Anyone who knows me via my blog knows that I am a bibliophile. I love books. All sorts of books. And there is a very special section of our library devoted to food and wine books.
While I can always find a way to justify my splurges on books Italianate in nature, books devoted to the cult of fine French wine are a true luxury in our home.
That’s just one of the reasons why a gift given to me yesterday by my clients Lisa and Stan Duchman has all the more meaning.
Stan recently attended a private tasting with Mr. Allen Meadows and had him inscribe the book personally.
Does anyone remember who called me “Dr. J’ so famously for the first time?
Words cannot express my thrill at receiving this truly excellent gift! Thank you, Lisa and Stan, Tracie P and I LOVE IT!
Here’s another post from my recent trip to Italy during the second and third weeks of September, 2010. I’m slowly making my way through Tuscany, then the Veneto, and then Friuli. Thanks for reading!
Above: Gaja’s Ca’ Marcanda winery “sinks” into the landscape.
Gaia Gaja drives fast. I could barely keep up with her… she in her Audi Quattro station wagon, me in my Renault Clio rental! After we finished our tasting and tour at her family’s Pieve di Santa Restituta property (a fascinating visit), we drove in tandem toward the coast, where we ate lunch in San Vincenzo at a restaurant that I highly recommend, if not for the food then for the cast of characters who await you). In the wake of our Fellinian repast, we headed from San Vincenzo toward Castagneto Carducci and her family’s Ca’ Marcanda winery.
Above: We stopped to chat with the vineyard manager whose team was picking Syrah that day (Monday, September 13).
I’ve visited some impressive wineries in my time as an observer of Italian wine and the people who grow and produce it (Soldera is at the top of that list, of course, and I’ll be posting on my incredible visit to Zidarich toward the end of this series). But Gaja’s Ca’ Marcanda stands apart, a winery sui generis.
As a rule, winemakers design their wineries and winemaking facilities with functionality as their guide. Aesthetics are no afterthought but beauty is trumped by the business of making wine, the nuts and bolts, as it were, of presses, vats, casks, bottling lines, etc.
When Angelo Gaja conceived the Ca’ Marcanda facility, he turned this notion on its head: the germ was an aesthetic ideal and the functionality and process of wine came in its wake.
Above: Everywhere you turn in the winery, you find objets d’art, like these movable wood sculptures by Astigiano artist Sergio Omedé.
As we toured her family’s winery together, I noticed that everyone we met — from the receptionist to enologist Guido Rivella — had a smile on their face, a bounce in their step, and a kind word to share even in the industrious hum of their daily toil. This place — this enotopia (how’s that for a neologism!) — is so violently beautiful to look at, with something interesting to gaze upon at every corner. It’s no wonder the staff enjoys showing up for work every day.
Above: One of the many sculptures in terracotta by architect Giovanni Bo (Gaja’s longtime collaborator).
It occurred to me that Gaja’s Ca’ Marcanda property, the third in the Gaja tripytch, is the fulfillment of an Oedipal cycle.
In Piedmont, Gaja inherited a winery built by his father. In Piedmont, Gaja the winemaker is the fourth generation in one of Europe’s most venerable winemaking legacies. In Piedmont, Gaja has always pushed the envelope of the appellation regulations and tradition but he never works outside of them.
In Montalcino, Gaja bought what may be the oldest continuously operating estate in the appellation, with a church that dates back to the 7th century C.E. There, too, he is bound by strict appellation regulations and an entrenched however youthful enologic tradition. There, he is painstakingly restoring the beautiful house of worship and making wines that do not attempt to redefine the place but rather sing the notes of Sangiovese to the tune of Gaja elegance.
In Bolgheri, Gaja built a winery from scratch, on an estate that never produced fine wine until he arrived. Here, he was free to express his creativity, quite literally and figuratively, in an appellation where the rules have yet to be written (all of the Ca’ Marcanda wines are Toscana IGT). Gaja’s own ars poetica was the only chain to bind him and like a great poet, he has created his own language, a brave and new idiolect. Truly fascinating…
Above: I regret that ability as photographer do not do justice to this amazing working space. That’s winery as seen from the backside. It’s virtually invisible to the outside world.
When Gaia showed me the main floor of the winery, where vinification, aging, and bottling take place in one open space, I noticed that the bottling line was enclosed in acrylic. Her father wanted one open space for the main room of the winery, she said, and so he had to devise an enclosure to ensure the hygienic integrity of the bottling line. Here, aesthetics once again had trumped functionality. I asked Gaia if her father had patented the system. No, she said. Why would he?
Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of
Pure imagination
Take a look
And you’ll see
Into your imagination
We’ll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The world of my creation
What we’ll see
Will defy
Explanation
There is no
Life I know
To compare with
Pure imagination
Living there
You’ll be free
If you truly
Wish to be
Just had to share these images of dishes that Tracie P made for us over the weekend, my first back at home from a trip too long…
That’s her pastitsio… unlike the Italians, the Greeks use egg in their béchamel, giving the crust of Tracie P’s pastitsio a custard-like texture… unbelievably good…
And last night, speckled butter beans that she had bought fresh and then froze, cooked with bacon and served with her homemade cornbread, made in her grandmother’s cast-iron skillet.
Watching our friend Edoardo Ballerini on Boardwalk Empire last night, munching on cornbread and sipping some 2008 Laurent Tribut Chablis, I felt criminally good…
Maybe its the way she grates her cheese,
Or just the freckles on her knees.
Maybe its the scallions. Maybe she’s Italian.
Above: During my graduate years, I spent many hours at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice working on my dissertation on Petrarch and Bembo and early transcriptions of Petrarch Italian poems.
Between the two working legs of my recent trip to Italy, I had just two days free over a weekend, when I could do whatever I wanted to do. What did I do? I went to a library, of course! And not just any library: I spent a truly sinful and decadently fulfilling morning of quiet study in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice (that’s the entrance above), one of my favorite places in the world (where I conducted much of my research for my doctoral thesis back in the day).
In all honesty, I didn’t find what I was looking for that day but I did find a few clues that led me to what I believe is definitive proof that the Greek wine Vinsanto gets its name not from the Vin Santo of Italy but rather from the toponym Santorini, the island where it is made. (Here’s the link to my original post on the origins of the two enonyms.)
Above: My beloved Petrarch (1304-1374, subject of my doctoral thesis) bequeathed his library to the Biblioteca Marciana (named after the patron saint of Venice, St. Mark). A bust of Petrarch surveys the main reading room.
My research that day led me to the discovery of a fascinating 19th-century journal entitled, New Remedies, an illustrated monthly trade journal of Materia Medica, Pharmacy and Therpeutics (New York, William Wood, 1880).
In it (volume 9, page 6), I found the following passage (boldface mine):
Greek Wines.
Greece, and particularly the islands of the Archipelago, produce a great variety of excellent wines, which have lately attracted the attention of eminent therapeutists in Europe. The most favored island is Santorino, the ancient Thera or Kalliste, being the most southern island of the group of the Cyclades, and belonging to Greece. A variety of wines are produced there, both red and white. The best red wine is called Santorin (or Santo, Vino di Baccho), representing a dry fine-tasting claret, with an approach to port. Another fine (white) wine is called Vino di Notte (night wine). There are two varieties of this, one named Kalliste, being stronger and richer; the other, called Elia, somewhat weaker, but both possessing a fine bouquet and equal to the best French wines, particularly for table use. The “king” of Greek wines, however, is the Vino santo, likewise produced in Santorino, occurring in two varieties: dark-red and amber colored. This wine is sweet, rich, very dry, and has a strong stimulating aroma.
Note how the author (Xaver Landerer, a professor of botany at Athens) refers to a wine called “Santo” and he refers to the island as “Santorino” (and not Santorini). Note also how he calls the sweet wine “Vino Santo” and not Vinsanto or Vin Santo (where the o of vino has been naturally elided by the inherent system of Italian prosody).
Together with the above document, I found numerous others from the same era that refer to a “Vino Santo” or “Santo” from “Santorino,” the common name for Santorini in the late 19th century.
I also discovered the following information, which I have translated from the Italian, from the “Summary of previously unreported statistics from the Island of Santorino, sent to the Royal Academy of Science of Turin by Count Giuseppe de Cigalla,” published in the Memorie della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino (proceedings of the Royal Academy of Turin, serie 2, tomo 7, Torino, Stamperia Reale, 1845).
Vineyards produce the [island’s] principal crops, with more than 50 varieties of known vine types. [68]
…
[In 1841 Santorini produced] Vino santo 2,350 barrels, 1,922 hectoliters, value 63,168 Italian lire [68]
The only product exported from Santorino worth mention is wine. The quanity exported in 73,120 barrels (59,797 hectoliters) was nearly in 1841 but it generally does not exceed on average 45-50,000 barrels per year (from 36 to 40 thousand hectoliters), correspondent to the amount of consumed in Russia. [70]
Evidently, Vinsanto from Santorini was widely popular in Russia, where it was consumed as a tonic (I found other texts that spoke of the wine’s popularity in Russia).
Above: My good friend and college roommate Steve Muench accompanied me that day and took this photo. A good Texan cowboy hat comes in handy in the Venetian rain!
Why do I do this? And why do I travel to Venice from Padua on a rainy Saturday morning only to spend 3 hours inside a library? As my friend Andy P likes to say, I am a self-proclaimed lover of Italian wine and a moonlighting Italian wine historiographer.
Even better news (for Italian wine geeks out there): I have also discovered what may be the earliest document (early 1700s) to make reference to Italian Vin Santo and the process employed to produce it. Ultimately, I believe that Vin Santo has its origins in the Veneto rather than Tuscany and you’ll see why when I post my findings later this week…
If you made this far into the post, thanks for reading! Stay tuned…
It fills Tracie P and me with great sadness to share the news that good friend to the B family, one of the nicest folks I’ve ever met, Melvin Croaker, left this world last night to pass to another.
As Melvin’s illness progressed, he spent a lot of time at home looking at Facebook. And in a way that may have not been possible a few years ago, he and I got to know each other by “following” each other — commenting and “liking” each others notes and posts.
I’ve worn that hat proudly in the Texas Hill Country, picking grapes (above).
I wore that hat proudly in Italy, where I found out that a good cowboy hat comes in handy when you least expect it.
It was just the other day, posting from Sant’Angelo in Colle in Tuscany, that I wrote: “Wherever I lay my hat these days, I am reminded that Texas is my home (for MELVIN CROAKER).”
We’ll miss you very much, Melvin. Thanks, again, for my hat. I plan to put it to good use…
Last night was a night of fusions and no one was taking sides at Trio at the Four Seasons (Austin).
The first was Washington state abalone, oysters, and salmon, paired with Prosecco. Chef Todd was cooking for a Washington state wine event in one of the event spaces at the Four Seasons hotel and he sent down some of the pairings to our table at the restaurant downstairs where a friend and client had asked us to join him with a Prosecco producer.
Perhaps the most extraordinary fusion came in the guise of a Texas smoked rib-eye paired with the Cos Cerasuolo di Vittoria. The Frappato character was powerful in the bottling we unstopped yesterday evening and the match between the bright fruit and the smokiness and fattiness of the beef was delicious.
But the most intriguing fusion came with a smile and rimless glasses. Daniele d’Anna, the current generation of the Bortolotti family of Prosecco producers. Daniele is the product of a “mixed” marriage: his father is Neapolitan and his mother Veneta. I’ve never met anyone like him: he can switch between a thick Veneto accent (familiar to me) to Neapolitan (familiar to Tracie P) on the turn of a dime. I was curious to ask him about what it’s like to live in a Veneto now dominated by the Lega Nord, the xenophobe Separatist movement.
The Lega Nord wants to secede from the Italian republic and form its own country, severing ties with central and southern Italy. Let’s just say that the Lega doesn’t look so favorably on southern Italians, their customs, mores, and life rhythms. The image from the left is taken from a bizarre Lega campaign that I saw when I was in Italy recently. “They suffered immigration,” it says. “Now they live on reservations. Think about it.” Pretty scary, huh?
I liked Daniele very much and he struck me as a highly educated, cosmopolitan, and enlightened fellow. I doubt he shares the xenophobic sentiments of his Leghisti brethren. He made an interesting point: anyone who wants to get something done in Italian politics today, he observed, needs to take sides. His girlfriend, he told me, joined the Lega so that she could run for mayor of her small town in the Veneto, Asolo (one of my FAVORITE and one of the most beautiful and historically rich places in the world). Does she share the Lega’s racist platform? No, Daniele said. She just joined the Lega as a means to an end, he explained. Do they talk about politics when she comes over to the parentals’s for dinner? No, he said with a smile, they don’t. The 31-year-old woman won the election by the way and now serves as Asolo’s mayor.
Only in Austin can a Salvadoreño (my friend and client Julio, above, left), a Methodist (Tracie P), a Jew (that’s me), and a Trevisan walk into a bar and order a Texas smoked rib-eye with a wine aged in amphora from Sicily. Sounds like a joke, but I’m here to tell you, people: it ain’t!
Buon weekend, ya’ll!
There’ll be more posts from my recent Italy trip coming up next week. Stay tuned…
Above: Gianfranco Soldera, legendary, enigmatic, and paradigmatic winemaker, a Trevisan farmer turned Milanese industrialist turned Montalcinese winemaker.
Anyone who’s ever had the good fortune to be invited to visit Gianfranco Soldera’s estate, Case Basse, in the southwestern subzone of the Brunello appellation will surely share my impression that his winery, vineyards, and contiguous botanical garden come together to form what is undeniably one of the most impressive estates in the world.
When he began looking for an estate to purchase in the early 1970s, the Piedmontese wouldn’t sell him a decent plot of land, he told me the other day when we visited. So he decided to to buy a parcel in Montalcino on the advice of a friend who had told him you could pick up a piece of land there for a boccon di pan, a mouthful of bread, in those days.
Above: The botanical gardens at Soldera’s Case Basse include a swamp (to create a maritime influence) and a white flower garden (to encourage nighttime pollination). “Ah, the white flower garden,” remembered wistfully my friend Dr. Lawrence O, the other day when he spied my visit on Facebook. Lawrence has visited there, of course.
When you talk to winemakers in Langa (Piedmont), many of the current generation still look to Soldera as a doktorvater (like Beppe Rinaldi, who told me that he often seeks advice and guidance from Soldera when the elder visits Barolo).
In many ways, it’s as if Soldera, when faced with the fact that he couldn’t make wine in Piedmont where he so obstinately desired to do so, decided to construct his own microclimate within the Brunello macroclimate. As he explains very openly, the remarkable botanical garden on his property (manicured by his wife) creates a unique ecological balance of plant and swamp life, including the “white flower garden,” so famous among wine insiders, intended to encourage pollination at night because the bright peddles attract the insects in darkness.
Above: “You find no vineyards with larger berries nor smaller clusters,” said Soldera proudly of his fruit. The attention to detail in his vineyard management is truly stunning.
Soldera has famously stated that he makes “natural wine.” Whether or not that’s the case is something I’ll leave that to the experts in the thorny field. He does seem to meet all the card-carrying members’s requirements: manual vineyard management, no chemicals in the vineyards, ambient yeasts in the cellar, no temperature control, lowest possible sulfuring. While I was in his presence a few weeks ago, he scolded one very famous winemaker in absentia for using cement vats for vinification, noting that wood is the natural vessel for winemaking. He also scolded another very famous winemaker for suggesting that it was okay to use a starter yeast when he had trouble initiating fermentation in his cellar.
But is it natural, I wonder, to build a botanical garden using mountains of manure (however organically prepared) in a place abandoned by sharecroppers because nothing would grow there anymore? I’ve leave that one to the exegetic forces of the rebbes and erstwhile Talmudic scholars in our field.
One thing we can all seem to agree on is that his wines are among the best in the world (and accordingly priced). I had the good fortune to taste the 2008 (extremely good) and 2006 (exceptional vintage, one of the best I’ve ever tasted) out of cask with him in the cellar. And at dinner we drank the 2003: an infamously and remarkably difficult vintage for any winemaker in Italy yet a harvest for which Soldera delivered lip-smacking acidity and gorgeously nuanced fruit aromas and flavors in his Sangiovese. These wines are simply life-changing, mind-blowing, awe-inspiring… It’s true…
Above: Soldera with Roberto Rossi, chef/owner of Il Silene, arguably the best restaurant in southern Tuscany. The drive up to Seggiano is worth it if only to taste Roberto’s olive oil. The food and service were amazing.
Anyone who’s ever had the good fortune to be invited to visit Gianfranco Soldera’s estate, Case Basse, will tell you that Soldera keeps no secrets and he liberally shares his often salty opinions with those whom have been invited for an audience. (You’ll be surprised to find out that he has a website.)
Our conversation spanned many generations of Italian winemaking the other day when I visited him and you can imagine the controversial topics we covered. But the thing that stuck with me was what he said when I asked him what he saw for the future of winemaking in Italy.
“Commercial winemaking has come to an end in Italy,” he said referring to the recent Brunello controversy and rumors that the historic Barbi estate has plans to sell its property to Italian wine behemoth Zonin. “The nature of Italy cannot support industrial farming and commercial winemaking has run its course historically,” he told me. However many grains of salt there may be in the world according to Soldera, there’s certainly a grain of truth in this morsel of wisdom.
Above: Sunset at the Case Basse estate.
Another winemaker told me the same thing later on in my trip. Stay tuned to find out which one…
Making the rounds of yesterday’s trade tastings in the Groover’s Paradise (aka Austin, Texas), I was extremely fortunate to get to taste the current releases from one of our favorite wineries in the world, López de Heredia, Viña Gravonia blanco and Viña Tondonia rosado 2000. Ten-year-old white and rosé wines. I was impressed by how bright the fruit is in these bottlings, unusual (to tell the truth) for this house, where savory and salty notes always seem to dominate. Can’t wait to crack these with Tracie P, ideally over some ceviche and tacos al pastor at Fonda San Miguel.
It was great to catch up with everyone after being away for so long, like wine professionals April Collins, Jeff Courington, and Lolly Thompson.
Wine broker extraordinaireSusana Partida was rocking the Bastianich.
When I see these two dudes, Craig Collins and Mark Sayre, I always “smile like a fool,” as my friend Thompson likes to say.
Rob was in fine Forman: SO MANY killer Italian wines in his book (Inama, Marchesi di Gresy, Selvapiana, Tenuta Sant’Antonio) from Dalla Terra.
This Valpolicella from Degani is a welcomed new arrival in my Groover’s Paradise. It was fresh and bright, juicy and delicious, the way I like it. And it should weigh in well under $20 retail according to importer Enotec.
How does the song go, Flaco?
the guacamole queen is there
oh Lawd she’ll really curl your hair.
enchiladas and BBQ
oh baby whatch gonna do
come over here beside me
tell me baby how you been
I get through laying it on you
well you know that I’m back again
In the wake of a comment on this blog by Tracie P (while I was in Tuscany) sharing her yen for some Tuscan pici (long noodles made with only flour and water), my good friend Federico aka Fred (export director for one of my favorite Montalcino wineries, Le Presi) appeared one day with two bags of dried pici by Panarese for me to take home.
Last night for dinner, Tracie P defrosted some of her excellent ragù and used it to dress a few nidi (nests) of the pici (also called pinci).
On the back of the label, the only ingredients listed are durum wheat flour and water. There’s something about pici, even when dried (and not freshly rolled out), that makes them ideal for meat sauces (or mushrooms). For all of their humility, the purity of the saltless flour and the texture of the noodles create a sublime pairing with the richness of the sauce. Simply delicious. We paired with a grapey, bretty, easygoing Valle Reale Montepulciano d’Abruzzo that was remarkably fresh and bouncy for an 06. A perfect Tuesday night dinner, catching up on the TV shows we missed (Tracie P sacrificed herself and did NOT watch the season finales of True Blood and Mad Men so that we could watch them together… THAT’S how much she loves me, she says).
How did I manage to get the pasta back without any breakage?
I used my cowboy hat, of course! I packed the bags of noodles on either side of the “crown” of the hat in my carry-on. It worked like a charm! That’s me, btw, above, outside the famous Osteria al Cappello in Udine, where hundreds of hats (cappelli) hang from the ceiling. (Photo by Joe Campanale.) The owner asked me if I’d give her my hat for her restaurant. “Un bel cappello,” she said. “A fine hat.”
“Naw,” I told her. “This hat will be riding home with the San Diego Kid back to Austin.” I’ll post more on the AMAZING MEAL I had at Osteria al Cappello in an upcoming post.
In the meantime, we’re sending lots of love to Pam and Melvin Croaker today. Melvin, you may remember, gave me my cowboy hat late last year.
Just had to share this link and send some blog love over to the Prosciuttificio D’Osvaldo in Cormòns (Friuli). That’s a photo I snapped of the D’Osvaldo collection of pigs the other day when I visited with the Ponca 10 (below, later that evening on the Gulf of Trieste). I’ll be posting about D’Osvaldo and what I learned, saw, and tasted there in a few weeks (but first Tuscany and the Veneto!). Stay tuned…
The Lega Nord wants to secede from the Italian republic and form its own country, severing ties with central and southern Italy. Let’s just say that the Lega doesn’t look so favorably on southern Italians, their customs, mores, and life rhythms. The image from the left is taken from a bizarre Lega campaign that I saw when I was in Italy recently. “They suffered immigration,” it says. “Now they live on reservations. Think about it.” Pretty scary, huh?
Do Bianchi by Jeremy Parzen 
