My wife Tracie and I thoroughly enjoyed this bottle of Toscana rosso last week by Scheggiolla in Chianti Classico, Siena province (pronounced skeh-JOHL-lah if I’m not mistaken). winemaker doesn’t specify the blend on the winery’s site but gauging from the color and flavor, I imagine it’s mostly Sangiovese with the addition of some Merlot.

It had that earthy Chianti character that you could easily pick out in a bland tasting. And it had just enough funk initially on the nose to live up to its credentials as a true small-scale, one-farm, family-run estate. We loved it and it weighed in at a price that would make it a by-the-glass restaurant entry.

We weren’t surprised: this estate, together with a handful of other Tuscan properties, is brokered in Texas by our friend Federico “Fredman” Marconi from Montepulciano. He’s one of the best Tuscan tasters I’ve ever known. In part because of his unfiltered experience on the ground and in part because of his many years in the trade, his knack for sourcing real-deal Tuscan wines is up there with the very best.

I’ve tasted the higher-tier wines by Scheggiolla as well: they reminded me of those chilly Saturday nights in Tuscany when you sit around a hearth and eat fried wild boar liver with the grandpa’s wine — and it’s freakin’ delicious, all around.

I am also eager to pop the cork on a bottle of 2009 Pruneto Chianti Classico, another wine from Fred’s wheelhouse. I tasted it at a trade tasting last year and there’s a bottle in my wine library just waiting for a blood rare steak. I bought both bottles at the Houston Wine Merchant.

Fred’s portfolio landed with one of the growing army of young and independent importer-distributors in Texas — DASH Imports — who increasingly cater to buyers who want authentic Italian and who aren’t afraid to turn their customers on to something they don’t recognize. Every day, it seems, there are more cracks in Southern-Glazer’s and Republic’s once impenetrable iron curtain in our otherwise free-market state. And that’s a good thing for everyone concerned (even the big boys, in my view, because diversity enriches our wine culture and community and as a result, everyone wins).

Keep on trucking, Fred. We love you and we love these awesome wines. Thanks for getting them to Texas.

In other news…

Just need to give a major shout-out to Tracie who hooked my band up with her delicious carbonara (below) yesterday after a songwriting session. Really awesome, paired with some Bucci Verdicchio, an excellent match for the dish imho.

What can I say? I married well!

Due to inclement weather, Repurpose and its partners at Southeast Texas Progressives have rescheduled today’s protest of the Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas for Sunday, February 25.

Please stay tuned for details.

Top wine buyers from across Texas gathered yesterday in one of Houston’s most exclusive private dining rooms to taste new vintages from the iconic Biondi Santi winery. The estate’s new ambassador, Tancredi Biondi Santi (seated above, mid-table on the right, across from Master Sommelier Jack Mason), led the tasting.

The séance — organized by Biondi Santi’s new U.S. importer Wilson Daniels — would have been otherwise unremarkable if it weren’t for the fact that the wines haven’t been available in the state through legitimate channels for decades.

“The wines have mostly come in [to the U.S.] through the grey market,” said one of the Wilson Daniels sales managers present at the swank luncheon.

He was referring to the questionably legal practice of importing of high-end European wines without using the so-called “three-tier system.” Most fine wine arrives here through an importer who sells it to a distributor who, in turn, sells it to a retailer or restaurateur who ultimately sells it to the end user — hence the “three tiers.” Historically, trade operators have often skirted the system (and its sometime prohibitive costs) by shipping the wines directly to the U.S., sometimes through illegitimate channels (for example, by misleadingly labeling the boxes as products other than wine, one of the world’s most highly regulated commodities).

Since the late 1990s, the sole purveyor of Biondi Santi in the U.S. has been Italian Wine Merchants, a retail operation headquartered in New York and once co-owned by Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali. In 2015, the upscale wine shop and broker was still offering back vintages to clients willing to shell out up to $1,500 per bottle, according to Eric Asimov writing for the New York Times.

Following the 2013 passing of the family’s patriarch Franco Biondi Santi (Tancredi’s grandfather), many Italian wine trade observers speculated that the winery would abandon his unwavering devotion to traditional-style Brunello di Montalcino in favor of a more modern approach.

As Eric wrote in his 2015 piece, Biondi Santi is considered “perhaps the greatest of all Brunello producers, but one whose style was roundly assailed in the 1990s and the first decade of this century.”

All eyes were on Franco’s son (and Tancredi’s father) Jacopo. In the eyes of some pundits, he had already shifted the winery’s stylistic direction, even before his father’s death.

Yesterday, the young Tancredi told buyers that all the wines are aged in the traditional large Slavonian oak casks that his grandfather, and great-grandfather Tancredi (his namesake), used to raise them.

“Barriques are not allowed,” he said referring to the small French oak casks that many Brunello producers use today in order to appeal to American and northern European sensibilities.

In my view, it’s really exciting news that the wines will finally be available outside of New York. And it will also be interesting to follow the winery’s evolution under Jacopo and Tancredi. The younger Biondi Santi also talked openly about his desire to become the farm’s winemaker once his father steps down. He’s currently studying enology, he said.

I’ve had the great fortune to taste the wines on numerous occasions in Italy, including a lot of older vintages over the years. That’s not something a lot of American wine professionals can say. The fact of the matter is that few sommeliers in America have had any contact with these wines at all. But my concern today is that Wilson Daniels’ pricing will still keep these iconic wines out of reach for most young wine professionals. The 2011 reserve we tasted yesterday will cost more than $1,000 on a typical high-end wine list in the U.S.

Are the wines worth the high price tag? Most of us will never know.

Texas food and wine lovers and restaurant and wine professionals: please register now for the Taste of Italy/Slow Wine Grand Tasting and seminars to be held on Monday, March 5, 2018 at the Hilton Post Oak (presented by the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce Texas, where I serve as a media consultant).

REGISTRATION LINKS FOLLOW BELOW.

Slow Wine (where I work as an editor for the guide) will be coming to Houston for the first time: at our morning seminar, I will be leading a tasting of 8 Piedmont wines selected from the guide’s prizes.

Next, BBQ writer Chris Reid, Italian wine legend Brian Larky, and I will be leading a tasting of Lambrusco paired with Texas BBQ. Top local smokers will be providing the food.

Finally in the afternoon, I’ll be leading a seminar on traditional balsamic vinegar with pairings by Chef Danny Trace from Osso & Kristalla and Potente.

And of course, the all-day Grand Tasting will feature both Slow Wine and Taste of Italy wineries and wines.

It’s a BIG BIG SHOW and the seminars are already almost sold out. Please register to make sure there’s a spot for you. And if you want a media pass and/or if you want to volunteer (which gives you access to the whole lasagna), please shoot me an email.

Hope to see you there! Thanks for your support and interest!

*****

GRAND TASTING
11 A.M. – 5 P.M. (Monday, March 5, 2018 at Hilton Post Oak)
OPEN TO TRADE, MEDIA, AND CONSUMERS.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE GRAND TASTING.

The event will feature more than 200 Italian food products and wines.
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Unless you’ve been living under a volcanic rock, you already know that wines from Sicily’s Mt. Etna have reshaped the Italian viticultural landscape. Nerello Mascalese, the active volcano’s favorite grape variety, has become so popular and so alluring in terms of its potential greatness that some of Italy’s most celebrated winemakers and wine trade players have set up shop there. The country’s most famous natural wine is made on Etna using Nerello. Some of its most coveted red wines are now made there using the same. And some of the top producers there are already hoping to capture a segment of the lucrative classic method market with sparkling wines made from Nerello.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Etna rosso — from the funky to the classic — it’s always been the white wines that have thrilled me the most. That’s partly owed to the fact that my wife and I drink mostly white wine at home. But it’s also thanks to the confluence of freshness and depth that white grape Carricante can achieve when handled by the right practitioners.

The variety’s greatness was on glorious display last week when I tasted Federico Curtaz’ Etna Bianco called “Gamma.” When I looked at the label, I thought to myself, “wow, that takes some real gumption to call a wine ‘Gamma,'” as in the “gamma factor” or “Lorentz Factor”: “the factor by which time, length, and relativistic mass change for an object while that object is moving” according to the Wiki.

But as soon as this wine came into contact with my tongue, I became a believer.

The fruit in the wine was like liquid electricity! Balanced citrus and elegant tropical fruit danced with elegant power in the blessed glass that had been fortunate enough to be filled with this wine.

It’s not a cheap date but it’s worth every last penny. What a wine!

Thank you to Anthony Baladamenti of Palermo Imports for turning me on to this.

Another memorable wine I tasted last week was the Beckham Sophia’s Pinot Noir from Oregon. Electric came to mind again when it came to the vibrant red fruit in this wine. Utterly delicious, with beautiful balance and classic style.

I was also intrigued to learn, thanks to the gent who tasted me on this wine, about the another organic winemaker’s use of azolla as a cover crop. The famed fern is probably what saved our planet from warming in prehistory. And today, it’s used across the farming sector for nitrogen fixation, the replenishment of nitrogen in soil, in this case by organic means.

Some today believe that azolla could be used to save the planet. And it’s been fascinating to read up on and learn more about the Azolla Event in the time before time.

In today’s troubled times, we could all use a more azolla in our diets.

Thanks to James Endicott of Vinocity Selections for turning me on to this excellent wine and hipping me to the azolla movement.

Above: the Zonin winery in Vicenza province, Italy. The Zonin winery group owns estates in Veneto, Piedmont, Tuscany, Sicily, and the U.S., among other properties.

Italian wine mogul and banker Gianni Zonin made headlines in Italy last July when he was spotted shopping with his wife in Milan’s exclusive Via Montenapoleone commercial district. At the time, the 80-year-old ex-president of the failed Banca Popolare di Vicenza was under investigation for stock manipulation and obstruction of regulatory authorities.

When the investigators published their findings the following month, they reported that 118,000 clients lost their savings when the Banca Popolare di Vicenza collapsed.

The European Central Bank “euthanized” the Vicenza bank less than two weeks before the Zonins’ shopping spree (New York Times). Gianni Zonin had been its president from 1996 to 2015. (Read an English-language account of the initial probe by Reuters here.)

Zonin and his family made headlines again this week in the Italian media when it was reported that Italian authorities had seized a mere 346,000 euros from the ex-banker in the wake of the financial scandal.

“A drop in the sea,” was how Giulio Romani, Italian Trade Union Federation (First CISL), described it. “It barely corresponds to 34 percent of Zonin’s more than 1 million euro salary in 2015,” the last year he served as the bank’s president.

In another report published in the Italian media earlier this week, financial investigators reported that in order to protect his fortune, the winemaker transferred ownership of “‘nearly all of his property’ to one of his sons and his wife in two transactions on January 15 and May 13, 2016.”

According to Italian Magistrate Roberto Venditti, the judge who ordered the seizure, “the accused [Zonin] gave the majority of his financial assets to family members over the course of two years.”

The news of the seizure and Zonin’s financial dealings in the wake of the bank’s collapse have emboldened members of the Facebook page Noi che credevamo Nella Banca Popolare di Vicenza (We who believed in the Banca Popolare di Vicenza).

Above: “Boycott the grape grower,” a flier featuring winemaker and ex-banker Gianni Zonin, posted on the Noi che credevamo Nella Banca Popolare di Vicenza Facebook page. The caption at the bottom is a play on the bank’s acronym, BPVI. Translated it reads, “swindle Vicenza residents first.”

The Zonin winery group owns estates in Veneto, Piedmont, Tuscany, Sicily, and the U.S., among other properties. The family’s wines are widely available in North America, including its popular Prosecco, which retails for roughly $13 according to WineSearcher.com. With offices in Charlottesville (VA) and Miami, the family’s Zonin USA is one of the largest wine importers in the country.

See these Reuters profiles of bank clients whose savings were wiped out when the Banca Popolare di Vicenza collapsed on Zonin’s watch.