“How weird it is to have a sibling.” That’s what the writer said the other day. “There is this person that is the closest thing to you that you can get. But is not you. How heartbreaking that is. And how close and far away you can feel.”*

Last month my siblings and I — my two brothers, one seven years my senior, the other two years my junior — made what we all believe will be the last trip to see our 90-year-old father. The occasion was his birthday, although he had no idea why we were there.

My younger brother called our group text thread “the Brothers Parzencheski,” an allusion to a disputed variant of our last name, a patryonymic obtained through our grandmother’s second marriage.

The farcical title was also a reference to the “Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky’s 19th-century novel that tells the story of three brothers each suspected of killing their father, each with a conspicuous motive. “A nice little family,” as the author calls them in the paratext.

It wasn’t that our father was actually dying. But a series of possibly countless strokes in recent years have severely impacted his mental faculties and memory, short and long term.
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The first I heard of it, it was February 2023, nearly a year after my “infraction” had occurred.

Back in March 2022, while traveling back to Linate airport in Milan for my return to the U.S., I was clocked going 118 km/hr in a 110 km/hr zone. That means I was going 73 miles per hour in a 68 mph zone. Eight kilometers or roughly five miles over the speed limit. Five miles over the limit, people!

The routine for Italian traffic citations is not entirely new to me. The last time I got one was because I had entered a ZTL or limited traffic zone area. (The previous time I had visited the town where I teach each year, the area wasn’t off limits to non-residential traffic. Returning to the university after the Covid closures, I just assumed it was allowed there. I tried to pay that ticket in Italy but that backfired. The story here.)

First you get a notice from your rental car agency. It includes the ticket info but it doesn’t allow you to pay it. It does inform you that if you don’t pay within a certain time period, you’ll owe even more money.

By the time the actual ticket arrives, it’s already way past the payment window. Oy.

I received my rental agency notice in February. I tried to have a friend pay it from his bank account in Italy but the authorities said you can’t make the payment until the final ticket arrives.

Arrive it did, a few weeks ago.

I immediately went online and used my bank account to do an international wire transfer. But after a few days, a message from my bank arrived telling me that the wire had been rejected on the Italian side because the format of the bank account was “incorrect.”

I check too make sure that I had used the right number. I had. But when I reviewed all the paperwork, I noticed that the ticket reference code in the English version of the letter was different from the one in the Italian version. I had used the one in the Italian version.

Luckily, the bank refunded my money, including the wire transfer fee of $5.

Yesterday, I sent another wire, this time using the code in the English version of the letter.

To be continued…

What’s on this pizza? I’m not sure I even know.

One of the trends I’ve noticed in my recent trips to Italy is that Italian pizza — or should I say, pizza in Italy, since pizza is a champion among world foods — has been undergoing a radical transformation.

Increasingly, I’ve been seeing creative pizzas like the one above (with fennel and what I believe was a beet ricotta cream).

But the bigger trend I’ve noticed is that pizzaioli are adding the toppings after the pie has been fired.

Take, for example, the photo immediately above.

That’s a classic “napoli,” the kind you’d find in nearly every pizzeria in Italy in the 80s and 90s, with salt-cured anchovies and capers.

It’s the kind and style of pizza that I found when I first began studying in the country.

Now look at this pizza (immediately above). It’s a “napoli” but the ingredients have been added only after (notice how they aren’t incorporated into the mozzarella and they). The mozzarella was also added after it was fired.

Tracie and I first encountered this style of pizza at the legendary I Tigli in San Bonifacio near Verona.

At the time, about 12 years ago or so, people thought that owner and pizzaiolo Simone Padoan was either a genius or a lunatic.

As one hipster pizzaiolo explained it recently, this new approach was inspired by the fact that the toppings and crust have wildly divergent cooking times.

If all the ingredients are fired at the same time and at the same extremely high temperature (the key to a great pie), the toppings suffer at the expense of the vessel.

Notice how the prosciutto cotto (literally, cooked ham) was added only after the pie had been cooked through.

The heat of the dough is transferred to the toppings and they become — at least in my experience — more tasty as their flavors are “freed.”

Will Americans begin following this new and sometimes controverial trend of post-fired toppings? I’m not sure that we are ready for such blasphemy!

Thanks for being here. And THANK YOU to everyone who came out to our sold-out Piedmont diner last night at Rossoblu in DTLA. What a blast! Thank you Chef Steve and Dina for a truly wonderful evening!

Traveling across small-town country in the U.S. is always a reminder that an overwhelming number of Americans care little about fine wine.

In big and medium-sized U.S. cities today, it’s almost impossible not to find at least a handful of venues where the wine program is thoughtfully authored and managed.

But as our recent trip to Orange Beach (near Gulf Shores), Alabama revealed, even in popular tourist destinations like the pristine white beaches of the Alabama coast, wine is just another adult beverage like the tequila, vodka, and beer etc. restaurateurs use to fill their bar wells.

When Tracie and I take road trips with our girls, ages 10 and 11, we always bring a cooler filled with our own wine to drink at the hotel.

But when it comes to mealtimes, it’s highly uncommon to find restaurants that allow corkage outside our country’s great metropoles.

And as Tracie always says, if you can’t be with the Chardonnay you love, drink the Chardonnay you’re with!

Our go-to wine on this last trip was La Crema Chardonnay. Yes, you got that right. La Crema. Its fruit is cloyingly present and you can taste the oak chip treatment. But it’s not offensive or unpleasant. To me, it tastes more like a wine cooler than wine. But it’s fresh, drinkable, and ubiquitous.

One of the big surprises was how much we liked the Ferrari Carano Chardonnay, another mid-tier restaurant staple. This showed great for its class at one of our dinners, with good balance, freshness, and fruit, however unidimensional.

But we did find a compelling if modest wine program at Zeke’s in Orange Beach where we were staying.

We ended up drinking a bottle of Jermann Pinot Grigio with what was probably the best shrimp I’ve ever eaten in my life — no joke, they were that good.

Zeke’s prints and laminates its beverage list. That means when a wine is locked in, it’s there to stay.

But I was impressed with the drinkability and food-friendliness that informed the selections. There is clearly someone there who cares about wine. And we LOVED the food there.

Beyond the shrimp boil for two, I did Gulf Oysters, which were delicious, and Tracie ordered a hummus appetizer that we also enjoyed. I was tempted to the Moroccan-style pompano but had to do the crustaceans.

For the record, there is a fine dining, surf and turf venue in Orange Beach — Voyagers at the Perdido Beach resort — where there is a serious program. But this was more of a flip-flop and bathing suit vacation.

We had so much fun and the girls loved it so much that we are planning to go back next year to explore the beach — and the wine lists.

Happy summer, everyone! Hope you are staying cool. And thanks to everyone who signed up for our sold-out Piedmont dinner Wednesday night at Rossoblu in downtown Los Angeles.

That’s me, left, with my buddy, the legendary sports and wine writer for the Houston Chronicle, Dale Robertson, tasting at Marchesi di Gresy in Barbaresco last month.

After Dale went into semi-retirement last year, he and I launched a podcast, The Sporty Wine Guy, where we talk mostly about the Houston wine scene, our travels, and the occasional anecdote from our personal lives.

But the cherry on top is the many tales that Dale shares from his time as one of the highest-profile sports writers in the country.

On yesterday’s episode, he told the story of the time he hunted Ken “Snake” Stabler down in a bar in Gulf Shores, Alabama after the famed quarterback had turned his back on a lucrative contract and virtually disappeared (it’s a good one).

After nearly a year of podcasting, we’ve been getting some great feedback on the show and most importantly, we’ve been having a blast just kibbitzing and trading notes on wines, wineries, wine bars, restaurants etc. we like.

Check out the podcast here. And check out Dale’s blog here.

Thanks for listening and following!

It took me a minute to make sure the wine was available in California since it only newly arrived there.

But I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be pouring the Amistà Nizza DOCG by winemaker Luca D’Attoma at my August 9 Piedmont dinner at Rossoblu in Los Angeles!

View the menu and registration link here.

The Amistà Nizza will be the last wine in a flight of Piedmontese bottlings that I’ve picked especially for this event (which includes Chef Steve’s vitello tonnato!).

Amistà is owned by my friend and client Michele Marsiaj, a Torinese entrepreneur who has really opened my eyes to Nizza’s magic. And the wines are made by Luca, a genuine Italian wine industry legend.

Ours will be there very first event where it is served in California. And I know our guests are going to be blown away.

And I can’t wait to share the wonders of Nizza, an appellation that many of us are just getting to know in the U.S.

You can read more about Amistà and the Nizza DOCG on the blog that I manage for the winery here.

The photo above comes from a Nizza DOCG seminar that Bruce Sanderson of Wine Spectator asked Luca and me to attend at Vinitaly this year. It was so amazing to be in the same room as nearly all the great historic producers from the DOCG, which was created in 2014 but stretches back ante litteram for centuries.

Isabella Oddero spoke at length about how her grandfather always believed that Nizza had the potential to become one of the great red wines of Italy. Today, Amistà is just one of a growing number of top growers working to raise the appellation’s visibility in the world.

And please see the menu and registration info here. I hope you can join us. This will be a night to remember for sure (the last one I did at Rossoblu was so fun). Thank you for your support and solidarity.

According to a report published on Monday by the Sole 24 Ore (Italy’s “Financial Times”), Italian winegrowers are predicting crop losses of up to 40 percent in peronospora-affected areas in central and southern Italy.

Abruzzo, Molise, and Marche are among the regions most impacted by the presence of the downy mildew. But Marche, Puglia, Basilicata, Umbria, Latium, Tuscany, and Sicily, and Tuscany are also mentioned among the regions where growers are experiencing significant drops in production.

The Sole 24 Ore report is based on data published this month by the wine industry trade unions Assoenologi and Unione Italiana Vini together with Ismea, a branch of the the Italian ministry of agriculture.

Organic farmers have been acutely impacted according to authors the report.

The outbreak of vine disease is blamed on heavy rainfall late spring. They brought much needed water. But the lingering humidity created challenging conditions in the vineyards.

The Sole 24 Ore article has been widely cited this week in Italy’s mainstream and wine industry-focused media.

Above: Plasmopara viticola aka Peronospora viticola (via Wikipedia Creative Commons).

In the wake of Eric Asimov’s article on vermouth for the Times last week, “This Summer, Pause for the Vermouth Hour,” it seemed like a great time to reach out to Fulvio Piccinino from Turin.

Fulvio, a professor at the Slow Food University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, is widely considered to be the world’s greatest expert on vermouth.

In the 2019, he published the definitive book on Vermouth of Torino. But he has also published seminal works on gin and on Futurist mixology, among others.

He and I have interacted on occasion because he consulted on the recipe for a vermouth produced by my client Amistà in the Nizza DOCG.

He’s an amazing dude and I always learn so much when I get to chat with him.

During our interview, I ask him why he thinks vermouth has become so popular in recent years. He doesn’t really answer the question directly but he talks at length on how interest in vermouth has changed and grown over the last decade or so.

In the early years of his seminars (his first session on vermouth dates back to 2010), he had just a handful of mixology professionals in attendance. Today, he said, he can barely accommodate the number of people who want to learn more about vermouth. But, he notes, they are mostly consumers.

He attributes that trend to the fact that people increasingly want to know what goes into the production of the vermouth they drink.

As I expected, it was a fascinating chat. And I’m pleased to sure it here. You can also watch it over on the Amistà blog. Enjoy!

Above: vitello tonnato at the famous Osteria Boccondivino in Bra, Piedmont, where the Slow Food movement was founded in 1986. The town is also home to Slow Food U.

Thanks to my teaching gig at the Slow Food University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont, I’ve been making at least two or more trips to the region every year for the last eight vintages.

That’s been great news for my Jewish boy stomach: Piedmont is home to what is arguably my favorite dish of all times — vitello tonnato.

For the uninitiated, vitello tonnato is garlic- and clove-studded roast veal that has been chilled, thinly sliced, and then topped with a sauce made of olive oil-cured tuna, capers, egg, and anchovy.

Above: homemade vitello tonnato at the home of my good friend and client Michele Marsiaj, owner of the Amistà winery in Nizza Monferrato.

While the origins of the dish are uncertain, most believe that it came about through a conjugation of cured fish (tuna and anchovy), available in Piedmont thanks to its proximity to the sea, and Piedmont’s ranching legacy.

To put it in blasphemous terms, it’s as if roast beef and tuna salad — the favorite dishes of many young male American Jews of a certain age — got together.

Above: old school vitello tonnato at the classic Antico Ristorante Porto di Savona, a crusty but must-experience culinary gem in Turin.

On Wednesday, August 9, at Rossoblu in Los Angeles, Chef Steve Samson, a close friend since college, will be serving vitello tonnato as part of a Piedmont-inspired menu. And I’ll be presenting the wines.

You can view the menu and registration link here. And I’ll be sharing the flight shortly on my blog.

Man, I am SUPER PSYCHED for this dinner. I hope you can join me. I know it will be a great time. Thanks for the support and solidarity. And thanks for loving Italian enogastronomy!