One of the things that will delight first-time visitors to Enoteca Naturale in Milan is its jaw-droppingly gorgeous setting in the Parco delle Basiliche (Park of the Basilicas). It’s one of the most beautiful plazas in the city, especially at night thanks to the dramatic lighting.

Another element that will surprise them is that it shares its physical space with Emergency, a humanitarian aid foundation that has worked to fulfill its motto nessuno escluso (no one left out) since 1994. Some may remember that its founder Gino Strada died this summer (see his Times obit here).

The sense of moral purpose and civic cause hasn’t been lost on the founders and owners of Enoteca Naturale who set their business up as an “SRL Benefit” when they opened its doors in late 2018. SRL is the Italian equivalent of limited liability company. The term benefit here denotes a for-profit company that receives tax incentives for fostering and supporting community. In the case of Enoteca Naturale, the owners have committed to making their workforce diverse, including numerous hires of immigrants. It’s a program known as integrazione sociale or social integration. Pretty cool, right?

I visited Enoteca Naturale on the very last day of my latest trip to my spiritual homeland in early October.

I was blown away by the depth of the by-the-glass selection. And the level of wine education chops was as thrilling as it was informed and informative.

But the thing that really impressed me about this wonderful natural wine destination was how nice that everyone was there.

That may seem like something banal. But in my experience visiting natural wine bars in the U.S. and Italy, it’s not always the case.

The occasional attitudes of some staff at natural wine venues have often reminded me of my graduate school days when academic one-uppersonship was often what guided human interaction among my peers. Every time I hear someone say something like, well, you must have never tasted Overnoy or Textier, I can’t help be reminded of the time one student mercilessly shamed another into admitting that they had never read Ulysses — in front of the whole class. Yes, that really happened.

Everyone at Enoteca Naturale was so warm and welcoming. They didn’t care where any of the guests were from or where they were going. All they cared about was pouring and sharing good wine with people who were there for that very purpose.

That’s my dissertation advisor and good friend, Luigi Ballerini, in the photo above btw. We had such a lovely visit there.

I’ll never forget the first time that I visited Milan’s other go-to natural wine bar, Champagne Socialist, which I also loved. They recoiled when they learned I was from Texas. Unfortunately, that’s something that happens a lot when I frequent natural wine circles. It took an entire of evening of drinking and bantering (and a couple of jazz cigarettes) to convince them that non tutti i texani vengono per nuocere (just like Fo’s thief).

No, none of that prejudice or presupposition was present at Enoteca Naturale. All I found was great wine and great people ready to share it with me. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Identify yourself as a wine professional and they will give you a trade discount.

In a closed-door vote last week, the Italian senate blocked a bill that would have expanded existing Italian anti-discrimination laws to include the LGBTQ community.

The controversial vote over DDL Zan (named after its author, Alessandro Zan, an Italian LGBTQ rights activist) has sparked protests across the country.

“Thousands of people gathered in Milan and Rome on Thursday,” writes Sandra Salibian for Women’s Wear Daily, “to protest against the decision of Italy’s Senate to block the ‘DDL Zan,’ a bill against homotransphobia, which would have extended passages of the penal code that already punishes discrimination and violence based on racial, ethical and religious beliefs to also include sex, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as disability.”

In the image from Instagram above, fashion designer Pierpaolo Piccioli poses with “DDL Zan” written on the palm of his hand as a neon sign hovers above him.

The line in neon is from Italian critical theorist and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini (it comes from one of the three sonnets he composed as a post-script to his landmark collection of essays, Lettere luterane, or Lutheran Letters, first published in 1976).

Non vogliamo essere subito già così senza sogni.

Translated slavishly, it reads:

We don’t want to be suddenly, so abruptly, without dreams.

I’ve translated the entire sonnet below. In my “performative” rendering, where I’m trying to maintain the rhythmic and prosodic spirit of the poem, I have translated the line as follows:

We don’t want our dreams so suddenly taken away.

Note the use of Agape (unconditional love for G-d) and Ananke (the personification of destiny) in the first stanza. See the Wiki links I’ve included.

I was honestly stumped by Pasolini’s “Devil of the Angel black” like “Luciano ‘o Sarracino.”

‘o Sarracino is Neapolitan. It means the Saracen. Perhaps a playful allusion to the Renato Carasone song?

Luciano: maybe Luciano Serra, his schoolmate and close friend from his years at the University of Bologna?

In the image below, you’ll see piazzas filled with citizens gathered in protest in the city of Brescia. Photo by my friend Laura Castelletti, an activist and politician there. As far as I can find on the internets, all of Italy’s major cities were backdrops for similar protests.

Here’s the sonnet, translation mine:

Signor Teacher, we have seen the Devil of the Angel
so black like Luciano the Saracen. “Yell long live
Benjamin Spock” he told us. He’s going to need a cane.
Enough of the Agape. We want the Ananke.

We are tired of becoming serious young adults.
tired of being forced to be happy, criminal or neurotic:
we want to laugh, we want to be innocent, we want to expect
something from life. We want to ask, we want to ignore.

We don’t want so suddenly to feel safe.
We don’t want our dreams so suddenly taken away.
Strike, strike, comrades! For our rights.

Signor Teacher, stop treating us like idiots
for one must never offend, wound,
or touch. Do not fawn over us, for we are men, Signor Teacher!

Above: grapes being “raisined” for the production of Valpolicella wines.

After a Twitter user tagged me in the tweet below, I immediately sprang to action. There was no time to lose!

Hi @DoBianchi ! Tis the season to post on social media about appassimento, which begs addition to your ITA-ENG vocab list 😅

— Alexandra M. Korey (@arttrav) October 25, 2021

As Alexandra, a Florence-focused art historian, noted, grape growers in Italy are drying their grapes — raisining them — right now.

The process is known in Italian as appassimento: the drying or raisining of the grapes.

Drying the grapes concentrates their sugar, their lifeblood. It’s an ancient process that was widely used in Italy from Roman times until the early 20th century. It’s still used in countless appellations, most famously to produce sweet Vin Santo in Tuscany and Amarone (a dry wine) and Recioto (a sweet wine) in Valpolicella, among many others.

The related Italian term passito means raisined– or dried-grape wine. Passito di Pantelleria is arguably the most well known among the passiti or dried-grape wines (plural).

The great 19th-century Italian poet, philologist, and critical theorist Giacomo Leopardi would have loved the terms appassimento and its verb form appassire. Like so many words in Italian, it can have multiple meanings. It’s used with poetic license to mean wilting or even waning (as in, their passion for [something] has waned).

Knowing that time was of the essence, I immediately called my buddy, grape grower and winemaker Angelo Nicolis, in Valpolicella. (His wines are imported to the U.S. by my client Ethica Wines and I visited with him in January 2020 on my last trip to Italy before the lockdowns.)

He swiftly dispatched the above photo and the below video. And as you can see from the crates of grapes being dried behind him, the timing was perfect!

As per Alexandra’s commission, I’ve also updated the Italian-English Wine Glossary to include the term.

Thank you for the nudge, Alexandra! And special thanks to Angelo who turned this around so quickly.

This is what I love the most about wine blogging and social media. How it brings us all together, from different corners of the world, around a passion that will never wane!

Above, from left: Brett Zimmerman, founder of the Boulder Burgundy Festival, and Margot Pascal, one of the owners of Domaine du Cellier aux Moines, one of Burgundy’s oldest wineries and youngest rising stars.

Me to legendary sommelier and wine educator Jay Fletcher: “Hey, Jay! When’s the last time you tasted a flight of six Aligoté?”

Jay to me: “Never!”

Our seemingly banal exchange gives you a sense of how remarkable this year’s Boulder Burgundy Festival was.

Disclosure: the Boulder Burgundy Festival has employed me as a media consultant for more than a decade.

Remarkable because it included the gathering’s first in-person events since the 2019 festival.

Remarkable because wine writer (and my dear friend) Alice Feiring flew in to present a flight of six different expressions of Aligoté, many of which are produced in diminutive amounts and were painstakingly sourced by festival founder Brett Zimmerman.

Remarkable because the brand-spanking-new Coravin sparkling wine preservation system had its in-person debut on the first day of the festival (a wine tool that many agreed is going to be a game-changer for restaurants).

Remarkable because Margot Pascal, co-owner of one of Burgundy’s oldest estates and one of its youngest rising stars, presented two flights of her family’s wines, including a showstopper Givry monopole and two wines made from Chardonnay and Chardonnay Musqué, a rare clone that wowed the roughly 30 collectors and wine professionals who had gathered to taste at the festival’s Sunday seminar.

Above: Brett Zimmerman and Bobby Stuckey, co-owner of Frasca Food and Wine where the event’s marquee dinner was held on Saturday night.

Tasting with Margot, at both her Sunday seminar and the Saturday night marquee dinner at Frasca, was one of the wine highlights of my year.

As Brett pointed out at the Sunday event, her wines are relatively new to the U.S. market and are already highly allocated. We were extremely fortunate to get to taste her family’s bottlings, all raised on her family’s estate, where wine has been continuously made for more than nine centuries.

They purchased the historic but then run-down farm in 2004 and have spent the last decade and a half restoring the iconic property and reviving the grape growing and winemaking there. The farm is organic certified and Margot’s family has employed biodynamic farming practices there for at least four years.

These wines are soon going to be impossibly hard to come by, Brett noted.

And if her Givry premier cru and Givry Clos Pascal monopole weren’t enough to bring the crowd to its feet, Margot’s Montagny Les Combes premier cru, made from Chardonnay and Chardonnay Musqué, would have been a showstopper on its own. It comes from some forgotten rows of the latter clone that Margot’s family discovered when they took over the property.

When’s the last time you tasted two vintages of Montagny Les Combes side-by-side? When’s the last time you tasted a Chardonnay Musqué? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Above: when’s the last time you tasted six different Aligoté in one sitting? If the answer is “yes,” please stop reading this post!

And if Margot’s flights weren’t enough to bring the house down (they did just that on Saturday night at Frasca, which turns into a French restaurant once a year for the festival), the flight of Aligoté presented by Alice was as utterly eye-opening as it was wholly delicious.

Alice, as the delighted group of tasters learned, has spent a lot of time on the ground in Burgundy tasting and researching Aligoté, a white grape often overlooked because of Chardonnay’s lucrative dominance.

“I love an underdog,” she said.

There was also a moving tribute to her close friend Becky Wasserman, for whom we all raised the first glass of wine that morning. We learned that there will be a tribute bottling of Aligoté produced to honor her legacy, career, and behemoth influence in the wine world. It will be made from vines planted in Becky’s birth year. “She loved Aligoté,” said Alice. “She loved an underdog.”

Gauging from the ooos and aahs emanating from the tasters, the flight seemed to thrill the room with its astounding range of aromas, flavors, and textures. More than one taster, including some top wine professionals who were in attendance, remarked on how these wines over-delivered.

And Alice gave a benchmark talk about her experiences with the wines and the people who make them.

The word remarkable was uttered more than once.

Above: Bobby presents the back of the house at Frasca on the night of the marquee dinner featuring Margot’s wines.

But maybe the most extraordinary thing about the festival was the fact that for most, it was the first in-person wine event they had attended since 2020. Last year’s festival was held entirely online. And it wasn’t clear if an in-person festival was going to be possible this year. What a blessing it was to be there: seeing cherished friends and colleagues after so much time apart was a deeply emotional experience for many, me included.

My heartfelt thanks goes out to Brett, the Boulder Wine Merchant crew, and the greater Boulder wine community for hosting Tracie and me this year. What an incredible experience.

Elephantem ex musca facere…

Astonishing and astonishingly sensational were the first words that came to mind after reading Jason Horowitz’s story for the New York Times late last week, “A Battle of the Bubbles: War Comes to the Prosecco Hills” (October 1, 2021).

Clickbait was the other.

Yes, it’s true that last month the EU agreed to hear Croatia’s case that its winemakers should be allowed to label their Prošek, a dried-grape wine made in extremely small quantities, as an officially recognized appellation.

The issue has been fermenting (excuse the pun) since July of this year. But the EU’s nod to let the case move forward has unleashed a river of “the sky is on fire” posts across the internets.

Although the Italians and the Prosecchisti would have preferred that the EU decline to hear the case, there is still little chance that the Croatians will prevail.

As top Italian wine trade observer Maurizio Gily noted earlier this year, the Italians began exporting Prosecco many decades ago, long before anyone was trying to ship Prošek abroad. This entitles them to the trademark in the market.

What is more likely to happen is that the EU will strike a deal similar to the one the Italians obtained when the lost their case to the Hungarians back in 2009. At issue was the supposed confusion between wines labeled as (and made from) Tocai in Friuli and the Hungarians’ claim to the trademark for the homonymous wine Tokaji. The Italians lost. As a result, wines labeled as Tocai can only be sold in Italy. In order to ship their wines abroad, the Friulians changed the grape name to Friulano.

And guest what? Sales actually grew after the change!

Prosecco growers, producers, and bottlers (and remember, bottlers are the biggest players here, not the growers or the producers), have had to contend with “Italian sounding” imitators for years now. The worst offenders are arguably the Australians who make tank-method wines from Glera (the main grape used in Prosecco in Italy) and label and sell them as Prosecco in Australia.

The Prosecchisti can’t do anything about it (although they have tried) because EU has no binding agreement with Australian regarding trademark protections for wine and food products. (To this day, btw, Californians still label and sell wines as “Champagne,” “Lambrusco,” and even “Brunello.”)

In the light of the above, it’s hardly a “war” or “battle” going on in Proseccoland. It’s just EU bureaucracy winding its way through the block’s byzantine legal process.

It’s also remarkable that Horowitz, a writer I otherwise admire greatly, only got quotes from a few of the (not so) major players (none of whom have a big footprint in the U.S. where his readers live). Where was Nino Franco? Where was Matteo Lunelli and Bisol? Where was Mionetto? It seems that he only spoke to a few bottlers. Where was Santa Margherita? Where was Cupcake, for that matter?

And what about the myriad family growers and family grower/winemakers? Where was their voice?

As for his claim that there is a serious discussion about creating a new name for Prosecco, I can only say, give me a break. That’s simply not going to happen, at least not in our lifetime.

I have so much to tell from my recent trip to Italy (just got back last night). Stay tuned for that. But thank you for letting me get that off my chest in the meantime!

Top image via the Gambero Rosso forum. 

Here in Piedmont where I’ve been teaching at Slow Food U this week, people drink red wine. When you talk to the old timers, they’ll tell you that in their day, there was no white wine to drink here. No Timorasso, no Anascetta, and maybe just a little Arneis (that no one really cared about back then). Just Barbera, Dolcetto, and the occasional Nebbiolo.

So it was only natural that Slow Wine guide editor-in-chief, a Piedmontese through and through, would order a bottle of red wine when he, his wonderful family, and I sat down for an aperitivo at everyone’s favorite natural wine bar Zero in the town of Bra where most of the students live and where I stay in hotel during my teaching gig.

His selection was a Roero Rosso by progressive grower and producer Alberto Oggero, a 100-percent Nebbiolo he calls “SANDRO D’PINDETA.”

Drinking this deliciously fresh wine and noshing on salumi and cheeses, I couldn’t help but think of how Roero Nebbiolo is a category (nearly) entirely ignored by my American colleagues. Even as Alto Piemonte producers and their Nebbiolo have become the new stars of the überhipster American wine scene, it remains immensely challenging to find wines like these — Nebbiolo by a lesser god, as it were — in our market. Historically there have been one or maybe two producers of Roero-grown Nebbiolo that have made inroads in the U.S. But the category was never wholly embraced. It’s time to rethink that, in my opinion.

The wine was gorgeous, with classically sweet tannins, a hallmark of great Nebbiolo. Not prohibitively priced and ready to drink right out of the bottle, it only got better as we three adults finished it. What a great wine and value.

It was wonderful to see Giancarlo and his family (they have two daughters just like Tracie and me and the girls enjoyed visiting with them immensely we we were all here in 2018).

Back in 2016, he asked me to give him a hand in launching the Slow Wine Guide USA. For three years, he and I traveled throughout California and Oregon. We started with 70 California producers. And that number had tripled by the time, three years later, that I retired as the U.S. coordinator.

Today, he told me, they have greatly expanded their California and Oregon coverage and have added other states as well. I couldn’t be more proud to have been part of the launch. And while I don’t envy him all the headaches and heartaches that come with editing a guide, I miss our epic trips and tastings.

He said that while the Slow Wine tour was cancelled this fall (for reasons we all know too well), he plans to bring the winemakers to the U.S. in early 2022, including a stop in Austin. I’m looking forward to taking him out to a favorite barbecue and a night at the Continental Club where we first really connected when I took him to see a Dale Watson concert.

Grande Giancarlo! I’m so glad we’re friends and I’m so proud to have been a part of the Slow Wine launch in the U.S.