What a thrill for me to lead my first seminar on the UniSG campus this morning!

My first seminar in the Master’s in Italian Wine Culture program seemed to fly by as the students and I discussed the power of social media in marketing wine; the subjective and self-referential nature of wine writing and wine blogging; and pioneering wine blogs and taste-makers who have shaped the enoblogosphere as we know it today.

Topics ranged from Gertrude Stein and her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (the ultimate self-referential novel) to Roland Barthes and the notion of [wine] Writing Degree Zero (and so much more in between).

And as an experiment and exercise, we also tasted two wines, a white and a red, first blind and then with the labels revealed. As we reviewed our notes, we discussed how wine writing can span the sensorial and the cultural and how most wine writing lands somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

We also looked at three different descriptions of the same wine: the winery’s fact sheet; a score and tasting note; and a highly lyrical tasting note. Again, here, we looked at how wine writing can fall anywhere in between the purely technical to the nearly idiolectal (the most extreme form of self-referential wine writing).

It was a great morning, spent in the company of highly talented, motivated, and simpatico people.

After class, we all headed together to the campus cafeteria were the culinary theme of the day was Indian cuisine. And after lunch and coffee, we all gathered outside in the sunshine where the students asked me questions about life in Texas and America and shared their own impressions from their travels there (even in Texas, where one student told me he had the best steak he had ever tasted!).

One thing that is super cool about the Master’s in Italian Wine Culture program is that the group (11 students) is very close and shares all of their lunchtime meals together. Honestly, I’ve never seen a class of graduate students who were so in-tune with each other (usually it’s the opposite). The camaraderie and solidarity were as refreshing as they were inspiring.

A great first day on campus and looking forward to tomorrow’s seminar!

Click here to learn more about the Master’s in Italian Wine Culture program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo.

Click here to learn more about the Master’s in Italian Wine Culture program at UniSG where I begin teaching this week.

And please follow along here on the blog where I’ll be posting about my experience on campus. Thanks for being here…

Above: Taking a photograph of grapes (like these Chardonnay grapes) is a form of enography or wine writing. Some would argue it’s one of the purest forms because it simply captures a fleeting moment in the grape vine’s (and the wine’s) growing cycle.

One of the greatest works of critical theory to emerge from the 20th-century was Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero. It’s a nuanced critique of social realism and the role that literature plays in the expression thereof. It was one of the first works among many that would follow where the “text” was considered distinctly from the author of the text.

Nietzsche said that G-d is dead.

Barthes said (in much more subtle and profound tones than I will go into here) that the author is dead.

Woody Allen said that Marx is dead… and I don’t feel so good myself.

Joking aside (although the joke is more pertinent here than I think many will realize or appreciate), Barthes probably couldn’t have ever imagined that there would be such a thing as wine blogging, although he surely would have seen it as an expression of bourgeoisie culture. With Writing Degree Zero, he did however give us an important for dissecting and getting to the bottom of the anatomy of a wine blog post.

In Writing Degree Zero, he considers (and am I largely paraphrasing here) writing on a spectrum.

Borrowing liberally from this book, with my own liberal adaptation of his model, we can establish two “poles” of wine writing.

On the one side, let’s say to the left for sake of argument (but not sake of political connotation), you have pure technical wine writing. In other words, writing where clarity and succinctness are key. Instructions on how to build a model airplane would fall on the left side of the spectrum, to give you an example. When it comes to wine writing, a wine fact sheet (a “tech sheet” or technical description of the wine) would similarly fall on the left.

On the very far right hand side of the spectrum, you will find poetical language and even incomprehensible language (in the case of the latter, that would be language that can be defined as an idiolect, a language that only one person speaks). Here, an abstract, hermetic poem by a 20th-century poet is right at home with a lyrical description of a wine (Samantha Dugan’s blog, “Samantha Sans Dosage” is a great example of a wine blog that leans heavily in this direction).

technical description of wine — lyrical description of wine

Nearly every wine blog post will fall somewhere in between these two extremes and in more cases than not, the discourse will lean more toward one pole than the other.

Historically, Robert Parker, Jr. and his 100-point scoring system for the wines he reviews represents one of the most extreme expressions of left-leaning wine writing on Barthes’ spectrum. An extreme example of right-leaning wine writing is represented by Alice Feiring and her highly personal narrative style.

One of the over-arching themes we will be covering in our seminars on wine writing and blogging and how it has evolved in the modern era. The greatest wine writing (I believe) benefits from the tension between those two poles. And the spectrum also gives a guide in understanding how wine writing, in part because of its highly subjective nature, rarely delivers absolute truth.

Ampelographers like José Vouillamoz and Attilio Scienza can argue over the accuracy of their entries for Italian grape varieties. But even in the case of this descriptive form of wine writing, the answers — the accuracy — is often gray as opposed to black and white.

Lyrical writers like Samantha Dugan and Alice Feiring probably don’t argue at all. But is it possible that their writing delivers a clarity and a shade of truth that can only be rendered by their lyrical and narrative styles?

Let’s discuss…

Today’s op-ed is by Thomas Moësse (below), Houston-based sommelier and wine director at Divino, where he runs one of the top Italian-focused wine lists in the state.

Recently, I read Alfonso Cevola’s blog post “The Endangered Wine List in the New Millennium” and spat out my morning tablet of Adderall.

[Editor’s note: in his post, Cevola writes that he doesn’t want “to be dazzled (or blinded) by the wizardry of young somms on the Adderall of ambition.”]

I hold Alfonso in the highest esteem and value his perspective on the constantly shifting and ever-exciting terrain of Italian Wine.

However, in this post Mr. Cevola voiced a series of complaints about the state of the wine list in our market and not without a telltale note of salinity.

He appears to draw a line in the sand. This line seems to exist ideologically between classics and upstarts and sociologically between industry veterans and young wine buyers (referred to as “the Instagram generation”). Mr. Cevola purports to be on the side of the consumer. But I feel differently.

First he mentions a lack of recognizable (“revered” and “essential”) selections on these wine lists. If buyers are foregoing the classics on their lists, maybe it is because they are advocates for their guest first and foremost — both are being left behind by exponential pricing increases and the corresponding unattainability of those vins de garde.

Furthermore, I can speak personally to a trend that I have seen among consumers of wine in restaurants like ours.

Long gone are the comments like “what kind of Italian restaurant doesn’t have Tignanello?” More commonly we encounter questions like “what will go best with our food?” Today’s consumer is not scanning a wine list for producers they recognize so much as they want some help with a discovery. Our job as wine service professionals is part curation and consultation. We ask questions first. We pair the wine with the guest and we form a relationship of trust.

If compiling a selection of essential wines is our only purpose, then why do we work so hard? Why do we travel to wine fairs, visit wineries with eight hectares of singular beauty to better communicate our passion? Is our passion relevant at all? If it’s as easy as he suggests, then maybe Mr. Cevola could write our lists for us (a service that his employer Southern-Glazer’s is more than willing to perform).

Simply put, we are living in the golden era of wine. More growers are producing great wine rather than merely selling their grapes. Their approach is a custodial one. The reverence for vineyard and the avoidance of manipulation constitute a revolution in how we think about wine. These are not just trends, and dwindling are the days of unscrupulous, large-production wines merely sold by the caché of their label.

It takes work to assess the bounty of wines available to us through large distributors and small direct import companies as well as an obligation to our guests to do that research, trust our instincts (not Instagram) and choose vibrant, sound wines for every imaginable consumer that might walk through our door.

That work is fueled by passion, not Adderall.

Thomas Moësse
Divino
Houston

Our thoughts and prayers go out to our sisters and brothers in central Italy this morning: a 6.6 magnitude earthquake struck Norcia (Umbria) shortly before 8 a.m. today (local time).

Luckily, most of the affected areas had already been evacuated in the wake of the 6.2 earthquake that virtually destroyed Amatrice and claimed nearly 300 lives in August of this year. Although some serious injuries and widespread damage to historic buildings have been reported, there have been no deaths as of yet.

After the August quake, the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce Texas set up a PayPal account to accept donations for relief and recovery efforts. The campaign is still active and you can donate by clicking here (the Chamber has been a client of mine since February of this year).

My friend Monica Larner, a wine writer living in Rome, wrote the following on her Facebook this morning and shared the image below:

I’m trying to understand the recent seismic activity that has us all on edge here in Central Italy. The earthquakes are the result of plate compression- one plate is pushed under another. That explains why the land near the epicenters had actually fallen by 20 centimeters since the two strong quakes last Wednesday. I’ve copied this passage from the USGS website (www.earthquake.usgs.gov): “Geologically, the Apennines is largely an accretionary wedge formed as a consequence of subduction. This region is tectonically and geologically complex, involving both subduction of the Adria micro-plate beneath Eurasia and the Apennines from east to west, continental collision between the Eurasia and Nubia (Africa) plates building the Alpine mountain belt further to the north and the opening of the Tyrrhenian basin to the west.”

I’m heading back to Italy tomorrow and will be driving through central Italy on my way to Naples later this week. I’ll report back if I learn anything new about the situation on the ground there.

Like Monica, I grew up in southern California where seismic activity is common. I was living in Los Angeles when the 1994 Northridge quake struck. It scared the living daylights out of all of us. But I’ve never heard of so many major quakes in such a short period of time.

This morning, Tracie and I have our Italian sisters and brothers in our thoughts and prayers.

You can donate to relief efforts here.

How could I not share the photo of the pizza (above) that I devoured joyfully last night at Bufalina in Austin.

My friend Steven Dilley, owner and founder of the concept (which now has two locations in Austin), continues to serve some of the best pizza I’ve ever had and the cured anchovies on this marinara really took it over the top.

And the pie paired exquisitely with a bottle of Abbatucci’s Rouge Frais Impérial from Steven’s ever-natural-minded list.

My date with the pie came on the heels of tasting with Cinzia Travaglini at another Austin restaurant where she was hosting a wine dinner.

Revisiting her wines, I realized that the first time I ever tasted Nebbiolo, it was from Travaglini. Long (very long) before the Italian wine renaissance began to emerge in the late 1990s in the U.S., her family’s wines were already widely available. I remember seeing them in gourmet food shops on the Sunset Strip when I was a grad student at U.C.L.A. And I remember tasting them with my private Italian language students when they treated me to dinner in their homes.

Her 2008 Tre Vigne was still very young and rich in the glass. She talked about how the 08 is going to be a top vintage for the winery and how the wines will age for even up to 30 years. A fantastic wine but it was the 2010 Riserva (below) that really blew me away with its focus and its lithe character and its nuanced layers of red and berry fruit. What a wonderful wine… and what a thrill to get to taste it with her after all these years (she was super nice).

Thanks for being here, everyone, and have a great weekend. I hope you’re drinking something lovely. Buon weekend…

This just in: I’ll be leading the last tasting of my Franciacorta Real Story campaign on Monday, November 14 in Atlanta at a super cool wine shop there, Le Caveau. Please join me! Click here for details.

Above: like me, Sotto’s new wine director Christine Veys attended U.C.L.A. She was featured this summer in U.C.L.A. Magazine. Click here to check out the profile.

I’m about to board a flight from LAX to Houston after leading a super fun wine tasting last night at Sotto where I’ve consulted on the wine list for more than 5 years now.

Not only did we present our new by-the-glass program (“Piedmont: anything but Barolo and Barbaresco”) but we also introduced the restaurant’s new wine director, my good friend and colleague Christine Veys (above).

Christine started as a server when the restaurant first opened (it seems so long ago now!) and it was clear from the beginning that she had a true gift for tasting and describing wine.

A few years ago, she became the wine program manager and she and I have collaborated on the list since that time with great results.

It was high time that she be given the title of wine director: even though I’ve been consulting and doing wine education and some writing and research for the restaurant, she’s been running the list for quite a while and she has really shaped the program into something special (both in terms of sales and personality).

I’m staying on as a consultant with the restaurant and Christine and I will be co-authoring the new list for the group’s newest project, Rossoblu, which is slated to open later this year in downtown LA. We are SUPER excited about that.

Congratulations, Christine! Mazel tov! I knew from the first time we tasted together that you were destined to become a top wine professional. I love working with you and couldn’t have a better partner in crime.

Now it’s time to get my butt back to Texas… Thanks to everyone who came out to taste with me last night and thanks again to Paolo Cantele for tagging along on my crazy adventures between Burgundy in Boulder and Piedmont in LA! Wish me speed!

From the department of “der Meister des giftigen Spotts”…

“The closer the look one takes at a word,
the greater the distance from which it looks back.”
—Karl Kraus

As I continue to prepare for the seminars on English-language wine writing and wine blogging that I will be leading next week and the following (as part of the UniSG Master’s in Wine Culture program), I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of truth in wine (writing) and how we perceive absolute truths in our awareness of wine when it is depicted or described in words.

There’s an ancient association of truth and wine that looms over the notion of truth in enography: The Latin motto in vino veritas, which, when translated literally, is rendered in English as [there is] truth in wine.

Some attribute the earliest exemplar of the expression to a fragment of a lost poem by the ancient Greek poet Alcaeus (although, beyond a Wikipedia mention, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of substance in the assertion that Alcaeus was the first to utter the phrase).

Italian scholarship points to the sophist (or teacher for hire) Zenobius as the first chronicler of the phrase, which he included in a collection of aphorisms.

To my knowledge, all concur that the Latin expression is an adaptation of the Greek εν οἴνῳ ἀλήθεια (en oinoi aletheia). And here’s where it gets interesting.

Whereas veritas means truth or reality in Latin, aletheia has a slightly different meaning in Greek. It’s generally translated as…

Click here to continue reading my post for the University of Gastronomic Sciences blog. Thanks for reading!

Earlier in the day, Jancis’ husband Nicholas Lander (a venerated food writer in his own right) had joked wryly: “whole-cluster fermentation? A topic that’s surely on everyone’s minds!”

But there couldn’t have been a more rapt crowd at yesterday’s marquee event at the Boulder Burgundy Festival: a seminar and guided tasting led by legacy winemaker Étienne de Montille, Master of Wine Jancis Robinson (yes, if you are here, you know what a megawatt celebrity and fantastic speaker she is), and Master of Wine Brett Zimmerman, founder of the festival.

I’ve been blogging about the festival (as the gathering’s official chronicler) here.

Thanks again to Brett for making me part of this extraordinary weekend of tastings and seminars. And thanks to Jancis and Étienne for your remarkable contribution. I can’t imagine a more thrilling guided tasting.

So much time and so little to tell: today, I’m making my way to Sotto in Los Angeles where I co-author the wine list and where I’ll be hosting a sold-out tasting of our new fall by-the-glass program tomorrow. Apologies for anyone who couldn’t get into the tasting but please come by the restaurant afterward for a glass if you are in town. Please wish me speed and thanks for your support!

Posting on the fly today from Boulder, Colorado where I’m serving as the Boulder Burgundy Festival’s official blogger.

The party’s just got started: Last night, bromance Paolo and I attended the festival’s Champagne kick-off event where we and guests were treated to a beefy flight of Krug, including 2002 and 2003 bottlings. Holy cow, people… It would be a tough flight to beat but the “Old and Rare Burgundy” seminar this afternoon with Masters Jay Fletcher, Bobby Stuckey, Richard Betts, and featured guest winemaker Étienne de Montille should best it handily. Stay tuned for updates…

In news from home…

My friend Christian Varas (below, center), who serves as wine director at Houston’s exclusive River Oaks Country Club, took home the prestigious Iron Sommelier prize last night at the Periwinkle Foundation’s charity event.

I wrote it up early this morning for the Houston Press (thanks to the Periwinkle’s publicist who sent me the release late last night and photographer Dave Rossman, who shot the gala affair).

Mazel tov, Christian! The prize couldn’t have gone to a more able or talented wine professional. Congratulations…

And in a stunning move that has left many Houston wine lovers fearing that one of the city’s brightest stars will leave them high and dry, David Keck announced yesterday on Facebook that he is leaving Camerata, the immensely successful wine bar he founded. Here’s the write-up by CultureMap, where Keck tells Eric Sandler that he doesn’t plan to leave the Bayou City (phew!).

Can we now tell David that camerata was a fascist salutation? Will his next venture be called Товарищ?

Joking aside, David’s contribution to the growth and health of the Houston wine scene has been enormous and we are all in his debt for his vision and the spirit of collegiality that he instilled into the wine community. He will be sorely missed behind the bar of Camerata, which he named after the Renaissance-era Florentine Camerata (meaning Florentine chamber or salon; camerata is a homonym in Italian that can mean comrade or chamber [in archaic Italian], as in chamber music), a nod to his career as professional opera singer. Thank you, David, for all you’ve done and we look forward to the next chapter!

That’s all the news that’s fit to blog about. Stay tuned for more from the Boulder Burgundy Festival over the weekend, including a seminar and tasting led by Master of Wine Jancis Robinson and Étienne…