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Above: “Dante and Statius Sleeping with Virgil Watching,” ink on tracing paper, after William Blake’s illustrations to the Divine Commedy, by John Linnell. Source: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale).

What a thrill to learn that the New York Review of Books published a new translation of Dante’s “Purgatory” earlier this year!

The excellent English rendering by poet D.M. Black fills a much bemoaned lacuna: while the “Inferno” has been translated countless times, often by leading poets, the “Purgatory” and “Paradise” have too often been relegated to seemingly hermetic English-language versions nearly impenetrable for the layperson of Dantean hermeneutics. This is owed in part to the challenges of translating the Purgatory and Paradise where Dante elevates the register of his language. It’s also owed to the fact that the Inferno, with all its blood and guts, has always been the most accessible and appealing to the greater reading public.

The drawing above, traced from William Blake’s illustration from the 27th canto of the Purgatory, shows Dante and the Roman poet Statius sleeping as Dante’s guide, Virgil, looks on. As they ascend the rings of Mount Purgatory, Virgil relies on Statius, a Christian, to explain “eternal truth[s]” of Christian theology that Virgil is unable to comprehend or explicate because of his pre-Christian status.

In the passage below, gleaned from the 25th canto, Statius explains to Dante how an embryo is transformed from a living being into a being with a soul.

In order to help Dante understand this miracle of G-d, Statius makes an analogy with how the heat of the sun transforms grape must into wine. It’s a powerful passage that, for reasons abundantly apparent, is of great interest to me.

I’m overjoyed to share the lines, transcribed here. But please check out the new translation, published on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death.

Open your heart now to the truth that follows:
and learn that in the embryo, as soon as
the brain’s articulation is completed,
to it, and joyfully, the Prime Mover [G-d] turns,
and in his joy at Nature’s handiwork
breathes a new breath into it full of power,
which takes what it finds active there and draws it
into its substance, creating a single soul
to live and feel and center on itself.
To make what I am saying less surprising,
think of the heat of the sun, that turns to wine
when joined with the juice the generous vine produces.

I’ll be discussing these lines, and acclaimed actor Edoardo Ballerini will be reciting them, on a Zoom call this Friday evening. Click here to learn more.

Above: the deceptive facade of Corti Bros. offers little clue as to what treasure lies inside this storied structure.

Those who have never visited Darrell Corti’s legendary Corti Bros. “specialty grocers” in Sacramento, California will be surprised to discover that the store is much, much more than a mere retailer of great food and wine. The shop, they will find, occupies a space that also serves as museum, library, and bookshop.

In many ways, the food and wine at Corti Bros. is actually a “front.” Not in the sense of a criminal operation. But rather by virtue of the fact that the food and wine are a pretext for what 16th-century European humanists would have called a “gallery of memory.”

Above: a display of ravioli cutters dating back to the 16th century. Click the image for the “label” as we call it in museumspeak.

In Renaissance (with a capital R) Italy, knowledge was considered a means to power, like weapons or gold. And the key to knowledge, it was believed then, was memory. To bolster memory, humanists would create what Italian scholar Lina Bolzoni has called galleries of memory — physical spaces that helped them to organize and retain knowledge in their memory. They were actual rooms where the walls were covered with paintings, drawings, and writings.

Strolling around Darrell’s shop earlier this year, I couldn’t help but feel like I was traveling through Darrell’s mind, revisiting all the nuggets of knowledge — aesthetic and otherwise — that he has gathered over a lifetime of curiosity and unbridled gastronomic adventure. That space, I concluded, is his gallery of memory.

Above: breadcrumbs and books. How many food shops have you visited that double as a library? Darrell’s food and wine-focused collection rivals those found in some of the best libraries in the U.S. No joke. I’ve visited those libraries, too!

The story of how Darrell and I met is as funny as it is indicative of what a mensch – a wonderful human — that he is.

Not long before I visited Sacramento in the mid-aughts to make a record with my band Nous Non Plus there (at the famous Hangar, another great story for another time), I had traveled to Tuscany to meet with Baron Bettino Ricasoli, Francesco Riscasoli’s father. I was searching for a copy of his ancestor’s famous letter wherein he offers a “recipe” for the production of Chianti. It was one of the most memorable visits of my career and Bettino and Francesco were lovely. They pointed me to where I would find the letter and I later translated it for the blog.

During a luncheon of classic Tuscan-style tripe (Bettino’s favorite), the Baron asked me if I had ever met Darrell Corti. No, I told him. He said that if I ever were to visit Sacramento, I must absolutely seek out Darrell. My interest in food and wine history, he told me, reminded him of Darrell’s.

“If you ever do visit him,” he insisted, “please tell me that I sent you.”

Above: the dried pasta selection at Corti Bros. takes up an entire aisle — a “gallery of [culinary] memory.”

Not long after the band arrived in Sacramento, the keyboard player and I headed to Darrell’s place for supplies (I always cooked and served wine at our recording sessions).

When we arrived at the store, I asked one of the cashiers if Darrell was there. She said she didn’t know but would call the back office to find out.

“Please tell him that Baron Ricasoli sent me,” I told her. She said she would.

But here’s the thing: we were rockers. I had shoulder-length (if already thinning) dyed-sandy-blond hair, mustache and goatee. Ryan, the keys player, also had a mustache and goatee and dreadlocks that literally stretched below his waist.

When Darrell appeared, he was livid!

“Who are you?” he demanded with a tone that barely concealed his understandable annoyance.

“My name is Jeremy Parzen,” I answered, “and Baron Ricasoli has sent me with his regards.”

Darrell suddenly pivoted and began to walk away.

“Stay right there,” he said.

Nonplussed, Ryan and I were convinced that we were about to be expelled from his shop.

But when he reappeared, he had a book in his hands. It was my translation of Maestro Martino’s 15th-century recipe collection, published by UC Press a year or so earlier.

“Would you please sign this?” he asked me. And thus a friendship was born, one that has profoundly shaped my intellectual and professional life over countless conversations, emails, and the occasional meal.

When I saw Darrell earlier this year, he reveled in retelling the story.

“They looked like the kind you have to follow around the shop,” he told one of his employees.

Above: Darrell graciously let me snap this photo of us together, an image that I cherish greatly.

Once when I visited Darrell during the annual California grape growers conference (he was the keynote speaker), one of the attendees pulled me aside and asked me if I knew who he was.

“He’s a national treasure,” she whispered, the hushed timbre of her voice a reflection of her reverence.

I don’t know that my career as a food and wine historian would have been as rich had it not been for the role model that Darrell represented for me. His friendship has been a blessing in more ways that I can count.

Gratias tibi ago magister optime.

Some may remember my post from September of last year, “How to open a wine shop during a pandemic,” about Vesper Wine owners and founders Aisha Savage-Shirley and James Oliver (above) who opened their retail program in Houston at the height of the lockdowns.

We had all become friends in 2019 after James took part in an Italy-America Chamber of Commerce trip to Vinitaly (I’m a consultant for the chamber).

I’ll never forget the last time we were all together, in the late fall of that year. We connected at another Houston wine shop and wine bar for what turned out to be a holiday party — one of the last before we were all stuck at home.

When I found out that they had decided to move forward with their plans for a new wine shop in an underserved neighborhood of our city, I called James to see if they would be up for a video chat to share on the blog.

You can view our chat on YouTube here. In the video, James explains how they swiftly reimagined their business model to focus on home delivery and curbside fulfillment. More than a year later, Vesper Wine is going strong and has expanded to in-store and off-site tastings as well.

On Friday of this week, James, Aisha, and I will be presenting a flight of three Italian wines paired with a menu from Roma restaurant (where I’m the wine director). We’ll also be spinning some Yé-Yé pop, a throwback to my rock ‘n’ roll days in New York with the French band Nous Non Plus.

It’s going to be a super fun event and tasting. And who knows where the night will lead us!

If you’re in Houston this week, please join us. Click here for details.

Tracie, Georgia, Lila Jane, and I will be opening our home to anyone who would like to join us this weekend for our Blow Out Hanukkah Party and Open Mic 2021.

There will be wine (bring your favorite bottle or beverage if you like), food (bring your favorite dish), and lots of great music.

For the adult open mic, there will be complete backline, plenty of guitars and keyboards.

And our backing band, wow, our backing band!

Grammy-award-winning bassist Tim Ruiz will be here (no joke). And Richard Cholakian, one of Houston’s go-to session drummers, will be on my Ludwig kit. And rounding out the lineup, I’ll be playing my beloved Telecaster.

And at some point, Katie White (above, vocals) and Lucky Garcia (bass) will be joining me for a miniset by our 80s cover band Biodynamic.

1 p.m. DOORS
2 p.m. KIDS OPEN MIC (this is something really fun, you’ll see)
4 p.m. ADULTS OPEN MIC
5:30 p.m. FIRST CANDLE LIGHTING

Happy Hanukkah everyone and please ping me for address etc. I hope you will join. ANY AND ALL ARE WELCOME!

Image via Adobe Stock.

What a surreal experience this morning at the breakfast table explaining to our daughters, 8 and almost 10, that Roe v. Wade will soon be gone. They’re too young to understand the broader implications of yesterday’s arguments before the Supreme Court. But their lives and the lives of their fellow Americans will be affected by it in ways that, sadly, we all know too well.

But even more surreal was Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s comment yesterday during arguments that “women don’t have to parent if they don’t want to.” In her questions to the lawyers presenting their cases, she suggested that women who don’t want to parent can simply put their children up for adoption, an easy solution — in her mind — to a much more complicated issue than she can evidently imagine.

Was Barrett paying attention when her colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked the following?

When does the life of a woman and putting her at risk enter the calculus? Meaning, right now, forcing women who are poor — and that’s 75 percent of the population and much higher percentage of those women in Mississippi who elect abortions before viability — they are put at a tremendously greater risk of medical complications and ending their life. [It’s] 14 times greater to give birth to a child full term, than it is to have an abortion before viability.

And now the state is saying to these women, we can choose not only to physically complicate your existence, put you at medical risk, make you poorer by the choice because we believe, what?

And that’s the thing that people like Barrett just can’t seem to wrap their minds around. Not everyone grew up in a picture-perfect, idealized white-bread world like hers. Not everyone in our country has the resources to ensure their reproductive health rights. Not everyone in our country has the means to allow them to choose not to parent.

Imagine a financially challenged white woman who lives in one of Houston’s depressed neighborhoods and already has children. Today in our state, unless she realized she’s carrying a child before six weeks into an unplanned pregnancy have passed, she would have to travel to another state to obtain an abortion. Given that it’s nearly impossible for her to do that, the natural outcome would be that she would have the baby. Can she simply decide not to parent the child? That’s where Barrett’s pie-in-the-sky argument falls apart. Not only would said American citizen have to risk her own health to deliver a child without the financial resources that Barrett enjoys. But she would also have no other choice than to parent a child for whom she doesn’t have financial resources to support.

Well, Barrett might say, she can simply put the child up for adoption. But think about for a second: is a woman living in poverty going to have the resources and the community support to start that process and take care of the child in the meantime? No, it’s not that simple. Nor is it that easy.

And that’s where Barrett and the anti-reproductive rights activists just don’t get it: not everyone in this country looks and lives like them.

Roe v. Wade wasn’t for people like Tracie and me who grew up with financial and health security. Roe v. Wade wasn’t for people like Tracie and me who have had unfettered access to health care and community support throughout our lives. Roe v. Wade was for the woman living with limited options and choices about how to care for her own body and how to provide for her children.

I was just a child when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. Tracie wasn’t even born. Throughout the course of our lives, it has ensured reproductive health rights for women from all walks of life — and not just the privileged like Barrett.

I’m not “pro-abortion.” I’m pro-reproductive rights for all women. I pray — I believe in G-d and pray genuinely — that our daughters will never have to face such challenges. And it’s more likely than not, given that they are growing up with privilege, that they won’t.

Roe v. Wade wasn’t for me. It was for the most vulnerable among us. And now it’s gone. That’s an American tragedy.

My client, Prosecco grower and producer Villa Sandi, called me at the last minute during Thanksgiving week asking me to cover for their export director at the Gambero Rosso tasting in Miami tomorrow, Tuesday 11/30.

If you happen to be in town, here’s the link. Stop by my stand and taste some bubbles with me!

I’m looking forward to seeing a ton of people I haven’t seen since the last time I was in New York for the Gambero and in Miami for the James Suckling tasting in February and March of 2020.

*****

On Friday, December 10, I’ll be pouring and talking about Italian wine with my good friend and Italian specialist James Oliver at his wine shop and tasting room in northwest Houston.

James wanted to incorporate a musical element from my career as a guitar player and songwriter with the French band Nous Non Plus. And so we will be spinning Yé-Yé pop tracks all night.

Don’t know what Yé-Yé is? Come find out!

Roma is catering the event. $45 per person not including tax. 3 wines, 3 courses. Good deal, right?

Will be a super fun evening. Click here to reserve. Only 10 spots available.

*****

And then on Friday, December 17, I will be joined online by acclaimed New York actor Edoardo Ballerini for a conversation that will benefit Animal Zone International, a “non-profit organization dedicated to saving animals, improving the environment and helping the local community on the Greek island of Amorgos.”

Even if you don’t know Edo’s name, you’ve seen him countless times on television and in major motion pictures. But some of you will also know him from the myriad audio books he’s narrated. In a future post, I’ll write more about Edo, how we met and became friends, and what we’ll be discussing week after next.

In the meantime, here’s the PayPal link to sign up for the event. It’s not a cheap date but it’s tax deductible and for a good cause. I hope you’ll join us.

******

And Houston people, don’t forget that Tracie, the girls, and I are hosting our blow-out open mic and Hanukkah party on the last night of the festival, Sunday, December 5. If you’re reading this, then you are invited! Ping me for details but we will start around 1, open the open mic around 2, light candles around 5:30, and then party and sing until there’s no partying and singing left to do! I hope you can join us. There are always some pretty amazing musicians who play.

“Why is it,” a leading wine writer asked me rhetorically late last month, “that our genre is the only one where we treat our audience like they know nothing about the subject matter?”

He was referring to the myriad “best wines for Thanksgiving” posts that flood the eno-internets, from the Pioneer Woman to the Reverse Wine Snob. (The Pioneer Woman’s post currently ranks higher than the New York Times in Google search results. What does that say about the power of wine and food blogging?)

As my friend pointed out, “every year, the same thing happens as if it’s never happened before. Why does [a given writer] publish the same article each year before Thanksgiving? It’s not like much has changed since the last time!”

Despite every respectable wine writer’s claim of a “division of church [advertising] and state [editorial content],” the bottom line — and let’s just go ahead and say it out loud, people — is that Thanksgiving wine recommendations are driven by advertising.

Yes, it’s true that the top wine writers of our generation are not directly influenced by the advertisers’ agendas. But there is no denying that especially in the internets era, the topics covered by mainstream wine writers are driven by clicks. Anyone even vaguely familiar with Search Engine Optimization will recognize that even the most editorially lofty wine writer is called on to deliver a Thanksgiving wines piece to align with the timing of Thanksgiving.

Name me a mainline masthead that doesn’t publish Thanksgiving wine recommendations these days. For that matter, name me a mainline masthead that doesn’t publish a Passover wine recommendations piece every year. It’s always been driven, however indirectly, by advertising dollars.

But in my view, there’s an even more powerful cultural trend that inspires these posts: the wholly and unique American concept that there is one PERFECT wine to go with the Thanksgiving feast. It’s a phenomenon that arises from Americans’ notion of exceptionalism and — I would go as far to say — historical progressionism.

Not progressivism, the socio-political philosophy that vexes today’s conservatives. I’m talking about progressionism, the very 19th-century and some would say Darwinian concept that evolution always makes things better. The ultimate expression of that philosophy, very much shaped by quasi-religious positivism, is that there exists a Platonic or otherwise divine ideal to which we are all striving.

This mode of thinking is also inspired by the erroneous belief that no one who came before us could be smarter than us. The Times has been publishing its Thanksgiving wine column since 2004. I read and enjoy it every year. But has the Thanksgiving menu changed since 2004? Have the world’s wines and their potential pairings changed? Nope, I didn’t think so.

Taking a page from our fellow European wine lovers, what if we threw “the perfect Thanksgiving pairing” to the wind this year and just enjoyed the wine and food? One family likes to serve “unfriendly to wine” artichokes. Another, asparagus. Does that mean that in the former case they can serve no wine at all and in the latter they are forced to serve Gewürztraminer, the only TexSom-sanctioned wine to go with that vegetable?

To my point, let me draw upon an ancient Latin saying: if the Romans were forced to forsake wine when artichokes are served, there would be no Rome. I’m joking about the ancient Latin saying part but can you imagine a Roman serving you delicious carciofi alla giudia or carciofi alla romana without a glass of fresh Frascati or crisp Castelli Romani?

At our family Thanksgiving this year, we’ll be serving Moscato d’Asti (a favorite of nearly half of the roughly 30 people who will be part of our gathering), Lambrusco (another easy winner for our people), some aged Nebbiolo from our cellar (for the red wine lovers), a buttload of Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio (because so many of the celebrants, including me and Tracie, know and love these grapes on any occasion), and a still-to-be-determined but probably sweet wine from Quarts de Chaume (to pair, against every and all rules condoned at TexSom, with the pies).

There won’t be one perfect wine. There will be plenty of wines to choose from. And there will be something for everyone. And that’s because the perfect pairing at Thanksgiving isn’t the wine. It’s the people who love and discover the wines and the way they make the food all the more enjoyable.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I’ll be pouring wine tonight from 6 p.m. onward at Roma in Houston. It’s a free tasting and the wines will be available to purchase for your Thanksgiving meal. (See? It’s ALL about advertising!)