Taste 4 Lambruscos with me in Los Angeles
with Emilian bites by Chef Steve Samson

Tuesday, August 8
6:30 p.m.
Rossoblu
$40 per person
1124 San Julian St.
Los Angeles CA 90015
Google map

Please call (213) 749-1099 to reserve.

Above: image via the Italian Communist Party’s Reggio Emilia Facebook page. Reggio Emilia is in the heart of Lambrusco and Parmigiano Reggiano country.

On Tuesday of this week, I shocked a few people (all friends, thank goodness) at my Lambrusco tasting in Houston when I spoke about Lambrusco’s relationship with historic Communism and Marxism.

The thesis of my talk was what I call the Lambrusco paradox.

Emilia is home to some of the world’s most celebrated, coveted, and costly food products: Prosciutto di Parma, Culatello, Zampone, Parmigiano Reggiano, and aged balsamic vinegars.

A 100ml bottle of traditional balsamic vinegar from Modena will set you back nearly $830 at Walmart in the U.S., for example.

At my local gourmet market in Houston, to cite a more mundane example, 12-month aged Parmigiano Reggiano costs $21 a pound!

The Via Emilia corridor — Modena, Reggio Emilia, and Parma townships — is home to some of the most famous gastronomy in the world.

But the only wine that the Emilians serve with their food products is an inexpensive, humble, and monodimensional wine made from a grape that is so tannic and bitter that you have to add sugar to it to make it drinkable — Lambrusco.

I spent a considerable amount of time in Emilia when I was in graduate school, first when I taught American students in Modena and then later when I was writing my dissertation and living cheaply on the outskirts of Reggio Emilia. My connection to Emilia runs even deeper thanks to my 30-year friendship with Chef Steve Samson, owner of and chef behind Rossoblu in Los Angeles where I co-author the wine list. He grew up spending summers at his mom’s house in Bologna (and Rossoblu is his first restaurant devoted to his family’s culinary heritage; his dad, from Brooklyn, studied medicine in Bologna in the 60s and married Steve’s mom, who grew up there).

I can tell you from personal experience that Emilians rarely drink any other wine than Lambrusco with their traditional dishes. And the only wine that they recommend pairing with their top food products is Lambrusco: not Nebbiolo, not Sangiovese, not Aglianico… It’s Lambrusco, period, end of report.

I’ll never forget bringing back a six-pack of Brunello di Montalcino from Tuscany to Modena and having my Emilian friends look at me like I was crazy. Why would we drink anything else besides Lambrusco with our cuisine? they asked me rhetorically.

So what is the origin of this disconnect, this conundrum? Why don’t the Emilians — from the entitled to the middle and working classes — reach for a “Super Emilian” to pair with their famous delicacies?

I believe that the answer lies in part with their region’s historic embrace of communism and Marxism.

In the decades that followed Italy’s reconstruction and historic “economic miracle,” politics and policy in Emilia were dominated by the Italian Communist Party — from the local to the regional level. The overwhelming majority of mayors, municipal council, and regional committee members were members of the Italian Communist Party. And that trend continued until the second half of the 1990s when the Tangentopoli (Bribesville) scandal marked the beginning of the end of relevance for the socialist and communist parties in Italy.

Evidence of that legacy is the fact that throughout Emilia you will find streets named after Marx and Lenin and St. Petersburg.

It was no surprise to me when I discovered that one of the wines I presented the other night in Houston comes from a winery located on Via Carlo Marx in a small village in Reggio Emilia province (the image below of Via Carlo Marx in Bologna, Emilia’s capital city, comes from Wikimapia.org).

Communism was always deliciously palatable in Emilia: in the years that followed Italy’s reconstruction, Emilia quickly emerged as one of the country’s richest regions thanks in no small part to the food industry there. After all, the Via Emilia corridor runs parallel to the Po River, the heart of Italy’s agricultural epicenter (akin to California’s San Joaquin Valley or the Loire Valley in France).

It’s easy to be a communist and a Marxist in a region where there is plenty of Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano Reggiano for everyone.

But there’s no space in a Marxist realm for elitist wines. Not only is the Po River Valley a place where the humidity and heat make it nearly impossible to produce fine wines, it’s also a place where no one really cares about fine wines (except when it comes to restaurants that cater to tourists).

Over the last 20 years, the hard right has risen in Emilia (and throughout northern Italy) and in most cases has wrested power from the Italian Communist Party.

But there’s no doubt in my mind that Marxist spirit and ethos continue to shape the Emilian’s love for and devotion to their humble Lambrusco, a proletarian wine that pairs brilliantly with their “queens” and “kings” of food products.

There’s a lot more to this than space and time allow for here (and I’ll expand on it in upcoming posts; I’ll also write about the origins of Lambrusco and why it’s the wine that it is today).

But in the meantime, I hope you’ll come out to taste with me week after next in downtown Los Angeles: I promise not to talk (too much) about Karl Marx!

In case you didn’t get the allusion in the title of this post, it comes from Gadda’s extraordinary book, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana.

It’s 8 a.m. Monday morning, July 24, and I am back in the saddle and back at my desk after nearly three weeks on the road between teaching in Italy and vacationing with my family in La Jolla, California, where I grew up. Here are some scenes from our vacation (images and notes from my last Italian sojourn forthcoming).

There were so many highlights from our summer vacation this year. But I’ll never forget that magical moment of finally being strapped in aboard a plane bound for California. The folks at Southwest were super nice and everyone was super cool about our car seats on the plane (I can’t say that every airline is like that!).

Here’s the view that awaited us on the other side. That’s the La Jolla Children’s Pool (beach), where I used to swim as a kid.

The Children’s pool has been taken over by the seals in recent years. So I took the girls nearly every morning to search for shells at the nearby La Jolla Cove, where the seals also hang out but still leave enough room for humans.

On Friday, July 14, we celebrated my 50th birthday (!!!) with an all-star hometown show at La Jolla’s sole rock club, Beaumont’s.
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For years now, there has been talk of a Lambrusco renaissance in the U.S. And while there have been many valiant attempts to hip Americans to what Lambrusco really is and why it is so great, it’s only in recent years that a confluence of factors — ranging from a new and growing wave of independent importers and distributors in the U.S. to Americans’ expanding and incessant thirst to (re)discover Italian viticulture — has made Lambrusco’s risorgimento possible.

I’m proud to say that I’ve made my own modest contribution to the Lambrusco revival: our wine list at the newly opened Rossoblu in Los Angeles (one of my clients) already has one of the largest (if not the largest) selection of Lambrusco in the country, including a robust rotating and evolving by-the-glass program.

In the light of the new age of Lambrusco, I asked my good friend Thomas Moësse if I could host a Lambrusco tasting and seminar at the excellent Vinology wine bar and shop in Houston where he authors the wine list. It’s one of my favorite wine retailers and wine programs in the city.

“Lambrusco, Karl Marx, and a Proletarian Wine for a Capitalist Age”
Seminar and Tasting with Jeremy Parzen
Tuesday, July 25, 6:30 p.m.
Vinology (Houston)

PLEASE REGISTER BY SENDING ME AN EMAIL HERE.

You have to RSVP by emailing me. The venue won’t be taking reservations. There are a limited number of seats so please contact me soonest to ensure availability.

Vinology
2314 Bissonnet St.
@ Greenbriar Dr.
West University
Houston TX 77005
(832) 849-1687
Google map

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.)