Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is one of those appellations that has been eclipsed since the 1970s by big business interests. Like Chianti, it was one of Italy’s grape growing areas that swiftly aligned itself with the corporate agendas of the “me” generation.

Today, there is just a handful of producers who rise above the fray of the négociants: Fanetti, Crociani, Sanguineto, Godiolo, Boscarelli…

They — all of whom make great wines — deserve mention here because another is about to join their ranks: last night I tasted a sample bottle of the Salcheto Rosso di Montepulciano Obvius and I was simply floored by how lip-smacking good it was.

According to the Salcheto site, the wine is made from organic grapes, vinified with ambient (naturally occurring) yeasts, and no sulfur is applied whatsoever.

But who cares???!!!

When I tasted it last night, I felt like I was living the junkie’s dream of that first high. It reminded me of that fateful bottle of Sangiovese that I drank at a friend’s father’s place in Montalcino paired with fried boar’s liver nearly 25 years ago. It was ELECTRIC!

This was the Sangiovese — the real Sangiovese, with classic notes of rich ripe plum and lip-splitting acidity — that I’ve been looking for all these years.

It’s that good… If you taste it and don’t like it, please send it to me.

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Above: Kermit Lynch, left, with our good friend Jayne Battle, owner of Jaynes Gastropub in San Diego with her daughter Romy.

Before I hopped on a plane back to Austin, Texas on Saturday afternoon, I drove north from La Jolla, California to the famous Chino Farms in Rancho Santa Fe (about 30 minutes from where I grew up).

Legacy Bay Area wine merchant Kermit Lynch and slow food revolutionary and restaurateur Alice Waters were celebrating their new books: his, a 25th-anniversary re-issue of Adventures on the Wine Route and hers, a second volume in the series The Art of Simple Food.

Above: Alice Waters did a lot to put Chino Farms on the map. When I was a kid growing in San Diego county, it was a weekend destination for great produce out where the ultra-rich lived (and still do live). See this NY Times article from 1988.

It wasn’t surprising to see the lines of admirers, 40- and 50-persons deep, who had gathered for a frontispiece dedication and autograph. After all, Kermit and Alice, who frequented the same nascent enogastronomic circles back in the day, have arguably done more than anyone else in the U.S. to introduce bourgeois and otherwise uppercrust consumers to the pleasures and health-enhancing properties of the Mediterranean lifestyle.

Above: The produce at Chino Farms is expensive and worth every penny. The high-end restaurant Market, just down the road, sources most of its ingredients from the celebrated fruit and vegetable stand. I highly recommend both.

When you journey to Chino Farms, you drive past an unending landscape of California ranches, exclusive country clubs, and polo stables etc.

Rancho Santa Fe hosts and boasts one of the world’s richest and most conservative communities. Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, stables her dressage horses there and often shows them at local competitions.

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It was such a joy for me to finally meet Aiden and Liam Yelenosky, who came into this world on Monday November 4, 2013.

That’s their dad John Yelenosky — affectionately known as “Yele” — one of my best friends of all time. He and I grew up together in La Jolla, California, playing basketball and playing music, not always staying out of trouble but always looking out for one another.

John and his wife Megan — both top wine professionals; he a rep for Southern, she a beverage director for a major San Diego hotel — faced some tough challenges over the arc of time that spanned their decision to have children and the day their twin boys arrived. But they never lost their optimism, even in the lowest moments, and their love for one another and their desire to have a family were never diminished.

Making my last business trip to southern California for 2013, I was thrilled to spend some precious hours together with their new family and Jayne and Jon at Jaynes Gastropub.

Even though I’ve lived in Texas for five years now, Tracie P and I have stayed very close with John and Megan and Jon and Jayne. And now we all have families. Jon and Jayne were the first, then Tracie P and I, and now the circle is complete.

To commemorate the occasion we opened a bottle of 1997 Barolo by Bartolo Mascarello from my cellar. What an incredible bottle of wine! One of the best I’ve had this year. Fresh and electric with acidity and notes of ripe berry fruit balanced by that classic earthiness that you find in the Mascarello family’s wines. A stunning bottle for a moment I’ll never forget…

Congratulations, Megan and John. Tracie P and I are so happy for you and so proud of you. We love you a lot…

Above: Earlier today, Sofia Pepe sent me this photo, taken mid-afternoon local time in Torano Nuovo, Abruzzo. “There was snowfall” last week, she told me by phone, “but it melted quickly.” Note the leaves on the vines.

“Luckily, we were spared any major damage,” said Sofia Pepe of the Emidio Pepe winery in Abruzzo when she and I spoke by phone this morning.

“We’re about 100 km north of Pescara,” she explained, “and we’re only 10 km from the sea, so the temperatures are warmer here than they are inland.”

She was referring to last week’s blizzard, “Attila,” which destroyed roughly 2,700 hectares of vineyards in Pescara province, including many historic growing sites owned by one of the leading winemakers in Abruzzo, Valentini (see below).

“When there are still leaves on the vines,” she told me, “the snow accumulates on the canopy and can cause the vines to collapse” (see the photo of her family’s Montepulciano above).

“The same thing happened here about twenty years ago.”

Above: Today, leading Italian wine writer Sandro Sangiorgi published this photo of the legendary Valentini vineyards on his blog Porthos. It accompanied a heartfelt letter of solidarity addressed to the Valentini family, who lost some of their oldest and most prized vines.

“My father [who is one of the patriarchs of Abruzzo viticulture] is planning a trip down to Pescara to help them rebuild their vineyards,” said Sofia.

“It’s not easy to do and only the older grape growers know how to do it. But it can be done: when this happened to us in the 1990s, we had a smaller property then but my father was able to rebuild the vineyards in about 10 days.”

I’ll continue to follow and post on the story as it develops… Thanks for reading…

From the department of “everyone should have my job”…

Posting in a hurry from the road today but just had to share these images from my first meal at Vallone’s, my friend and client Tony’s new restaurant in Houston. It opened on Sunday…

Lobster rolls… These were off the charts…

Onion rings… Tony and his partners, chef Grant Gordon and GM Scott Sulma, are having fun with the steakhouse canon… The restaurant — with its 55-day aged steaks, etc. — is definitely for heavy-hitters but the menu is also wonderfully playful and creative…

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The very first vineyard that our older daughter Georgia P ever visited was one of Luca Ferraro’s top growing sites, where he sources the fruit for his Bele Casel Prosecco Colfòndo.

Knowing that Luca is an organic farmer meant a lot to me and Tracie P: it was Georgia P’s first visit to the countryside and we were acutely aware that by harvest time (we visited in September 2012, photo above), many growers have been spraying their vineyards with all kinds of chemicals.

I am thrilled to share the news that Luca’s Colfòndo is FINALLY available in the U.S. and I have made it the center piece of my Do Bianchi Wine Club Christmas Offering.

Click here to read more about the wines and for order details.

Happy holidays, everyone! And thanks for all your support in 2013!

Above: A scene from the festival of San Zopito, the patron saint of Loreto Aprutino in Pescara province, Abruzzo (image via Vincepal’s Flickr [Creative Commons License]).

It’s hard to digest the news that continues to arrive in the wake of the blizzard that destroyed 2,700 hectares of vineyard in Abruzzo last week.

As my friend and colleague Michael Horne pointed out on my Facebook yesterday, “that’s 6,700 acres, or 10.5 square miles, of damaged vines.”

Below I’ve translated an excerpt from a letter that was sent by Abruzzo grape grower and winemaker Fausto Albanesi (owner of Torre dei Beati) to the editors of L’Espresso wine blog (L’Espresso is a major glossy weekly magazine).

It was reposted by a number of Italian wine bloggers (and I owe thanks here to my client Silvano Brescianini of the Barone Pizzini group who brought it to my attention).

The letter by Albanesi, who grows grapes in Loreto Aprutino township (the same where Francesco Valentini lost up to 50 percent of his legendary Trebbiano vineyards), is as moving as the editors’ allusion to a famous nineteenth-century Italian poem.

The poem is “To Silvia,” by the Italian philosopher and poet Giacomo Leopardi.

It’s a poem so well known to Italian school children that the editors didn’t even need to quote it directly to evoke the poignant lines of the canto below (please read this Wiki entry to learn about the meaning and legacy of this famous work).

Oh Nature, Nature
why do you not give now
what you promised then? Why
do you so deceive your children?

(Here’s a link to a complete translation of the poem.)

Anyone who has ever driven through Abruzzo on a fall day before harvest knows that its hillside towns are surrounded by vineyards and olive groves as far as the eye can see. It’s one of the areas of Italy that still looks the way people remember it from the 1970s. In many ways, there is still a de facto share-cropping system in place (see the letter below). The effect of this natural disaster on the local economy is hard to wrap my mind around.

And so today the small grape-growing families of the Abruzzo countryside are in our hearts and in our prayers…

My translation of an excerpt from Albanesi’s letter follows.

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Above: Many vineyards in Abruzzo are pergola-trained and as a result, the weight of the snow on the canopies caused them to collapse. Strong winds also caused major damage in vineyards and olive groves (image via Intravino via NewsAbruzzo).

According to reports published over the weekend in Italy, snowfall and blizzard conditions destroyed up to 2,700 hectares of vineyards in Abruzzo last week.

The storm — dubbed “Attila” — delivered freezing temperatures and 100-kph winds from the Artic, dumping up to 2 feet of snow on the central Italian region.

Above: Pescocostanzo in L’Aquila province on Wednesday of last week (image via MeteoWeb).

In his post today for DIVINI, the Corriere della Sera wine blog, journalist Luciano Ferraro published a short interview with leading Abruzzo grape grower and winemaker Francesco Valentini, whose winery, which dates back to the 1600s, is widely considered one of the best in Italy today.

“In the provinces of Pescara, Chieti, and Teramo,” says Valentini, “there was a first wave of bad weather two weeks ago, with 500 millimeters of rainfall in just a few short hours. Then, last Tuesday, there was a blizzard, with gusts up to 100 kilometers per hour. It wreaked havoc in our vineyards. We’re still assessing the damage but I believe [Abbruzzo] had up 2,700 hectares [under vine] that were leveled.”

On the Valentini estate, which covers 250 hectares, of which 75 are planted to vine, “half of the vines were damaged, unfortunately in the best zones for both Trebbiano and Montepulciano. Precious vines that were at least a half-century old. At this point, we’ll have to survey each plant to determine which can be saved and which will be thrown away. [The storm brought] tremendous damage. And many other wine and olive oil producers are in the same situation.”

Valentini, who rarely speaks to the media, and the regional office of Coldiretti (Italy’s farmer and grape grower association) have publicly called on Italian government officials to classify the storm as a natural disaster and to declare a state of emergency.

Bad weather continues to affect central and southern Italy. Heavy rains have followed the blizzard over the weekend, causing major flooding in urban areas and further damage to vineyards and olive groves. Up to 1,500 persons were evacuated and schools were closed in Pescara according to reports today.

It costs a little more in the Texas market than elsewhere (just a few bucks, really) but it’s worth every penny: the ARPEPE 2010 Rosso di Valtellina.

It’s my number-one Thanksgiving wine this year because 1) it has a wonderful balance of earthiness and fruit; 2) its classic spice note (think cinnamon) will work beautifully with the Thanksgiving trimmings; 3) it will please everyone from “I only drink Natural wine, thank you” to “did your husband bring any of that vino of his for Thanksgiving?”; and 4) it’s one of the new wave of super groovy Italian wines that are finally making their way from the coasts to Texas (thanks to a new generation of distributors here).

Of the seven Thanksgiving wines that I recommended today over at the Houston Press (including an Australian wine, believe it or not), it’s the most expensive, weighing in at around $40 in our market. But it deserves an extra special shout-out for having made it here. The Texas wine scene is a better place for it…

Special thanks to Neil Turner of Serendipity Wines for believing in this winery, getting the wines to Texas, and for letting me taste samples before they were available for retail sale.