30 years (we met on our junior year abroad in Italy), but he’s also the chef/owner of the popular LA restaurant and pizzeria Sotto, where I’ve also been writing the wine list for the last six years.

I couldn’t have been more geeked to try the new restaurant and menu, which is based on recipes from his mother, who’s from Bologna, and the summers he spent their as a kid.

The recipe for the eggplant above comes from the kitchen of signora Valbruna, who still lives down the street from where Steve’s mom’s family lived in San Donnino in Bologna. I’ve sat at Valbruna’s table many times over the years! I even took Tracie P to eat with their family on our honeymoon: that’s how good her cooking is…

And that’s the big secret about Emilian cookery. There are many great restaurants in Emilia and most of the best ones are in the countryside. But nothing comes close to the home cooking. That’s where the real deal culinary magic happens.

I’ll never forget an evening from a couple of years ago when Steve previewed some dishes from the future Rossoblu menu at Sotto. His mother was in attendance, of course. She said she liked the tortellini but “mine are better,” she said (cue Jewish mother/Italian mother jokes here).

Steve’s tortellini were incredible last week. I’ve never had tortellini that good outside of Emilia. It was a sort of litmus test for him and he passed with rosso and blu flying colors, the red and blue of his beloved Bologna soccer club. Complimenti, Steve!

But as much as I was impressed with the tortellini, it was the tagliatelle al ragù that really wowed me.

The dish is the non plus ultra of great Emilian food and I have never — never ever — had tagliatelle this good outside of homes where I’ve eaten in Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, and Bologna.

What a great night and great meal at the new Rossoblu, which is still in the “friends and family” phase of opening. The official launch will happen next week.

Need a reservation? I know a guy who knows a guy…

The website is still a holding page but check out the Instagram and Facebook for updates and images.

When it comes to Montestefano (pronounced MOHN-teh-STEH-fah-noh), one of the top crus in Barbaresco, you often hear the Langhetti say that the wine baroleggia. In other words, it resembles, evokes, or aspires to be Barolo-like in character.

This microaggression against Barbaresco as an appellation is misguided and unwarranted in my opinion and experience: it would seem to imply (or one may infer from it) that Barbaresco is the inherently inferior among the two designations.

But there is a distinctive earthy and savory note that sets Montestefano apart from many of the other expressions of Barbaresco, which tend to be more lithe and less austere than their counterparts in Barolo to the south.

The 2004 vintage is remembered by many as classical growing cycle, with an even and balanced progression of the seasons that some compare to the supreme 1989 harvest in Langhe.

When we opened this bottle on Sunday night for a couple of special guests in our home, this 13-year-old wine guarded its fruit jealously, with rich tannin that only slowly began to reveal the wine’s gorgeous dark red fruit and umami flavors. The tannic character and the electric acidity in this wine make me believe that it has many years — even decades — ahead of it before it reaches maturity. What a wine, people!

Earlier in the evening we also opened this bottle of Centesimino, a native grape of Faenza (Romagna), a variety I had never tasted before.

According to ampelographic reports I could find, the vines used to make this wine are ungrafted. In other words, they are the descendants of plants that were not affected by the phllyoxera epidemic of the 19th century (because they were not impacted the louse, they were never grafted to phylloxera-resistant vitis labrusca from the New World). Evidently, the vines’ ancestors were cloistered in a palace courtyard in Faenza proper and were spared from the scourge.

The “A” by Villa Venti, a rigorously natural winemaker (meaning organic farming practices, spontaneous fermentation, and minimal interventionism), was bright, with eye-popping berry fruit and zinging acidity in the mouth. We all enjoyed it immensely.

The bottle that found its way to our home arrived clandestinely. But I hear that it might be making it to Texas via legitimate channels soon.

A truly original and compelling wine and a reminder of the awe-inspiring breadth of Italian viticulture.

In other news…

A tree fell on our house early Monday morning!

Intense winds on our street in southwest Houston brought down a number of old trees and caused havoc on our block, leaving nearly 200 homes without power. Miraculously, the damage to our roof was minimal and our landlords were swift to have the 25-year-old tree removed and the damage repaired.

But, man, what a fright to wake up and find that this mighty trunk had fallen in our backyard!

The funny thing was that no one in our family heard it fall: did it make a sound?

Thanks for all the well wishes. We are all safe and all is right in our home.

Dulcis in fundo…

Georgia P (age 5) and Lila Jane (age 3) had their dance recital on Sunday afternoon. They both took the stage confidently and with gusto. And while their performances may not have been impeccable, the looks on their faces and glowing smiles that appeared when they saw me and Tracie P in the audience were priceless.

They are my heart, my love, and my joy. I’m so blessed that Tracie gave them to us and I have so much fun being their dad.

Writing from the road today in California as I embark on a new editorial project and adventure. Stay tuned… 

It’s been heart-wrenching to hear the reports and accounts of yesterday’s bombing in England.

Our hearts, thoughts, and prayers go out to the families of Manchester today.

G-d bless Britain…

Image via the Wiki.

Above: the mural in the main dining room at Rossoblu, which will “hard” open in just a few weeks in downtown Los Angeles.

What a thrill to see my friend Steve Samson profiled this week in the LA Times for the opening of his new downtown restaurant (where I’m writing the wine list).

“Los Angeles is poised for some major restaurant openings in 2017,” writes Hillary Eaton for the paper. “Perhaps one of the most anticipated is chef Steve Samson’s Rossoblu, set to open in downtown’s gorgeous new City Market South development on May 17.”

While Samson has earned a following for his perfectly blister-flecked, wood-fired pizzas at Sotto, his Southern Italian restaurant in Pico-Robertson, you will not find a single pie on the menu at Rossoblu. Instead, Samson’s newest project will allow him to flex other muscles, crafting a menu that reads as an ode to the Italian cuisine of the Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy.

Samson’s connection to Emilia-Romagna runs deep. The region is home to his favorite soccer team, F.C. Bologna, referred to by fans as rossoblu (after the team’s red and blue colors). It’s also the place he spent his childhood summers with his mother’s family. Each summer he grew more enamored with the food and culture that would one day drive him to abandon a prospective career as a doctor to become a chef.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Steve and I first met back in 1987 — 30 years ago! — when we were both juniors at the University of California (I was at UCLA and he at UCSD) and we were both spending our year abroad in Italy.

Even though he was studying in Venice and I was in Padua, we became fast friends and it didn’t take long before he took me with him to Bologna, where he spent summers as a kid: his dad studied medicine on the GI Bill at Bologna where he met Steve’s mom. She grew up in the city’s San Donnino neighborhood.

It was such a great experience for me, during my first year in Italy, to experience Bologna and Steve’s family’s life and circle of friends there. Dindo, one of Steve’s best friends growing up, is still one of my best friends, too (here’s a song I wrote for him).

Seven years ago, when Steve was getting ready to launch his first restaurant in LA as chef/owner, I had just moved back to California from New York where I had spent a decade working as a translator, wine and food writer, and musician. He had always said that he wanted me to write the wine list at his restaurant and even though I had picked up and moved to Texas to marry Tracie P by the time he opened, he insisted that I be the restaurant’s wine director.

We’ve been going strong together ever since and I couldn’t more thrilled to be part of the new project and more proud to be Steve’s friend and colleague: it’s so wonderful to see someone you love thrive like this and achieve a lifelong dream.

Congratulations to Steve and his wife and partner Dina on this new gastronomic adventure! I am so stoked to be a part of it.

As soon as the restaurant officially opens next month, we’ll begin planning our first wine dinners and tastings etc. In the meantime, if you happen to be in LA next week, I’ll be leading a tasting of Campania wines at Sotto, Steve’s other restaurant, on Tuesday, May 23 (click here for details and reservations). Please join me!

Thanks for your support, everyone. I feel so blessed to do what I do for a living and so lucky to be surrounded by so many talented and gifted people like Steve and Dina.

Earlier this year, a wine director at a super cool, nationally renowned American restaurant told me: “You know, the French [sparkling winemakers] tell you that they only do one dosage. But, actually, they secretly do a bunch of micro-dosages.”

By its very nature and by definition, dosage can only be performed once in the life of a sparkling wine.

Also earlier this year, I spoke to a group of roughly 20 fine dining professionals and asked them their impressions of pas dosé sparkling wines. Not one of them knew what I was talking about.

Considering the role the sparkling wine plays in the fine dining experience and considering the category’s popularity in youthful fine wine culture today, a lacuna like that is helpful to no one — neither server nor guest nor to the restaurateur’s bottomline.

Ever since the dawn of the new era in wine connoisseurship in the U.S. and the rise of the übersommelier in the late 1990s, wine knowledge and awareness have exploded in this country. And more than ever, restaurant professionals have a treasure of media assets available to them in their quest to expand their knowledge.

When it’s common for sommeliers to be able to rattle off every growth in Volnay or every township in upper Piedmont or speak at length about the nuances of Nykteri, why is that knowledge of sparkling wine production has lagged so far behind?

In my two-year tenure working with the Franciacorta consortium (a partnership that ended in December but that’s another story), I traveled all over the U.S. talking about sparkling wines and sparkling wine production. And frankly, I was blown away by how this category is so rarely mastered by even the best and most successful in the business.

I ascribe the widespread insouciant approach to the fact that sparkling wine is arguably one of the most manipulative expressions of viticulture. Understanding how sparkling wines are made and what makes them unique takes a lot of time and study. It’s one of the most technical forms of winemaking and in many ways, sparkling wine runs counter to our fantasies about the historic natural wine movement. Just consider the sine qua non role of Chaptalization in sparkling wine production. There ain’t anything natural about that! (By the way, sine qua non is not pronounced seh-NAY-kwah-nun, like the wine from California; it’s pronounced SEE-neh kwah nohn).

Before I started working with the Franciacorta consortium, I was as guilty as the next floor sommelier in neglecting my knowledge of how sparkling wines are made and how to taste them properly. But thanks to my work with their bottler association, I had the opportunity to taste with a number of top winemakers and sommeliers and I was also very fortunate to get to taste a lot of above-my-paygrade sparkling wine from France.

The information is out there and easy to access: Jancis Robinson’s online edition of the Oxford Companion to Wine and Tom Stevenson’s introduction to Christie’s World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine (print only, I believe) were key resources I used in upping my game (and I highly recommend both).

Another key moment for me was when I asked Bellavista winemaker Mattia Vezzola to share his insight into how to taste sparkling wine.

“Does the promise of the nose,” he said, “deliver in the mouth of the wine? That’s one of the hallmarks of great classic-method wine.”

Unfortunately, we tend to taste sparkling too hurriedly and there’s no getting around the fact that tasting (and learning how to taste) classic-method wine takes a lot of time and patience.

Yesterday, I attended an excellent trade tasting of sparkling wines presented by the cellar master at Gosset here in Houston. I really liked the presentation: he led the group through a flight of monovarietal expressions of their classic cuvée to illustrate the role that the different varieties play in shaping the style of the house. And I really liked the wines, as well.

The export manager also gave a thoughtful and insightful talk on the history of the appellation and its role and place in the world of fine wine (although I took issue with his etymology of the toponym Champagne, which does comes from the Latin campania, as he noted, but campania does not mean chalk nor is it related in any way to the word chalk, despite the role that chalk plays in the appellation).

He pointed out (rightly) that Champagne owes its historic fortune not to the French but to the British and Russians, who embraced the wines as a core expression of their fine dining culture.

In a lot of ways, I thought to myself, Champagne and sparkling wine in general are the result of a series of Bloomian misunderstandings. And that legacy, no doubt, has contributed to the ways that the wines are still misunderstood today.