Honestly, I couldn’t believe it either: the Prosecco DOCG growers association has appointed a “Prosecco policeman” who will fine bar and restaurant owners who improperly serve Prosecco on draft or in a caraffe.

It’s serious business. The fines are stiff (up to €20,000!).

I’ve reported on the development today for the Bele Casel blog.

In other Prosecco news…

Now that Croatia has officially become an EU member, the Italian media have been ratcheting up their coverage of the Prosecco-Prošek showdown.

The AP reported on this story back in April, 2013, back when negotiations for Croatia’s EU entry were still underway.

At the time, the Croatian agriculture minister Tihomir Jakovina suggested publicly that Croatia cease to produce Prošek.

His call to end production and avoid a showdown was met with zealous protests by Prošek producers, notably Andro Tomić, the “bard” of Prošek.

At Vinitaly this year, President of the Veneto, Luca Zaia, a former agriculture minister, stated unequivocally that Croatia must stop production of Prošek as a condition of its EU membership.

Many speculate that Croatia has a legal precedent for a claim to Prošek because the category was commercially successful long before Prosecco became a commercially viable category in Italy.

Prosecco, as a “brand,” was first sold successfully in Italy in the late 1800s by Count Marco Giulio Balbi Valier, who probably used a train station in the village of Prosecco (Carso, Friuli) as a hub for the shipment of the wines to Vienna.

Prošek, on the other hand, has been used as a commercial trademark in Croatia for many centuries.

Of course, the Hungary-Italy showdown over Tocai Friuliano and Tokay (Tokaji) looms large. Hungary ultimately won the right to the homonymous trademark and Friuli can no longer export wines labeled Tocai (as of January 2008).

Baby P 2013 update: the astronomic cost of self-employed couples having a child (via My Little Sugarpie). If we had better government regulation of health care, our family wouldn’t be going into debt to bring another healthy child into this world.

The village of Maiolati Spontini (Ancona province) is one of the 24 communes that produce Verdicchio di Castelli di Jesi. The vineyards there are part of nearly 3,200 hecatares planted to Verdicchio, 90% of which are destined to become “classico” wines. Why doesn’t the appellation command more attention in the U.S. marketplace?

At our house, we drink more white wine than red wine. And we drink more Castelli di Jesi than any other white. That’s partly because the price-quality ratio for these wines is excellent. But it’s mostly because we like to drink acidity-driven white wine in which minerality delineates the tasting profile.

When you travel to the Marches (le Marche in Italian), your senses are rewarded by one of the few remaining high-profile wine producing areas where Italy’s negrarizzazione has spared the landscape (Negrarization, the unbridled commercial and industrial development of once pristine farmland, named after the village Negrar in Valpolicella, where the corollary blight of consumerism has spread like a pox).

Life there is relatively simple (reminiscent of what Tuscany must have been like in the 1970s). The people are friendly and earnest. And the food simple, wholesome, and delicious.

As ideal as this sounds, the Marches still don’t play much of a role in Americans’ eno-universe. Just ask a wine buyer in any major U.S. market (aside from the Italophiliacs) if they can name five producers of Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi. Surely, they can rattle off five names from Barolo, Prosecco, or Brunello. But Jesi? And let’s not even get into Ascoli Piceno or Matelica…

But the reason why I’m writing about the Marches today goes beyond my passion for this beautiful and untouched region and my nearly daily consumption of the wines (I’m not kidding about that, either).

I’ve begun to follow the Marches carefully because I have a client there. And said client recently became a member of a new group called Terroir Marche.

The self-financed (not EU subsidized) group of organic and biodyanmic farmers believes that “the farmer is the primary source of our daily nourishment and is a pillar among those who safeguard the environmental landscape, the true but neglected patrimony of Italy.”

And its mission is to “promote awareness of organic farming in the Marches, to defend the territory and its resources, and to share the culture and practices of a sustainable and humane economy.”

I have been an avid supporter and an ardent fan of Vini Veri, VinNatur, and the Natural wholesome farming movement in general.

But I have never seen a group whose devotion to their shared cause is based so deeply and strongly in ideology.

I believe that grape growing and winemaking — like all human endeavor — is inherently and intrinsically ideological (and political) in nature. And as I have followed my client and the birth of this group, I realize that I have never encountered winemakers so passionate about the ideological and political impact of chemical-free farming.

More than any others I know, they see their mission as one of safeguarding Italy’s greatest resource, one vineyard and one field at a time. They’re not doing it to market their products. They’re not doing it because it’s trendy. They’re doing because they need to do it. Otherwise, their children and our children may not ever know this Italy — one of G-d’s great gifts to humankind, the “garden of Europe.”

I wish I had time to translate their entire mission statement. But I think I’ve conveyed their ethos here (however clumsily).

I applaud them for what they are doing and am hopeful that my daughters, thanks to them, may very well get a chance to see and taste the beautiful Marches the way that I have seen and tasted them.

BABY P 2013 UPDATE: No news to report but chances are that she’ll arrive this week.

Tasting Giovanna Rizzolio’s Cascina delle Rose Barbera d’Alba on Friday night brought back a flood of memories from our stay with her on our honeymoon.

One of my favorites was waking up in the morning and seeing Asili and Rabajà from our bathroom window (when seated).

In the photo above, the gaze is actually facing north-northwest. Asili and Rabajà are out of frame to the right. Here’s a Google map link with directions from Asili to Tre Stelle (where Giovanna’s estate is located) to give you some context and to illustrate the unique terrain of Langa.

When you click on the map, zoom out and note the Tanaro river and the way the Alps seems to suddenly melt away into valley… Barbaresco is simply one of the most magical places on earth for me.

Buona domenica, yall!

Above: Praesidium, a Vini Veri producer, is a winery that seamlessly aligns natural winemaking and elegance with a genuine expression of its appellation.

Italian wine needs “more marketing and fewer leftist hipsters,” said Angelo Gaja in a post published today by Luciano Ferraro, wine editor for Corriere della Sera.

While I don’t agree with the part about “leftists” (being a card-carrying member myself), I do believe that the Italians — as Gaja points out in the post — could learn a thing or two from the French, who are brilliant wine marketers (just think of the 1855 classification and how it reshaped and continues to dominate wine sales around the world).

Gaja had just returned, together with roughly 400 Italian producers, from Vinexpo in France, where his transalpine counterparts impressed him with their proactive attitude toward a market in crisis.

Francophilia aside, Luciano’s post and Gaja’s notes made me think of a wine I tasted this spring, a stunning Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo by Praesidium that impressed me with its delicate equilibrium between brilliant originality and faith in tradition.

I loved the wine and immediately Googled it to find out more (it had been sent to me by Katell Pleven of Vine Collective; check out a podcast interview with Katell, posted earlier this month by Levi Dalton on I’ll Drink to That).

Even though the estate produces some of the most expensive wine available from Abruzzo, it doesn’t even have a website (Gaja doesn’t have a website either but I’ve heard that one is in the works).

At least from this side of the Atlantic, it would appear that Praesidium engages in little or no marketing at all beyond its participation in Vini Veri and efforts by its U.S. importer (this post was the most informative I could find).

As someone who makes his living primarily in wine marketing, I’m all for an Italian embrace of more aggressive and ambitious marketing. I love Italian wine and beyond my professional life, I feel personally invested in its success because I enjoy drinking it.

But Gaja — a genius marketer, supreme in Italy and rivaled by few beyond Italy’s borders — and his observations made me remember that part of what makes Italian wine so great is its own self-imposed challenges and obstacles.

It’s an element of Italian culture that dates back to the centuries of foreign occupation between the Renaissance and the modern era. During that period, Italians developed a sense of provincialism that, to this day, often leads them to see little beyond the mura of their villages.

But in my experience, their chasmophilia and topophilia can impart a uniqueness — a delicious peculiarity — to their wines that defies the homologation demanded by consumerism and its marketers.

So as much as I admire Angelo Gaja for his role as an architect in the renaissance of Italian wine, I also cherish the backward-looking producer like Praesidium who sees little purpose in marketing their high-end wines.

Sometimes, as in the case of the Praesidium Cerasuolo, that backwardness allows us to pass through the portone of a tiny village in the province of Aquila by way of the bottle and glass…