From the department of “I never knew what loneliness was”…
My Vinitaly day II (highlights so far)
The legendary Giorgio Grai (right) spoke to me about the “gymnasium of taste” where one trains to understand and to “compose” wine. One of the most fascinating conversations of 2012 (so far). Thanks again to Francesco Bonfio (left) for making our time together possible.
Stay tuned…
My Vinitaly day I (highlights)
The Union of Authentic Grape Growers and Winemakers (and the best soppressa I’ve ever tasted)
Alfonso and I were dinner guests last night in the home of Stefano and Katerina Menti who live just above the village of Gambellara (Vicenza). They were hosting the first-ever meeting of the new Unione Viticoltori Autentici — Union of Authentic Grape Growers and Winemakers. The acronym UVA spells grape in Italian.
From left, clockwise: Eleonora Costa and her husband Luigi Armanino of Crealto (Monferrato); Nicola Ferrari of Monte Santoccio (Valpolicella); Stefano and Katerina Menti of Menti (Gambellara); Francesco Cirelli of Cirelli (Abruzzo); Alfonso; and my good friend Riccardo Zanotto, producer and distributor (Treviso).
Although Riccardo kept joking that the get-together felt like a meeting of Freemasons, you couldn’t help feeling that these young winemakers shared a sense of esotericism. After all, in a world dominated by the Zonins (literally down the road) and the Gajas (at the upper end of the scale), there’s not much place for authentic wine.
Everyone was showing their best wines and there wasn’t a loser in the bunch. But the star of the evening was Riccardo’s soppressa from Tuscany. It was easy to slice, like a conventionally made soppressa, but once on your knife, it was more like a chunky pâté — hands down the best soppressa I’ve ever had. “Pig. All it has in it,” said Riccardo, “is pig.”
I loved all the wines and wish I had time this morning to post my notes on each one but I’ve got to head over the fair now.
Two highlights were…
Stefano Menti’s gently sparkling lees-aged Garganega was the type of wine I wish Tracie P and I could drink every day. A balance of salty and bright citrus and white stone fruit, chewy and fresh… fanfriggin’ delicious.
And the old-vine Grignolino by Crealto was fantastic… Fresh and bright on the nose, tannic but sill very light in the mouth, definitely one of the top 5 expressions of Grignolino that I’ve ever tasted (and if you’ve only tasted commercial Grignolino this is a good benchmark for what traditional Grignolino can be).
Of course, you can’t have a meeting of a new secret society without a secret society dog…
I’m off to my first day at the Italian wine industry fair Vinitaly… stay tuned!
Do Bianchi and please try not to curse (if possible)
Before heading to the first-ever meeting of the Unione dei Viticoltori Autentici in Gambellara (Vicenza), Alfonso and I stopped at our favorite bar in the village, the Trattoria al Passaggio for do bianchi — two little glasses of white wine.
If you’ve ever lived in the Veneto, you know that using the name of the Lord in vain is kind of like getting out of bed and going to work each morning. You may not want to, but you just have to.
I asked the owner if the sign below worked: “If possible, we ask that you do not curse [blasphemy].” He said it did…
There’s a long tradition of blasphemy in the Veneto, stretching back to the Venetian Republic’s historic political opposition to the Vatican. Today, although avoided in polite circles, blasphemy is used there — in some extreme cases — the same way American speakers of English might use a “crutch” expression like, you know.
Of course, the ancient notion of “cursing the gods” stretch back to antiquity and beyond. And every Italian region I’ve visited has its own colorful variations of blasphemy — always avoided like the plague in polite society.
I loved the qualifier of the owner’s admonition: if possible…
Probably not the case in a “company town” where the company in question happens to be Zonin…
Venice (Venezia), a bird’s eye view
Landed this afternoon Venice via Dulles, via Frankfurt…
I can’t smile without them…
We took these Polaroids this morning as I was packing and getting ready to leave for Europe.
I wept in the parking lot at the airport when I kissed them goodbye and when the TSA agent asked me if she could go to Venice in my place, I couldn’t hold back the tears.
Everyone says that you can’t know what it’s like to be a parent until you become one and that it changes your life in ways you simply can’t imagine…
No one ever told me about the heartbreak… I just can’t smile without them…
You know I can’t smile without you
I can’t smile without you
I can’t laugh and I can’t sing
I’m finding it hard to do anything
You see I feel sad when you’re sad
I feel glad when you’re glad
If you only knew what I’m going through
I just can’t smile without you
You came along just like a song
And brightened my day
Who would of believed that you where part of a dream
Now it all seems light years away
And now you know I can’t smile without you
I can’t smile without you
I can’t laugh and I can’t sing
I’m finding it hard to do anything
You see I feel sad when your sad
I feel glad when you’re glad
If you only knew what I’m going through
I just can’t smile
Now some people say happiness takes so very long to find
Well, I’m finding it hard leaving your love behind me
When wine service is really bad, 3 strikes you’re out…
Above: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (who gets the reference?).
After ordering three bottles of wine in a fancy-schmancy Houston restaurant only to be told that none of them were available, I had had enough…
Alice and I pay a visit to the “Wine Seer” (New York Stories III)
“@Levi_opens_wine an amazing wine seer, don’t you think, @DoBianchi?” tweeted Alice at the end of the night after we visited with Levi and Brooklyn Guy uptown last Friday night.
In my view, Levi is arguably the coolest sommelier in the U.S. right now and beyond his razor-sharp expertise in Italian wine, he always seems to be just one step ahead of the curve, shaping the discourse and defining the dialectic — a wine “seer,” as Alice put.
It’s not that I didn’t want to see all of my other friends last week in the City. I only had about 48 hours on the ground and they were consumed mostly by meetings with my top client. And Alice, Brooklyn Guy, and Levi were the people I needed to see on this trip.
It was also great to catch up with celebrity sommelier Michael Madrigale, who was working the floor at Boulud Sud that night with Levi.
But it was Levi who had the goods and the dope that I wanted to smoke.
The first wine he opened was the 2005 Overnoy Arbois Pupillin (made from Savagnin), a wine that Levi knows is hard to find beyond the island of Manhattan. An oxidative, tannic, orange wine from the Jura… In many ways this wine represented a synagoga (a coming together) of fascinations that have exited some of us over the last decade. The wine was salty and dense, with its muscle dominating its grace; its delicacy and nuance emerging and revealing itself only as we patiently observed its evolution.
Brooklyn Guy offered that this was an ideal expression of this wine, noting that he had seen a lot of bottle variation in his purchases.
But the pièce de résistance was the Equipos Navaros Bota de Manzanilla Pasada (Sherry).
Brooklyn Guy (aka “the Brook,” as Eric the Red calls him) and Levi have both visited Jerez in the last few years and it was thrilling to hear them hold court on this wine, produced by a generic, commercial winery that holds back certain privileged casks.
“Sherry is a forgotten wine,” said Brooklyn Guy, as Levi expressed his view that the category delivers wines that should be served with food instead of as an aperitif, as do the English and Anglophilic Americans.
I highly recommend checking both of their blogs — Brooklyn Guy and So You Want to be a Sommelier, respectively — and their threads on Sherry and their discoveries.
Is Sherry going to be the next big thing in the U.S.?
@Levi_opens_wine an amazing wine seer, don’t you think, @DoBianchi?
Angelo Gaja’s State of the Union Address: “the winery next door isn’t an enemy”
Above: The last time I tasted with Angelo Gaja was in March 2010 at his winery in Barbaresco.
Earlier this week Angelo Gaja sent out one of what I call his “papal bulls.” As an elder statesman of Italian wine, he often issues these statements via email — on the state of the Italian wine industry, on the Brunello controversy, on the distillation crisis in Piedmont etc. And a number of Italian bloggers repost them.
As I prepare to leave for Italy to attend the Italian wine trade fair Vinitaly (and to lead a group of bloggers to Friuli the following week), I decided to translate his most recent “state of the union” address.
Whether you agree with him or not, I think that you’ll find his insights and observations as interesting as I did.
For the record, I am the author of the translation below and while you can find the piece on many Italian-language sites, I read it on I Numeri del Vino (an Italian wine industry blog that I highly recommend).
I also highly recommend checking out this post by Alfonso on the DOC(G) to DOP migration (part of the same EEC Common Market Organization Reforms that Gaja references in his statement).
Europe’s Winds of Change
by Angelo Gaja
The Italian wine market is going through a phase of profound change that offers contrasting clues for interpretation.
Domestic consumption is dropping while exports are growing. There are producers who are finding it hard to sell their wines and their cellars are still full of wine. Others take advantage of market opportunities and they empty their cellars with ease.
The current trend of pessimism contrasts with the rhetoric of optimism. Where does the truth lie? The numbers don’t tell the whole story but they help us to understand the current situation.
Nearly twenty-five million hectoliters of Italian wine are exported annually and domestic consumption is just over twenty million hectoliters. Together, these numbers constitute a demand of forty-five million hectoliters, to which we need to add the demand for wine by vinegar producers and users of industrial alcohol. The annual average production of wine in Italy in recent years has strained to meet demand. Will Italian wine fail to rise to the occasion?
Causes that Contribute to a Balancing of the Market
Global warming has contributed to this stress, as has the advanced state of obsolescence of 50 percent of the vineyards in Italy today. But it has also been accelerated by the effects of the European market reforms that were called for, imposed, and implemented by Brussels on August 1, 2009.
These reforms were inspired by common sense — a rare commodity these days. And they were intended to put an end to the waste perpetuated by more than thirty years of public subsidies devoted to the elimination of surplus. And they were implemented by the introduction of measures aimed at re-balancing the wine market.
Once squandered, [European Economic] Community contributions are now devoted to the co-financing of promotion of European wineries beyond Europe’s borders and they have helped exports take off despite the current crisis.
In a short period of time, the number of wineries exporting their products has grown more than 30 percent. A significant number of artisanal producers has begun to ship wines abroad and their success has encouraged to them to combine their resources and to travel beyond Italy’s borders to tell their stories and share their passion, traditions, and innovations. And in doing so, they have helped to contribute to the greater respect that Italian wine now commands throughout the world. As a result, there are many who now believe that the Italian wine market is undergoing a profound and unprecedented structural change that requires them to adopt a new and different cultural approach.
Think Differently
More must be done to monitor and prevent the production of counterfeit wine.
We must stop thinking that we need to compete with one another and that the winery next door is an enemy.
It’s inconceivable that the windfall of European Economic Community contributions for the co-financing of exports beyond Europe’s borders continue uninterrupted: why should European citizens be taxes to achieve this goal?
We must learn how to build business networks using only our own funds.
The domestic market continues to be the most challenging. But its value is undiminished because it’s what shapes and builds business: it’s a mistake to dismiss and neglect it.
The producers whose wines enjoy a healthy presence in the Italian market are often the same producers who reap the rewards of foreign markets.
The balance between supply and demand puts the greatest responsibility on all of our shoulders. And it should impel producers to grow and to become more capable businessmen who are better prepared to rise up to meet the challenges of the market.
Angelo Gaja, March 19, 2012
Do Bianchi 