The dream of every Jew (at least this one)? To write Christmas music, of course!
Every since I was a child, I’ve dreamed of writing Christmas music… just like one of my idols, Irving Berlin, who wrote “White Christmas” and “Happy Holiday,” among others…
And so when we “went into the studio” this year to make Nous Non Plus’s new album, Freudian Slip (Aeronaut 2011), we also recorded some holiday music.
The A-side of our new self-released single, “Holiday,” was inspired by and written for Tracie P (every day with you is a holiday…)…
The B-side is a song inspired by our troops, “(General, Please) Keep My Baby Safe This Christmas Eve”: it’s an anti-war song, sung from the point-of-view of a soldier’s wife or mother… Céline did an awesome job with the video… And the song features an heart-wrenching guitar solo by our friend David Garza, one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever had the chance to work with…
The single is only available on CD (no digital release) and costs $5 (including shipping).
For every CD shipped, Nous Non Plus will donate $1 to Operation Homefront, providing “emergency financial and other assistance to the families of our service members.”
Even if you don’t want a CD, please consider Operation Homefront (based in San Diego, California, and San Antonio, Texas) for your charitable giving this year…
To order a copy of the disk, please send me an email by clicking here (or leave a comment in the comment section below).
Tracie P and I LOVE Christmas music (Karen Carpenter, anyone?) and we have a strict rule at our house: NO Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving… and then LET THOSE BELLS RING! :)
Baby P, the image above is your first “close up” from an early ultrasound. Someday we’ll tell you about what it felt like to “see” you for the first time.
Dear Baby P,
Mom is going to have a laugh when she reads this and discovers that I am at a loss for words… since I’m generally the one who talks too much!
She and I talk to you all the time and sometimes — especially in the morning when we say goodbye before the workday — I put my lips to her belly and I tell you I love you.
I’ve finally sat down to write you the letter I’ve been meaning to write you. But today I don’t know what to say.
I thought I’d have some nuggets of wisdom to share or some insights about becoming a parent. But I don’t.
When folks find out that you’re pregnant, they always ask the same three questions: is it a boy or a girl? do you have a name? are you excited? Sometimes I think they ask you those questions because they want to say something but, like me, they don’t know what to say.
There are plenty of people who offer advice about being a parent and much of it is sound and some of it has been useful. But most of it is their way of sharing the experience with you. As one Italian friend of our wrote, having a child is the most normal thing in life and it is also the most extraordinary.
But then there are the grandparents. They don’t offer advice. But nearly all of them say the same thing: having a child will change your life in ways that you can’t imagine.
Baby P, that’s a photo of your beautiful mom! And it’s also a photo of you. Some folks say she’s the most beautiful mother-to-be they’ve ever seen. I have to say that I agree! She’s been such a good mother to you and I love her so much.
Becoming a parent sure does change your life: your rhythms and daily routines change; your lifestyle changes; your body changes. Every time mom and I go to the doctor for your checkup, we marvel at the miracle of life. Even with all the science of the twenty first century, the great brains of the world still can’t figure out how it all works. (And it’s probably better that way.)
But it also changes how you see the world: from the milk that I buy for mom at the store to the way a line from the poet Virgil scans; from the car seats that I installed last week to the financial challenges that we and our friends in Europe are facing every day; from your baby clothes neatly folded in your nursery to the sadness in a best friend’s voice when he talks about missing his child. Everything looks, tastes, smells, feels, and appears differently to me. But it’s not because everything is different. It’s because I’m different.
Baby P, that’s my silver milk cup from when I was born. Your grandmother, Mamma Judy, had your name engraved on the other side of the cup.
Baby P, there’s so much I want to tell you. About the world and its great cities, about music and poetry, about philosophy and art…
But today, the words just won’t come.
And so I think I’ll just put my lips to mom’s belly and tell you I love you…
Just had to write a quick note on the Moscato Rosa that Jeff over at Vino Vino “tasted me on” (as we say in the biz) over the weekend…
It’s a new bottling by an old grower from Friuli, Bressan.
The winemaker calls it Rosantico (pronounced ROHZ-ahn-TEE-koh), a composite of rosa (pink) antico (ancient).
I’d tasted a lot of Moscato Rosa, canonically classified as a rosa or pink, as opposed to nero (black or red) or bianco (white), grape by Italian ampelography. But the wines were always dried-grape expressions of the variety. Historically, Moscato Rosa has been vinified as sweet wine, intended for long-term aging, in the Veneto and in Trentino-Alto Adige.
This wine is vinified instead as a dry wine.
However light in color, the wine was tannic and rich in body. Moscato Rosa is an aromatic grape and the nose on this wine was wild (literally): it ranged from the unctuously floral to technicolor red and stone fruit.
In the mouth the wine was more savory than I expected and it had some wonderful earth tones that worked with its fruit like roast vegetables and chutney.
I’ll have to go back to Vino Vino and revisit it (Jeff offered me a tasting pour during a recent event). But it does pose an epistemological question: when a “traditional” producer like Bressan takes an experimental approach to a native grape, is the resulting wine a “modern” expression of the variety?
Without a doubt an original and fascinating wine (although not cheap) and a great pretext for some epistemological reflection…
As of today, we’re exactly four weeks away from our due date (did you know that pregnancy is now measured in ten months? So we are technically “nine months” pregnant).
But that didn’t stop Tracie P from making her famous Chicken and Dumplings (from scratch, including the stock) for Sunday supper with the Johnson Family. That’s Donkey & Goat Untended Chardonnay in my glass, btw.
We are all healthy and our obstetrician is very happy with Baby P’s development. Her weight is just below the 50th percentile, “right where we want baby to be” said our doctor. But we are feeling a lot of fatigue and discomfort these days with the final “growth spurts.” Tracie P’s belly is getting BIG!
Aunt Holly brought delicious cornbread and brownies…
We are so lucky to be surrounded by people who love us and want to help and support us as we head into the last month of our pregnancy…
My super good friend Michael Nieves was in town last night for the epic Jayhawks show and he generously let me be a plus one (he’s Mark Olson’s manager, not to mention my band Nous Non Plus’s licensing agent).
Before we hit the Paramount theater for the show, we shared an awesome bottle of Marqués de Murrieta 2001 Rioja Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial at Trio, still very young in its evolution but generous with its ripe red fruit and beautiful acidity “supporting” all the elements in the wine, as they Italians say… Great stuff…
Over dinner, Michael and I fondly remembered the night before I left Los Angeles to come visit Tracie P (then still B!)…
And amazing show… one of those shows that reminds you how powerful great songwriting can be, especially when paired with one of the greatest duet singers on the Alt Country scene (up there with Gram and Emmylou imho).
Thank you, Michael! You are one of my oldest and most cherished friends…
I had fun this morning with my Houston Press post, writing about my favorite breakfast — my take on California-style huevos rancheros — and wine for breakfast (in this case, Moscato d’Asti). Here’s the link…
And, hey, it’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it… Here are a few recent posts I did for my friend Tony (above with screenwriter and winemaker Robert Kamen): an interview with Maximilian Riedel (where he discusses the art of decanting Champagne) and notes from the Kamen dinner at Tony’s this weekend.
Who’d have ever thought that you could make a living as a wine blogger?
Yesterday I called one of my favorite Campania producers, Paola Mustilli, and asked her if she’d contribute a few videos. Thanks, again, Paola, for the videos! They’re awesome!
Her Coda di Volpe entry is just the first in a series of Campania grape names she sent me and I decided to post it as the first because I’m still thinking about Coda di Volpe after reading Fringe Wine’s excellent post on the variety.
There’ll be others to come before the Christmas holiday. So please stay tuned and thanks again for speaking Italian grapes!
Yes, folks, it’s that predictable time of year when everyone posts their Thanksgiving wine recommendations. Among the literally hundreds of blogs and feeds that I follow, one of my favorites this year was Eric Asimov’s [Eric the Red’s]“What Can I Drink at Thanksgiving Besides Wine?” There are a gazillion interesting posts out there: Just search for Thanksgiving wine (not in quotes) in Google Blog Search and you’ll find a trésor of inspired suggestions.
One of the common themes is the challenge that the Thanksgiving meal poses for the would-be sommelier: With so many dishes, with such a wide variety of ingredients, aromas, and flavors, and with so many cooks in the kitchen, what one wine can you recommend?
But there’s another relevant (and in my view, equally important) question we should ask: With such a heterogenous group of people gathered for the all-American holiday, what wine will pair well with both the food and the guests?
My brothers (one in his fifties, the other in his forties) are both high-powered attorneys, and they like highly alcoholic Zinfandel and oaky, tannic Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. My mother [Mamma Judy], who remains forever young in my heart, likes wines that are lighter in body, with gentler alcohol and tannin. The extreme concentration (or extraction, as we call it in wine parlance) of a classic “Zin” or “Napa Cab” would not only overwhelm mom’s palate, it would also overpower her digestion, especially on a day when we all tend to overindulge.
The following 10 wines are available in the Houston market. They are not samples sent to me by a publicist or distributor. They are wines that my wife Tracie P and I drink and serve in our home. They are wines that we can afford, and they are wines that we share with people we love. Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!
Tracie P and I won’t be heading to Orange, Texas for Thanksgiving this year because we’re about 5 weeks away from our due date! We’ll miss Thanksgiving with Mrs. and Rev. B but I made sure that they have some good wines for their holiday meal. Back here in Austin, this is what we’ll be drinking…
Earlier this year, when my friend, publisher, and wine industry insider Maurizio Gily suggested that we visit the village of Carema before heading to the European Wine Bloggers Conference, it was hard to contain my excitement. As a devout lover of Nebbiolo, I have sought out and drunk Carema whenever and wherever I could: known for its intensely tannic nature, the bottlings of 100% Nebbiolo grown in the hillsides of this pre-alpine village, with its morainic mountains that pop up in the landscape with a beautiful violence as you drive north from the freeway (moraine: “A mound, ridge, or other feature consisting of debris that has been carried and deposited by a glacier or ice sheet, usually at its sides or extremity; the till or similar material forming such a deposit.”—Oxford English Dictionary)
Before we headed to the Cantina dei Produttori Nebbiolo di Carema vinification facility and tasting room in the middle of the village, Maurizio, his colleague Monica, and Italian wine marketer Wineup and I hiked the trail that leads from the town up through the pergola-trained vineyards — yes, pergola-trained! (Check out Wineup’s excellent photos here.)
Pergola training has thrived here for a number of reasons, explained Maurizio. Because of the appellation’s unique geographic and topographic elements (i.e., elevation combined with violently steep slopes, extreme temperature variation, and healthy ventilation thanks to the morainic valley), the pergolas help to keep the fruit cool (thanks to shading) under the warm sun of summer and to keep the grapes warm in the case of early frost.
You really have to see the village and its vineyards to understand how it works…
You can click on the image above for a larger version: as you can see, the terraced, pergola-trained vineyards (planted exclusively to Nebbiolo) are situated on the eastern side of the valley, where the sun beats down in the late afternoon. This combination of the nutrient poor morainic soil, excellent exposure, good ventilation, and the local grape growing tradition is what delivers these incredible, age-worthy wines. (That’s the village of Donnas, Val d’Aosta, in the distance, btw.)
The other reason that pergola training has endured here is the fact that the terrain itself restricts the use of machinery: the vineyards are literally sculpted into the side of the mountains and the only way to work them is by hand. The pergola also allows the growers to employ integrated farming and it wasn’t uncommon to see other crops planted beneath the canopy. Italy’s top wine blogger Franco Ziliani calls the viticulture of Carema “heroic.” This is land where, until the advent of modernity (in the 1960s), life survival was extremely difficult and the terrain challenging. Every grower needs to exploit his vineyards, explained Maurizio, to the greatest extent possible.
Once we made it back to the village and the winery, I wasn’t surprised to find large-format, Slavonian oak casks (like this 1,550 liter beauty). Although the winery does age some wine in barriques (say it ain’t so!), the greater part of ever vintage is destined for large-cask and stainless steel aging.
Growers association president Viviano Gassino had double-decanted an amazing flight of wines for us to taste: 87, 90, 95, 99, 00, 03, 06, and 07.
The 1987 was beautiful: A bit of disassociation, slightly browning (I wrote in my notes), but very alive and tannic; rich fruit but still very tight.
The 1999 stunning: Gorgeous acidity, really bright, with an amazing balance of body and tannin united around rich berry fruit. Maurizio and I both noted more focus in the winemaking style from 1999 onward.
The 2006 was another highlight for me and reminded me of the 1999 in a younger expression. This is what we’ll drink for Thanksgiving this year, at Aunt Holly and Uncle Terry’s house here in Austin.
Simply put, Carema is one of the most amazing appellations I’ve ever visited: for its violent beauty, for its unique confluence of geographic and topographic elements, for its perfectly viable anachronism, and for the outstanding wines it produces.
But the most incredible thing is that you can find the 2006 Carema by Produttori Nebbiolo di Carema in the U.S. for under $30 (2007 is the current release but there is still some 2006 in the market).
I love love LOVE these wines and they are my Thanksgiving pick for 2011 (even though they’re not available in Texas, I’ve managed to evade the authorities and sneak a few bottles in).
Thanks for reading! To get a better sense of the topography of Carema, here’s the slide show that I hurriedly created the week of my visit just over a month ago…
Do Bianchi by Jeremy Parzen 