Today Barolo mourns the loss of one of its greatest grape growers and winemakers, Domenico Clerico, 67, who died yesterday in his home in Monforte d’Alba. According to reports published in mainstream Italian media, the cause was cancer.

Clerico was among the pioneers who reshaped the Barolo landscape when, in the 1980s, he began aging his wines in barriques — new wood, small French oak casks as opposed to the traditional large-format botti made with Slavonian oak.

Not only did his wines appeal to a newly emerged generation of monied American wine enthusiasts, but they also set a new standard for high-quality collectible wines from Italy. At the peak of his “modernist” period in the 1990s, his widely coveted labels fetched previously unprecedented sums for Italian wines at New York’s top Italian restaurants and retailers.

Although most American collectors will remember him as a visionary of the new wave of Barolo producers, he was also one of the first grape growers there to embrace organic growing practices. Even at the height of his popularity among top America wine buyers and critics, he always pointed to his obsessive approach to grape farming — not his winemaking style — as the secret behind his wines’ extraordinary aromatic character and nuanced flavors.

Many among the current generation of Piedmont winemakers and vignerons looked to him as role model and inspiration for their own work in the vineyard.

“A master and a great man,” posted Barbera d’Asti winemaker Gianluca Morino on his Facebook yesterday (translation mine).

“Thank you for everything, Domenico. We grew up with your Arte,” wrote Morino, referring to Clerico’s groundbreaking blend of barrique-aged Nebbiolo and Barbera “Arte” (art), first released in the 1980s and considered to be one of the first “Super-Piedmont” wines.

No matter where he will be remembered in the modernist vs. traditionalist spectrum, there is no doubt that Clerico produced some of the world’s greatest and most memorable wines over the last three decades.

In a quote reposted on Clerico’s American importer’s web site, leading Italian wine critic and authority Antonio Galloni wrote that “few producers’ wines have given me as much pleasure over the years as those of Domenico Clerico.”

My wife Tracie P and I had the great fortune to dine with Domenico last July in Piedmont. Over the course of our meal, he spoke openly about his decision to abandon small-cask aging and to return to the traditional botti instead. As we tasted some of his top single-vineyard designated wines from the 2000s, he insisted however that their greatness — and man, they were great! — was owed to the quality of the fruit rather than the modernist approach of the winemaker.

A man known for his colorful character and trailblazing work in setting new benchmarks for Italian wine, it was clear to both me and Tracie that it was substance, not style, that had defined the career and life of one of the world’s greatest winemakers.

Sit tibi terra levis Dominice.

Just had to share a tasting note for this wine by my bromance Giovanni Arcari and his partner, another one of my best friends in Italy, Nico Danesi.

Giovanni and I were still a little blurry on Sunday after an epic day partying lakeside near Salò on Lake Garda the day before. But a late-morning start didn’t stop us from a quick visit to Giovanni and Nico’s cellar in Coccaglio (on the southern border of the Franciacorta appellation, below).

Giovanni generously hooked me up with a bottle of their 2011 Franciacorta Extra Brut for me to take to dinner on my last night in Italy. I was heading to Milan to meet one of my best friends from my University of Padua days, Stefano Spigariol, who’s also celebrating a milestone birthday this weekend. Our mutual friend Gavino Falchi, a Milan based architect and designer, was in charge of the menu.

The wine was made from 100 percent Pinot Noir grapes and was disgorged in May 2015.

Gavino was worried that the wine wouldn’t have the weight to stand up to the richly flavored Guinea hen that he had braised with porcini essence, olives, and nutmeg (note the vintage Richard Ginori plate he brought to serve this superb dish, below).

But, man, the chewy ripe red fruit character of the wine sang with the earthiness and fattiness of the fowl. We were all blown away by how the delicate fruit notes on the nose were transformed into such robust flavor in the mouth. And all the while, the wine’s freshness hadn’t been diminished a bit by the more than 24 months that had passed since being disgorged.

Giovanni and Nico have shared so many memorable bottles of their wine with me and my friends. But this was one of the most remarkable in terms of its glowing, brilliant fruit character. What a wine!

I’m so proud to count Giovanni and Nico among my closest friends: I’ve been giving them a hand this year marketing their wines in the U.S. and they should be coming to Texas by the fall.

I’m also blessed to have found such a great friend in Stefano so many years ago (nearly 30!). He and I share so many interests in literature, music, and critical theory. And our discussions with Gavino are always lively and thought-provoking as we enjoy Gavino’s superb homey cooking.

All in all, between teaching all week at the university in Bra, a dreamy day of eating and drinking by the lake with my Franciacorta crew, and an excellent confabulatio spent with my Milanese comrades over Giovanni and Nico’s wine, it was a pretty swell trip.

And dulcis in fundo, Tracie P and the girls are coming to pick me up this afternoon at Bush airport back in Houston.

Thanks for being here and see you on the other side…

As much I as cherish my memories from my university days in California and Italy, I realize now that the cafeteria food really sucked back then.

The grub at the University of Padua was, hands down, a lot better than U.C.L.A.’s. And getting the small plastic cup of wine that was served with your meal on Via San Francesco — red or white, optional — was pretty nifty. But it was still a far cry from the daily bread offered up in the chow line at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont where I’m teaching this week.

Those are some of “Digital Age Food Writing” students yesterday, above. And the tray below was my own.

That’s tartrà on the right, a savory pudding made with eggs, onions, and herbs, a classic dish of Piedmontese country cooking.

And I know that my wife Tracie P will be glad to see that I got my daily allotment of freshly picked leafy greens! (Well, she already knows because we are constantly messaging each other throughout our days on either continent, but just the same a picture is worth a thousand words…)

Our one Russian classmate and I bonded over the beet soup that was also on the menu yesterday.

She remarked that it reminded her of the borscht that she ate as a kid. She was surprised to learn that it was one of my childhood standbys as well, a staple of Russian-Jewish immigrants like my grandparents (oops, did I just say immigrants?).

We are halfway through our culinary writing class and this afternoon, following our morning session on food blogging and social media trends, I’ll lead my first seminar on “Wine in Boccaccio’s Decameron.”

Pane per i miei denti, as they say in Italian! Something [bread] I can really sink my teeth into!

Every day this week, I’m doing back-to-back three-hour seminars with a one-hour break in between. It’s only Wednesday and I’m already fried but nothing could be more exhilarating for me than to find myself back on campus, the habitat where I feel most at home and fulfilled.

And as if I didn’t have a teaching load heavy enough, I’ll be playing a set of music tomorrow night at L’Alfieri on the edge of downtown Bra, a township that lives and breathes the Slow Food ethos. The restaurant/bar is run by a Belgian alumnus of the university who serves a international menu, including great Indian food, together with craft beers and natty wines. Come and join us if you happen to be in this neck of the woods!

That’s Italian wine legend Giorgio Grai (above, right) with leading Italian wine retailer and former winemaker Francesco Bonfio, co-founder of the newly launched Association of Italian Wine Shop Professionals, known as AEPI (Associazione Enotecari Professionisti Italiani). They convened last month for the group’s first seminar for its members in the Colli Euganei (they are posing in front of Italian humanist Francis Petrarch’s house in Arquà Petrarca, in the heart of the appellation, where the poet spent his final years).

I wanted to bring their new site to your attention because it also includes a blog that Francesco and his colleagues intend to populate with Italian wine news and stories. For example, they just published a video interview with Gianni Bortolotti, farmer, gourmet, and food and wine connoisseur who was widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on enogastronomy in the Valle d’Aosta. The interview was published on the seventh anniversary of his passing.

They also recently posted a video interview with Mr. Grai (filmed on the occasion of his seminar for the group), one of Italy’s most renowned winemakers and blenders and one of the wine world’s most fascinating and colorful characters.

I’m looking forward to following their feed and I imagine you will find it as useful and interesting as I do.

(Full disclosure: Francesco is one of my best friends in Italy and I am a huge fan of both him and Mr. Grai. Image courtesy of AEPI.)

The other new wine (and Italian wine) resource I’m really excited about is Alice Feiring’s newly released book The Dirty Guide to Wine: Following Flavor from Ground to Glass (Countryman Press 2017).

Diversity in soil type and how it impacts the aroma and flavor profile of wines from around the world is arguably the most controversial and often the most exciting component of wine education and connoisseurship today. And this new entry by Alice, written with Master Sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier, is (to my knowledge) the first stand-alone work on the topic, digging deep(er) perhaps than any wine writer’s efforts before her.

I’ve only had a chance to leaf sift through the review copy sent to me by the publisher but it’s what I’ll be reading tonight on my flight to Europe on my way to lecture at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont next week. I can’t imagine I won’t be including it in my syllabus for the wine writing seminars I’ll be leading there later this year. And I’ll report back with my notes once I till my way through…

(Full disclosure: Alice is one of my dearest and most cherished friends, she’s the owner of New York City’s most famous toilet and bathtub, and she makes the best salad in Manhattan.)

And lastly, from the department of “all the news that’s fit to blog about,” I was catching up on my Feedly this week when I read that the Association of Italian Sommeliers (AIS) recently certified its first blind member, Antonio Tramacere, age 49, a resident of Lecce province in Puglia (that’s the Santa Croce Basilica in the historic center of Lecce above).

“Today, I’m a sommelier, finally,” said Tramacere in a press release issued by the association, “even though I was not able to complete the visual test [required] in the exam.”

“As Giacomo Tachis used to say, ‘our sense of smell is how the soul and our emotions see.’ This phrase is my North Star.”

(Image via CanteleUSA.com, a blog I run for my client Cantele.)

From the department of “those who drink and don’t drink again don’t know what drinking is”…

Above: “Bacchanal of the Andrians” by Titian (1490-1576) in the Prado Museum (image via Wikipedia Creative Commons). See this label entry on the Museo del Prado website. Click the image for higher resolution version.

“I strive to make the world a better place to eat in.”

That’s the closing line of one of the bios of one of my students at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo (Piedmont), where I will be delivering two lecture series next week for the Master’s programs.

The university was founded in 2004, the organic outgrowth of the historic Slow Food Movement.

I can still remember like it was yesterday: during my first year at university in Italy (Padua) in 1987, I made my first trip to Rome where I saw the mega-sized McDonald’s at the foot of the Spanish Steps (Trinità dei Monti), opened the previous year. To a 19-year-old wide-eyed kid in Italy for the first time, it seemed as incongruous as obscene, a non sequitur in its surroundings and an oxymoron in its cultural setting.

According to legend, the Slow Food movement was inspired, informed, and shaped by a desire to counter the fast-foodization of Italy. And the opening of the McDonald’s in Rome’s historic center became its battle cry. Today, some 30 years later, the Slow Food ethos continues to drive more than one generation’s desire to achieve culinary self-awareness and gastronomic sustainability. Strive to make the world a better place to eat in: it could very well be the Slow Food university’s motto.

The seminar I’m the most excited about is my “Wine in Boccaccio” series of talks.

Wine plays a more important role in the Decameron than you might imagine. And in many ways, Boccaccio’s work represents a bridge that leads to the “new” wine culture of the Renaissance.

Of the “three crowns” of Italian literature in the Middle Ages, most point to (my beloved) Petrarch as the “first humanist.” Some even call his predecessor Dante a “proto-humanist.” But both Petrarch and Dante are wary of wine and reluctant to even discuss it.

It’s in Boccaccio’s work that enogastronomy is distilled (or rather fermented) into a new science, a new knowledge, and a new self-awareness absent in Dante and Petrarch. And wine in the Decameron sets the stage for a new and heightened interest in wine in the coming renewal of learning — the Renaissance. In many ways, Titian’s painting above would not have been possible without the Decameron and a new conception of what wine is and what role it plays in the human experience and condition.

Isn’t that painting above incredible? It depicts a Bacchanal on the island of Andros, where a river of wine flowed (click this link to read Philostratus’ description of the island [the link only works once in preview mode before you have to subscribe fyi]).

The lyrics of the music in the foreground are: qui boyt et ne reboyt il ne seet que boyre soit (those who drink and don’t drink again don’t know what drinking is).

The score and the painting were both composed at the height of the Renaissance at the court of Ferrara. The painter, composer, and courtiers were all intimately familiar with Boccaccio, whose works had been propelled to greater fame and fortune thanks to the advent of the printing press.

Next week, we will read and we will read again… and we might just taste some wine as well. I can’t wait…

With increasing audacity, more and more independent California winemakers are finding their way to the once enologically challenged state of Texas, where market demand for wholesome wines is increasingly fueled by unfettered access to information on the internets. Myriad wine buyers in my adoptive state have told me that they read about a given wine on a blog authored beyond our borders or they saw the wine in an email offering or post by a metropolitan wine monger on a coast other than the Gulf. And then they just have to have it.

I first read about the excellent wines of Clos Saron and winemaker Gideon Bienstock on my friend Alice Feiring’s blog (maybe you’ve heard of her, America’s leading advocate for natural wine?). And I was overjoyed to find that a few bottles recently landed on the shelves of my favorite Houston wine retailer.

There’s been so much talk in recent years about the pitfalls of “natural” wine, in other words, wine farmed without the use of chemicals; fermented solely with naturally occurring “ambient” yeast; and stabilized with as little winemaker intervention and sulfur as possible. The natural wine detractors are often right to point out that “natural” and even “organic” are labels sometimes (mis)used to market wines with defective character. They point out that the wines can be “mousy” or “cidery” and that they often show volatile acidity, that vinegar or nail polish smell that usually blows off when the wines are otherwise good. The natural wine label shouldn’t be an excuse for faulty winemaking, they assert.

Now is not the time, place, or space to enter into the labyrinth of semiosis that often accompanies these discussions. But the bottomline is that it’s never counterproductive to maintain a genuinely critical approach to tasting any wine. And as much as I may admire the winemaker for their devotion to her/his laudable mission of making wines without chemicals or additives, I don’t refrain from expressing my opinion as the quality of natural wine — or any wine, for that matter. I don’t like natural wines simply because they are labeled as such. And similarly, I don’t shun wines that don’t claim to be natural (the real issue, in my mind, isn’t whether or not wines are natural or not but rather whether or not we penalize wines that don’t claim to be natural).

I don’t know that winemaker Gideon claims his wines are natural, although I believe the trade generally considers him one of the leading natural winemakers in the U.S. today. I do know, now that I’ve tasted one of his wines for the first time, that his rosé (above) is one of the best wines I’ve tasted this year. It’s made mostly from Syrah with a balance of field blend of red and some white grapes grown in Lodi, he writes on his website.

This wine had the verve and electricity that you often find in the best natural wines. And its fresh ripe red fruit aromas only became more succulent and delicious in the mouth, with just enough savory character to give that yin-yang balance. Man, it didn’t take long for the Parzen-Levy mishpucha to drink it down last Friday evening: the best indication of how lip-smackingly good it was.

What a great wine and what a great night with our families… Natural wine done right and a family jamboree to boot!

Opening a bottle of wine is always a wager, a gamble that can pay dividends of pleasure or a bet that can end in a broken promise of delight unfulfilled.

And every bottle of wine is like a dance partner: you can ask him/her to the dance floor but he/she may or may not accept your invitation; and once/if he/she accepts and the dance begins, you and he/she may or may not align in step and rhythm. Sometimes, when the stars align just so, you can make beautiful music together.

When one of my best friends in Houston and I asked our waiter to open a bottle of Giovanna Rizzolio’s 2011 Cascine delle Rose Barbaresco Tre Stelle the other night at Da Marco, it felt like we were dancing with the stars. Three stars, to be exact: Tre Stelle, the name of the hamlet where Giovanna and her family grow, vinify, and bottle their excellent wines (one of the menzioni geografiche aggiuntive or additional geographic designations allowed in labeling Barbaresco).

Man, what a wine! Zinging acidity with a wonderful balance of dark red fruit, subtle anise, ripe tannin, and an earthiness that imparts a savory character to these long-lived wines.

At six years out from its harvest, I imagine that this wine will “shut down,” as they say in the trade, at some point in future.

But right now it’s going through a state of graceful expression of its fruit, with tannin that doesn’t overwhelm its fruit and umami character.

It was also great to experience Da Marco, one of Houston’s leading and storied Italian fine dining destinations, where legacy chef Marco Wiles takes his inspiration from classic Italian cuisine.

I’d never eaten there before and I was really impressed with the general service and the wine service in particular. Seafood is the restaurant’s speciality, I was told, but that night we opted for the housemade tagliatelle with fresh porcini and prosciutto — a SUPER pairing for the Barbaresco, mirroring the sweetness of the Nebbiolo’s fruit and its savory earth.

The restaurant was packed on a Tuesday night and the vibe was right. I wouldn’t call it a cheap date but our servers, the kitchen, and the wine delivered every last penny worth of our bill.

I really enjoyed it a lot.

As I drank the last glass of the Nebbiolo and relaxed into the brio of the evening, I thought about those nights that Tracie P and I spent at Giovanna’s farmhouse on our honeymoon in 2010 — seven and a half years ago now. Looking out from the hamlet of Tre Stelle across the small valley, you could see the most famous vineyards of Barbaresco — Asili, Martinenga, and Rabajà — covered in snow.

Since Tracie and I came together and got married, our lives have been filled with too many blessings to count — big and small. Giovanna’s wines are one of them.

Thanks to everyone who commented on and shared my post this week “Waiter, waiter: please don’t tell me my wine ISN’T corked!” Honestly, I never imagined that it would strike such a nerve. In case you missed the Facebook thread, check it out here. Buon weekend a tutti! Have a great weekend, everyone!