Anyone who’s ever been on an Italian wine industry media junket knows that the experience can be a bit of a schlepp. You generally have to board a bus at 9 a.m. and stay out all day, often until after dinner, visiting wineries, tasting wines, attending lectures and seminars, and eating way too much food.

It’s often exhausting but the upshot can be rewarding. When well organized, the trips allow you to taste a lot of wines that you might miss otherwise. And what’s even better is that you get to taste them side-by-side, mostly in single sessions for each category.

Last week, I spent three days getting on that bus at 9 a.m. And I’ve now tasted more Moscato d’Asti and Brachetto d’Asti and from more producers than ever before. And even though I’d been on a Barbera d’Asti junket once before (eight years ago now), I also got to refresh my knowledge and tasting notes for Barbera d’Asti and the newly born Nizza appellation as well.

I haven’t been on a trip like this in a long time. But I was glad to be on this one: for the last year, I’ve been contributing to blogs sponsored by the Moscato d’Asti and Barbera d’Asti consortia.

One of the highlights was getting taste a lot of Moscato Secco. It’s one of the new designations from Moscato d’Asti and it’s coming to a town near you soon.

Brachetto Rosé, a dry wine, is another brand new designation I was eager to check out. And it was amazing, honestly, to taste 30 or so expressions of Brachetto side-by-side, including classic Brachetto, still Brachetto, and the new category.

Despite the long hours, the massive amounts of truffles we were forced to eat (see below), and the behemoth number of wines we were compelled to taste, it turned out to be a really fun experience. And that was especially because of the super cool people who were on the trip with me (above).

I’ve been working in this business for more than 10 years now. And I’m convinced, now more than ever, that it’s not the wines that make me keep coming back. It’s the people. It’s the community that makes it all worthwhile.

I have a ton of notes that I’ll share. And this week, I’m traveling through northern Italy tasting more wines and talking to producers in other appellations as well. In the meantime, please wish me speed and safety.

Heartfelt thanks to the Moscato d’Asti, Barbera d’Asti, and Brachetto d’Acqui producers for hosting me. I really learned a lot on this one. Thank you!

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, American winemaker Dan Petroski, founder and owner of the California-based Massican winery, generously sent me a bottle of his latest label, Gaspare.

Named after the father of a schoolmate who nudged Dan toward his first winery job in Italy, it’s a 2016 blend of Tocai Friulano, Ribolla Gialla, and Chardonnay. But unlike Dan’s celebrated Friuli-inspired northern Californian whites, the fruit for this wine was grown in the Colli Orientali del Friuli by his friends Serena Palazzolo and Christian Patat whose Ronco del Gnemiz (Gnemiz Hill) winery is one of the most renowned in the appellation.

The wine is thoroughly delicious, richer in style than Serena and Christian’s signature wines, perhaps more reminiscent of Borgo del Tiglio in terms of body and weight than the lean, laser-focused monovarietal bottlings from Ronco del Genmiz. The aromatic character of the Tocai prevails while the Chardonnay seems to impart muscular elegance to this age-worthy (imho) bottle.

But the thing that really struck me about it was its trans-national character. And even more impressive, in my view, its “anxiety of influence,” to borrow Bloom’s phrase.

Here’s a critically acclaimed and admired American winemaker whose aesthetic has been shaped by his contact with Friulian white wines. Like a Dante emulating his guide Virgil, he has applied his experience in and passion for Italy using Friulian grape varieties grown in Californian soil. But now he’s come back to Italy, full circle, in a peripeteia that precedes a glorious reckoning, a resolution of sorts between that which inspires and the inspiration itself.

The Oedipal connotation is profound. In today’s world of new- and old-world contamination, where European winemakers react to and emulate American sensibilities and American winemakers (like Petroski) emulate and react to their European counterparts’ sensibilities, the Massican Colli Orientali del Friuli Bianco represents a sort of Jungian lysis. Or should I say autolysis?

Great stuff and thanks, Dan, for sharing it with Tracie and me (she loved it, too).

Happy holidays, everyone! We hope you enjoy the new album from the Parzen Family Singers, “Their Love Is Here to Stay”!

DOWNLOAD ALBUM FOR FREE HERE.

Or click here to listen on SoundCloud.

Many of the songs on this album were inspired by our girls, Lila Jane age 5 and Georgia almost 7. Over the course of the year, they challenged me to write songs about them and their lives.

The lead track, “Safety Song,” came about when Lila Jane asked me to compose a song about, well, “safety,” something we spend a lot of time talking about at our house.

Georgia makes an appearance on vocals on “Minivan,” another one they asked for (although now they are more excited about our F150 than our Odyssey).

“Sonny,” the album’s only instrumental, is about one of their stuffed animals.

Sonny the Cheetah makes another appearance in “We Are The Bunnaroos,” a song about their make-believe rock band (inspired by “Josie And The Pussycats” and [Paul Collins’] The Beat).

“(This Is Called The) Go Rusty,” a track about our new dog, was co-written by Lila Jane who performs vocals.

“Welcome To The S—hole” is self-explanatory (rock ‘n’ roll is one of the best antidotes to Trump and his racism brand).

“Taking A Bath” was another song challenge from the girls. We wrote it together as I strummed a guitar and they played in the tub. It’s my homage to Randy Newman.

“ABCs” is the album’s only cover, performed by Lila Jane.

“At The Museum” was inspired by our visits to Houston’s excellent Museum of Fine Arts. It’s testament to the old adage that you can write a song about anything under the sun. I’m really proud of the lyrics on this one (and all the while in the café/the milk is steaming/sipping cappuccinos and dreaming).

The title track, “Their Love Is Here To Stay,” was written after white supremacists sent an anonymous defamatory letter about me to Tracie’s 97-year-old grandmother “memaw” (the folks back home/they say she’s crazy/to love a spirit such as he/she’s been around the world that lady/nobody knows her mind but she).

Thanks for downloading and listening (any proceeds from pay-what-you-want sales will go to our efforts to repurpose the newly constructed Confederate memorial in Tracie’s hometown, Orange, Texas).

We hope you enjoy the music as much as we did making it…

Happy Thanksgiving and happy holidays, everyone!

Please join me tonight (Friday, Nov. 16) at Sud Italia on University Blvd. in Houston (Google map) for an evening of great Italian wine and conversation. I’ll be pouring wine for guests all evening.

The greatest works of art and literature are those which are conscious of being works of art and literature, texts that are self-aware of being texts, so to speak.

Without diving headfirst and recklessly into a discussion of “experiential” versus “experimental” poetics, suffice it to say that there are two types of “art” in the [post-]post-modern world: those which merely entertain us and those which expand their genre by forging new ground, as they entertain us all the while.

This dichotomy can be traced back to antiquity, of course. But in modern times, the “art vs. entertainment” dialectic was best summed up by Umberto Eco in his (in)famous 1985 essay “‘Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.”

“According to traditional standards in aesthetics,” he wrote, “‘Casablanca’ is not a work of art… [I]f the films of Dreyer, Eisenstein, or Antonioni are works of art, ‘Casablanca’ represents a very modest aesthetic achievement.”

A lot of Casablanca fans will be surprised to hear that. But as Eco illustrates (and despite being a diehard ‘Casablanca’ fan, I agree with him), Casablanca is a great film but it’s not a work of art. In other words, it’s not a film that’s conscious of being a film. It’s just a great film.

Late-night graduate-days debates over the intersection and divergence in art and entertainment — fueled by pungent cigarettes and acrid coffee — came to mind as we drank the Minimus 2017 Pinot Gris from Oregon the other night.

Where so many skin-contact and natural-intentioned wines can tend to be monochromatic in their aromas and flavors, this wine delivered gorgeous varietal expressiveness, with brilliant fruit (ripe peach and apricot), elegant acidity, and artful weight, body, and texture. In a word, I loved it.

But I was also struck by the fact that, like many of the Craft Wine Co. wines, it’s a one-off, one of the many bottlings they do just once — when the confluence of growing conditions and availability of fruit gave the winemaker the unique opportunity to make. No, there won’t be a 2018 bottling and that’s simply because the winemaker has already moved on to his next aesthetic adventure (well, honestly, I don’t know that for sure but it’s my understanding that each of their wines is intended to be an entirely singular viticultural expression, a sui generis bottling).

The packaging and meticulously compiled metatext (see the image above) also struck me as remarkable and remarkably thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Like a text that’s left the hands of its author and has gone on to become its own living and breathing objet d’art, this wine seemed to have a life that came into being only after the moment of its issuance. At the risk of sounding unintentionally macabre, I’ll borrow Barthes’ equally infamous declaration that “the author winemaker is dead…” In other words, this wine, so mindful and self-aware of being a wine, had taken on a life of its own once it left the confines of the cellar where it was born and found its way to me in Houston.

(For the record, the man who made this wine is alive and well; meaning here is figurative, of course, not literal.)

Is winemaking an intellectual pursuit? I believe that no, it’s not. Is it an aesthetic expression of its winemaker? I believe it is… but not when she/he seals the wine with a cork or screw cap. It becomes poetical the moment a wine lover pulls that cork or twists that screw cap.

And the other night, the Minimus 2017 Pinot Gris was pure poetry…

Buon weekend, everyone! Have a great weekend and drink something delicious!

Del Posto group (NYC) buyer and Italian wine guru Jeff Porter shared the following press release with me yesterday and I’m happy to repost it here: Ian is THE LEADING English-language authority on Italian ampelography. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Ian next month to Houston! (Image: Barbera grapes as depicted by 19th-century Italian botanist Giorgio Gallesio [Flickr creative commons].)

Indegina World Tour
Ian D’Agata
Houston, Texas
December 11 & 12, 2018

Please come experience one of the greatest speakers on Italian wine in the world: Mr. Ian D’Agata. Ian is one of the world’s foremost experts on native grapes of Italy and his most recent book Native Grapes of Italy has become a defacto tome for wine lovers across the globe. In addition to being an author Ian has established the Indegina Center for Food & Wine studies in Barolo, Piemonte. Indegina has been created to teach and explore the world’s native foodstuffs and wine grapes from all angles: science, economics, history, culinary and sociologically.
Continue reading →

As the cloudy sky looked on, the sheriff’s patrol car that idled outside Congregation Bonai Shalom (in Boulder, Colorado) politely moved to allow me to take the last parking spot in the lot outside the synagogue.

Three 30-something congregants greeted me warmly as I approached the temple entrance.

“I’m from out of town,” I said.

“Oh, where from?” one asked me smiling broadly.

“From Texas,” I said, “Houston. May I join you today? I’m on the road for work and there’s no way that I’m not going to shul today.”

“Of course,” they answered heartily and nearly in unison.

By the time services were in full swing, the sanctuary was packed. And the young rabbi didn’t shy from noting what an emotional time it was for all of us. Only a week had passed since the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Tears welled, it seemed, in everyone’s eyes, including mine.
Continue reading →

Of all of the events at the Boulder Burgundy Festival (now in its eighth year, my fifth as official blogger), there is no more spirited gathering than the “Paulée-Inspired Lunch.”

For those not familiar with the term paulée, it’s an annual party thrown in Burgundy to celebrate the end of harvest (paulée means literally a panful or the amount a pan holds, a reference to the early years of the outdoor celebration when attendees made single-pan meals). The Burgundian paulée was also inspiration for the New York and San Francisco wine festivals known as La Paulée.

Every year, on the Saturday of the Boulder festival, top Burgundy collectors bring prized bottles from their cellars to share liberally with other guests. It always makes for an extraordinary luncheon, this year hosted at Boulder’s excellent francophile Mateo where the kitchen turned out classic French country dishes including escargots, coq au vin, and the boeuf bourguignon in the photo above (the food was fantastic).

Yesterday’s meal happened to find me seated with a high-profile distributor who sells, among other fine wines, the highly coveted Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. And as it so happened, one of the guests (a very generous collector) sent over a glass of 2001 Échezeaux Grand Cru by the storied estate.

As we shared the wine (a small taste for each of us at the table), the conversation turned to the exorbitant cost of these wines and how they are allocated throughout the world.

According to WineSearcher.com, the current release price for this wine is around $1,650 per bottle (yes, per bottle). And the market price for the 2001 is around $2,300 per bottle.

But even these sums pale when compared with the current release price for the domaine’s top wine, the Romanée-Conti Grand Cru, which retails today in the U.S. for roughly $17,000 per bottle. (To wrap your mind around these astronomical prices for 750ml of wine, see this Barron’s article.)

One of the neatest things about my career arc is that so many Italian collectors enjoy sharing their wines with me. And over the last five years, my work with the Boulder Wine Merchant and the Boulder Burgundy Festival has given me the opportunity to taste some extraordinary French wines otherwise above my pay grade and beyond my reach.

But I had never touched my lips to the holy grail of fine wine, D-R-C as it is known in the trade by its initials.

It was an emotionally charged moment, I have to admit. And the wine, however youthful 17 years since it was harvested, was utterly and thoroughly delicious. With rich fruit, elegantly balanced acidity, and fine texture and weight, it really delivered greatness and wholly lived up to its name.

Will I taste it — let alone drink it — ever again? Probably not. And that’s okay by me. It’s kinda like the old bit about the rabbi who enjoys a bite of a ham sandwich but then notes that he can live without it (that’s not really how the joke goes but you get the drift).

I would have been happy with the fat glass of 1997 Latour Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru (one of my favorite appellations of all time), poured for me by a friend at yesterday’s event. It came from her father’s cellar and still had the price tag affixed: $125 per bottle, presumably purchased in the early 2000s before Burgundy’s prices began to skyrocket.

All in all, it’s been one of the best festivals of my run and I feel truly blessed to be a part of it.

Heartfelt thanks goes out to festival founder and organizer Brett Zimmmerman, who invited me up here for the first time five years ago, and to all the amazing sommeliers who have poured me truly unforgettable wines.

It’s always a wonderful gathering, attended by some of the best and brightest in our community, and I can’t recommend it enough to you.

Now I’m off to the last three events: Chablis brunch, Gevrey-Chambertin seminar with Pierre Rovani and Kelli White (both super cool wine writers), and grand tasting. Nice work if you can get it (as the song goes).