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!

Last week, while touring vineyards and tasting with winemakers in northern California, I stopped into a popular restaurant for a before-dinner glass of wine in one of the area’s trendy tourist districts.

After I took a seat at the bar, the bartender walked me through a couple of by-the-glass rosé selections. They all sounded good, even though I didn’t know any of the producers. I asked her to pour me one of her favorites. Her ability to rattle off all the grape varieties in each wine and describe the style of each was impressive. It was clear that she was familiar with all of the restaurant’s by-the-glass offerings and I was confident that I was in good hands.

The wine was icy cold and it took it a few minutes to warm up in the glass. It had some good fruit in the mouth but the nose was still very muted because of the temperature. I took a few sips and by the time I had drunk about half of the glass, I realized that it was corked.

I’m sure that this has happened to many of you: when the wine is too cold, it can be hard to determine its fitness or “correctness.” Even some of the best tasters I know don’t catch corkiness at the first sniff, especially when it’s subtle. It’s even more challenging when the wine is too cold.

The restaurant and its bar were both really busy on a Thursday night in the early weeks of the prime wine tourism season. And it took a moment before the bartender checked back in with me.

When I mentioned that the wine was corked, she looked puzzled. She then promptly grabbed the bottle from the tub of ice behind the bar and poured herself a taste. She swirled and sniffed and unequivocally declared that “the wine definitely isn’t corked but I’ll be happy to pour you something else.”

It’s possible that I was wrong and I appreciated her offer to pour me something else.

But what is the point of challenging the guest regarding the corkiness or fitness of a wine?

I was alone that evening but what if I was out with my significant other or with a colleague or client? It made me feel crummy enough that she felt it necessary to belittle my ability as a taster. But what if I had been on a special-occasion date with my wife on our trip to California wine country? The awkwardness that her insistence created would have only put a crinkle into what would have otherwise been a seamlessly lovely evening.

There’s no doubt that servers, sommeliers, and bartenders who work in wine country often encounter citizen wine lovers who don’t have a lot of experience in tasting and determining wine fitness. But in my view, that’s all the more reason not to challenge the guest’s take on the wine.

Many years ago, while dining at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in the U.S., I told a sommelier that I believed a wine was corked. He tasted it and said it wasn’t and didn’t even offer to bring me something else. Was his pride as a taster more important to him than his mission to provide a great dining experience? (Never mind that he had a huge steel plug pierced into his tongue, easy to spot when he opened his mouth it was so large.)

My server ended up pouring me a fine glass of Anthony Truchard’s Chardonnay and didn’t charge me for my first glass. I really appreciated that. But what was the point of challenging my assessment of the wine when the restaurant (or at least the bar) has a policy of substituting wines by-the-glass (and not charging for them) when the guest questions the wine’s fitness?

She could have easily replaced the wine and then discreetly tasted the questionable wine (not in front of me).

I can’t imagine that she didn’t pour the rest of that bottle for other guests that evening. Too bad for them…