THANK YOU to everyone who came out to taste Franciacorta last week in California. I’ll be posting a report on all three tastings over on the Franciacorta Real Story blog later this week. But in the meantime, a couple of notes from the trip…

Above: a new and more acidity-driven style of wine is emerging among producers of “cult” wines from Napa.

San Diego-based winemaker Duncan Williams and I first met in 2007 when I was researching Italian grape varieties grown on Californian soil. I visited him at a winery in Fallbrook in southern California where he was growing and vinifying Sangiovese at the time. Impressed with the freshness and overall drinkability of his wines, I’ve stayed in touch with him over the years and we occasionally taste together when I’m in San Diego.

On Saturday, following the Franciacorta Real Story tasting at Jaynes Gastropub, he tasted me on one of his new wines, the 2012 Williams and Heim Triple Entendre (50% Cabernet Sauvignon, 33% Merlot, 17% Cabernet Franc).

This wine had healthy acidity and good balance. Although the wine is very young and has at least a few years ahead of it before it fully comes into focus, its wood (55% new barriques) is already well integrated and its alcohol didn’t jump out ahead of the wine.

I liked it a lot. If you’re looking for a new cult Napa wine to collect, this is the ground floor. Check it out here.

In other Californian news…

The following post comes from Lawrence Cohen, a friend and wine rep who sells wine to Sotto in Los Angeles where I author the wine list. He possesses encyclopedic knowledge of European food and southern California restaurants. A recent conversation about the “best restaurants in Tijuana” prompted him to compose the following dispatch on La Querencia, which I gladly share here. Note that there is another La Querencia on the American side of the border in Chula Vista. Although I believe the two restaurants are related, the menus are far from identical.

Above: abalone at La Querencia in Tijuana. Los Angeles-based gourmet Lawrence Cohen recommends the restaurant’s abalone and chorizo sopes (image via La Querencia website).

La Querencia is the best restaurant in Tijuana. And it is excellent for a crowd, or for romantic dinner for two. The mixture of the best food and casual family ambiance where you can bring the kids or the fine wine party of serious diners, with easy going service make La Querencia the go to restaurant of Tijuana. There is no other restaurant in Tijuana we returned to as often or as happily as La Querencia.
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Aided by Sotto owner/executive chef Steve Samson and his team, chef Isabella Pedroli Giordano (above, left, with her mother) prepared an ASTOUNDING authentic Ligurian menu for a sold-out crowd on Monday. Los Angeles-born-and-bred, Isabella is slated to be the sous chef at Steve’s new Emilia-concept to be called Rosso Blu. I had a blast drinking Pigato and talking food with her at the end of the evening.

Unfortunately (fortunately?), I was too busy pouring and talking about Ligurian wines to properly photograph her excellent food. But I was blown away by the materia prima and the way she handled it. The California basil — used for her pesto — was enough to make you swoon.

I was speaking to the waitstaff about the wines during lineup when the seductive aroma of freshly crushed basil leaves began filling the dining room as chef Isabella’s équipe put their pestles and mortars into action.

It happens every spring and summer when I visit my home state of California: once again I was floored by the bounty of high quality produce from in the El Dorado state.

When I sat down for dinner on Tuesday night at St. Vincent, one of my favorite wine spots in San Francisco, owner and Italian wine sage David Lynch insisted (rightly) that I have the tomato and melon salad (above).

My beloved Golden State aside, few farming communities in the U.S. can deliver nightshades like this outside of Italy.

It was rivaled only the artichoke, butter lettuce, white peach, and almond salad (below).

Purely delicious, focused, and wholesome.

In other news…

It’s been tough to be away from the girls this week but I was cheered by the turn-out at my Franciacorta Real Story tasting yesterday in the Golden Gate City (below).

Thanks to everyone who came out to taste and chat Franciacorta.

Tomorrow we’ll be doing the same tasting — 14 wines — in LA and Saturday in San Diego.

Click here for details and RSVP info.

Only a few more days on the road before I get back to my ladies and some needed downtime. Wish me speed!

My series of Franciacorta Real Story tastings continues next week in California with events in San Francisco (Weds.), Los Angeles (Fri.), and San Diego (Sat.), including a consumer Franciacorta tasting at Jaynes Gastropub in San Diego (see details below).

And on Monday night, I will also be pouring and speaking about Ligurian wines at Sotto, where I curate the wine list (see flier above).

Looking forward to tasting Franciacorta and Liguria with you next week!

LIGURIAN DINNER AT SOTTO MONDAY

The Sotto dinner is part of the restaurants ongoing “Sopra” series, where Chef Steve and guest chefs venture beyond Southern Italian cuisine. It should be a fantastic dinner. Check out the menu here.

FRANCIACORTA REAL STORY TASTINGS

PLEASE NOTE THAT JAYNES GASTROPUB HAS ADDED A CONSUMER TASTING TO THE FRANCIACORTA EVENT ON SATURDAY WITH FOOD PAIRINGS CREATED ESPECIALLY BY JAYNE AND HER TEAM IN THE KITCHEN.

To RSVP for any of the Franciacorta trade events,
please shoot me an email by clicking here.

San Francisco
St. Vincent
Wednesday, July 15
11 a.m.

Los Angeles
Sotto
Friday, July 17
11 a.m.

San Diego
Jaynes Gastropub
Saturday, July 18
2 p.m. TRADE
3 p.m. CONSUMER

Above: the once awesome Ten Bells on the Lower Eastside, once a favorite wine bar, is now a graveyard for forgotten bottles of soulful natural wine.

When the mustachioed, tatted, pierced, and semi-Mohawked bartender at the Ten Bells wine bar on the Lower Eastside approached me yesterday as I sat at the bar during happy hour yesterday, I asked him about a by-the-carafe wine from a Provence estate called Domaine de la Patience.

“Do you mean the white or the rosé?” he asked me sullenly.

“I was wondering about the rosé but what’s the white like?” I said. “Is it by-the-carafe as well?”

“Do you like oaky, buttery Chardonnay?” he queried.

Nonplussed by his deadpan line of questioning, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

“You’re kidding, right?” I said as I began to realize that it wasn’t a joke. “Is it really ‘oaky and buttery’?”

“It is,” he answered, tersely by this point.

“May I please just have a glass of the Prosecco?” I solicited, hoping solely to appease him.

Domaine de la Patience, it turns out, is an estate imported to the U.S. by Jenny and François Selections, one of my favorite purveyors of organic and biodynamic wines from Europe.

I still haven’t tasted the wine but knowing the importer, I can’t imagine that it’s “oaky and buttery” or even remotely “Napa Chard” in style.

Has it come to this? The Manhattan restaurant and wine landscape continues to evolve rapidly. But did everyone’s favorite natural wine bar on the Lower Eastside have to sink to this level?

Maybe, as my friend Ed McCarthy (a favorite wine writer and one of the greatest tasters I’ve ever known), wrote on the Twitter: “He thought you were an oaky, buttery kind of guy, you know, the average clueless American.”

And in much better news…

Yesterday, before I headed to the Ten Bells for a business meeting, I popped into the East Broadway Mall in Chinatown to taste the above flight of super groovy Italian beers with Chris Leo and his partner Laura Marchetti.

They’ve recently launched a new importing business called the Maritime Republic.

Super cool folks, super cool beers. Check it out…

Thank you to everyone who attended my Franciacorta Real Story tasting yesterday at I Trulli in Manhattan and thanks to owner Nicola Marzovilla and the restaurant staff for making it such a seamless event. Click here for information on my Franciacorta tastings to be held in SF (July 15), LA (July 17), and SD (July 18) next week…

Above: note how different the Giacosa label was in 1967.

In many ways, Robert Parker Jr.’s Wine Advocate “bulletin board” — originally launched in 2001! — gave us an early glimpse into how social media would reshape the wine connoisseur landscape and dialectic in the U.S. in this decade and the last.

One of the virtual communities that emerged from the board, which was closed in 2010, was a small band of Nebbiolophiles led informally by one of the most wonderful and generous persons I’ve ever met through wine social media, Ken Vastola, a computer and electric engineering professor by day and author of Fine Wine Geek, a blog devoted to chronicling his passion for the wines of Piedmont.

Yesterday, Ken and a handful of collector friends — Iggy, Ben, Mark, and Carl — treated me to an extraordinary flight of Nebbiolo over lunch at I Trulli (following my seminar and tasting).

That’s the Giacosa Barbaresco from 1967 (above), my birth year. It had passed its prime, all agreed, but it still had some life in it. I enjoyed it a lot and it’s always fun to have a birth year wine.

Above: the 1979 Giacosa Barolo Le Rocche di Castiglione Falletto (not to be confused with Giacosa’s Le Rocche di Falletto, a vineyard in Serralunga) was the top wine of the lunch. Man, what an incredibly pure and gorgeous expression of Langa viticulture! I was blown away by its clarity and vibrancy.

And it also inspired Ken to utter one of the most beautiful observations on the fine wine tasting experience that I’ve ever heard.

Above: the 1990 Barbaresco Pora by Produttori del Barbaresco. Dayenu! It would have been enough to taste just one of the wines in the flight. The 1990 Pora, at least in this instance, is probably at the peak of its evolution and expression. What a gorgeous wine!

As we tasted through the wines, Ken recalled a remarkable evening of tasting and scoring rare and old bottlings of Nebbiolo with a top Piedmont expert and other similarly minded collectors.

His fellows were surprised when he didn’t give his top ranking to a bottle of Giacomo Conterno’s Monfortino. Evidently, everyone else in the group felt it was the best wine of the night.

Above: “Nebbiolo heads,” as Ken refers to his loosely knit band of tasters, can’t live by red alone. What a thrill for me to taste the 2010 Collio Studio Bianco by Borgo del Tiglio, one of my favorite producers! As it opened up in the glass, it revealed layers and layers of stone fruit and minerality. This will be such a great wine to revisit in 5-10 years imho.

“Think of a top model,” mused Ken yesterday as our meal came to a close, “like Christie Brinkley, for example.”

“Yes, it’s true,” he noted, objectively “Christie Brinkley may be more beautiful than my wife by some abstract standard. But I love my wife and she is the most beautiful woman in the world to me.”

The Monfortino, he remembered from that evening, “may have been a Christie Brinkley. But it wasn’t my favorite wine of the night.”

Ken’s brilliant and tender observation aphoristically unraveled one of fine wine’s most deep-seated conundra. Let me frame it using language borrowed from the field of symbolic logic: in a finite universe, is there a wine that is superior to all others?

The housemade pastas at I Trulli were superb as always.

The answer is yes, of course, at least if you believe that the universe is finite.

But we mustn’t allow that quasi-mythical wine to elide the wines that we like best.

Ken and his cohorts have been so generous in sharing their wines with me. When I thanked the group yesterday, they all told me that they are always looking for an excuse to dig into their cellars and open some of their favorite wines.

I feel extremely fortunate that I’ve met such generous and gentle souls through wine social media. They taste wines of this caliber every month. I get to do it — mostly thanks to people like them — a couple of times of year.

Yesterday, Ken reminded me that the point isn’t to discover the “best” wine in any given flight.

The point, as he so eloquently put it, is to taste the wines together and to remember that our favorite wine — like the persons we love — may not be the best wine but rather the wine that we love best.

Maybe Robert Parker, Jr. was on to something with that bulletin board after all…

Thanks to Ken, Iggy, Ben, Mark, and Carl, for an unforgettable tasting. What a wonderful experience for me!

There is still room available at today’s 11 a.m.- 1 p.m. walk-around tasting at I Trulli on 27th St. (between Park and Lexington) in Manhattan.

Please join me if so inclined and taste 16 expressions of Franciacorta.

Information for today’s event and next week’s three tastings in California follows.

To RSVP for any and all of them, please shoot me an email by clicking here.

The tastings are open to all but I do need to get a rough headcount. So please do send me a message if you’d like to attend.

Looking forward to tasting Franciacorta with you!

New York
I Trulli
Monday, July 6
11 a.m.

San Francisco
St. Vincent
Wednesday, July 15
11 a.m.

Los Angeles
Sotto
Friday, July 17
11 a.m.

San Diego
Jaynes Gastropub
Saturday, July 18
2 p.m.

Above: Franciacorta as seen from Mount Orfano in the southernmost tip of the appellation. Click the image for a high-res version (spectacular). In the image, you can see Lake Iseo slight to the left of center.

The response to my Franciacorta tastings in NYC, SF, LA, and San Diego has been fantastic. THANK YOU to everyone who will be coming out to taste and talk Franciacorta with me.

We’re expecting a healthy crowd at each of the events (below) but there is always room for more. So please feel free to share the invite and information with anyone you like (trade especially).

FYI: we have changed the time of the San Diego tasting from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

WE WILL BE TASTING MORE THAN 12 EXPRESSIONS OF FRANCIACORTA AT EACH OF THE GATHERINGS.

And I will give a short talk on the appellation, its history, and the people and places that make the wine before opening the walk-around event.

To RSVP for any and all of them, please shoot me an email by clicking here.

The tastings are open to all but I do need to get a rough headcount. So please do send me a message if you’d like to attend.

Looking forward to tasting Franciacorta with you!

New York
I Trulli
Monday, July 6
11 a.m.

San Francisco
St. Vincent
Wednesday, July 15
11 a.m.

Los Angeles
Sotto
Friday, July 17
11 a.m.

San Diego
Jaynes Gastropub
Saturday, July 18
11 a.m.
2 p.m.