Dispatches from Italy’s 2018 harvest are just beginning to come in.

That’s a shot from Oltrepò Pavese, snapped earlier this week. They’ve started picking their Chardonnay (below) and Pinot Noir for their classic method wines.

From what I’ve been told, Oltrepò Pavese was spared a lot of the late spring and early summer rain that hopscotched across norther Italy this year.

The photos come from winery Travaglino who’s underwriting a blog that I’m writing for the next six months on the appellation. More on that later…

I’ve been told that most a lot of Franciacorta has already been harvested.

I was in Franciacorta in May and then back in June. Limited but still menacing hailstorms and late rains were keeping producers on their toes. When Tracie and I were there in June with the girls, there was a huge thunderstorm that had growers spraying a lot of copper the next day. (After heavy precipitation, copper is sprayed to prevent peronospora, otherwise known as downy mildew.)

Looking around on the internets, I found this authorization, dated June 15, for Trentino producers to increase the maximum yearly amount of copper per hectare to 9 kilos.

The request and authorization are indicators that they’ve experienced problems with peronospora during this very rainy vintage in northern Italy.

Currently, the EU allows growers to use 6 kilos per hectare per year. But the EU’s Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (PAFF) Committee is considering reducing that amount to 4 kilos per year, something that has organic growers gravely concerned (see my post from July 23 here).

Copper is a very sticky issue in Europe these days.

Southern Italy has also seen some patchy but limited rain late in the growing cycle this year. It didn’t impact growers to the same extent as in the north.

Those are Chardonnay grapes harvested in Salento this week, above, photo via my friend and client Paolo Cantele.

The quality of their fruit this year is excellent, he said, despite some late rainfall. He and his brother Gianni are really happy with their results. Those grapes will be used to make their flagship Teresa Manara Chardonnay, their twentieth vintage (mazel tov, Cantele family!).

Down in Tuscany, they’ve had a “rainy and cool” season, said my friend and client Stefano Cinelli Colombini in a Facebook post (translated here, by me, for their blog).

Those are Stefano’s Merlot grapes in Maremma, along the coast.

Based on his lab samples, he’s expecting an early harvest, which is surprising considering the conditions.

“With these crazy seasons,” he wrote, “there’s no telling what the results will be.” But he’s confident that the vintage has good potential.

Between the wild fires in California wine country and the odd weather on both sides of the Atlantic, I don’t know of any winemaker — not even the rubiest red Trump supporter (and there are plenty of them in California, by the way) — who doesn’t believe that climate change is affecting and impacting their livelihood.

Earlier this year, Stefano wrote this compelling op-ed on how winemakers need to face the challenges of climate change (I translated it for his blog; it’s worth checking out).

Wishing winemakers across the world, a bountiful and healthy harvest! Buona vendemmia!

For years now, I’ve been smuggling Bele Casel Prosecco Col Fondo into the state of Texas. (I confess, TABC! You got me, Three-Tier System Crusader!).

The motivation for my illicit activity was the fact that Bele Casel wines were not legally available in my adoptive state. Without an importer or licensed distributor here, you could only find the wines on the American coasts, where they have been available for years. Sadly, Texas is one of the most restrictive no-ship states in the union (thank you, Wholesalers Lobby!). And the state’s alcoholic beverage commission aggressively enforces the no-ship rule. That means that law-abiding Texans couldn’t buy the wines at an out-of-state retailer and have them shipped here.

But as of this week, Bele Casel — one of my favorite Italian wineries and one of my longtime clients (I author their English-language blog) — is now officially and legally available in Texas.

Austin-based progressive importer Rootstock agreed to bring the wines in last year and they are finally here.

Next Thursday, my good friend Nathan Smith and I will be presenting the wines at one of my favorite Houston wine bars and shops, Vinology. Please call the shop (info below) to reserve.

A lot of my Texas wine friends have already tasted the wines at our house. Now they’ll finally be able to take the wines home with them, too — legally. I couldn’t be more happy about that.

Bele Casel Tasting and Seminar
Thursday, August 23
6:30 p.m.
Call the shop to reserve.
Vinology
2314 Bissonnet St.
Houston TX 77005
(832) 849-1687
Google map

News stories I’m following this week…

Landmark Monsanto/Roundup/Glyphosate Ruling

From CNN on Saturday: “San Francisco jurors just ruled that Roundup, the most popular weedkiller in the world, gave a former school groundskeeper terminal cancer. So they awarded him $289 million in damages — mostly to punish the agricultural company Monsanto. Dewayne Johnson’s victory Friday could set a massive precedent for thousands of other cases claiming Monsanto’s famous herbicide causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

The story is heartbreaking (and the CNN report includes graphic images).

Monsanto has vowed to appeal. But it’s plausible that the ruling will reshape the battle over glyphosate, the herbicide in Roundup, a weed-killer that most health experts believe is carcinogenic.

“This is a big victory for human health worldwide,” said Timothy Litzenburg, “the small-town attorney who took Monsanto for $289 million.”

Prosecco Growers Challenge Australian Labeling Practices

In the wake of a first round of trade talks between Australia and the European Union, the Brisbane Times reports this month that Italian wine growers want their Australian counterparts to stop labeling wines as “Prosecco.”

According to the Times article, Prosecco producers claim that the term “Prosecco” is a “geographic indication” (GI), inexorably linked to the place where it has been historically and traditionally produced.

“The Prosecco issue is one of the many skirmishes we could see if the EU seeks to expand the protection of GI to include a wider range of wine regions, as well as food and foodstuffs under the proposed new trade agreement,” said Lisa Chesters, member of the Australian House of Representatives.

“What’s next? It would be the equivalent of you can no longer call pizza ‘pizza.'”

Are Italians Self-Defeating in their Branding?

In an op-ed published this week on the Slow Food blog, Slow Food University law professor Michele Fino decries what he calls self-defeating branding practices that sully consumer perceptions.

In his piece (in Italian), he bemoans the many instances where leading commercial winemakers are incorporating branding language that evokes the word “Prosecco.”

Citing the use of the word “sec” in a Eastern European marketing campaign by a behemoth Piedmont sparkling wine producer, he argues that such strategies ultimately damage the reputation of Italian wine appellations by associating them with cheap, inferior mass-market products.

A sparkling wine labeled “Promosso,” bottled by a Prosecco producer, is another example, he writes. Italian sparkling wines labeled “Secco” are equally counterproductive (even for readers who don’t speak Italian, the images he includes are self-explanatory).

He calls these campaigns expressions of tafazzismo, Italian “masochism” as embodied by the popular 1990s television character Tafazzi (a mime, dressed in black and wearing an athletic supporter, constantly beating his genitals with a plastic bottle).

Prosecco, “a small village in Trieste province,” he notes, “is the most famous name in sparkling wine production throughout the world.”

“It’s only right that we raise a glass to its international success… But we should also try to understand what we want to achieve — all of us together and without vacillation. Regulation is urgently needed” (translation mine).

Top image via Mike Mozart’s Flickr (Creative Commons).

Walking into a great wine shop for the first time is like being invited over to a new friend’s house to check out her/his record collection. It’s an honor and a privilege and it’s bound to lead to discovery.

For years, I’ve followed one of the top wine buyers in the U.S., Samantha Dugan who covers France, sparkling wine, and cheese for the Wine Country in Long Beach, California.

She’s the author of one of the all-time greatest (but currently hibernating) wine blogs, Samantha Sans Dosage. And her hopelessly devoted social media followers literally drool over her food and wine recommendations, travel notes (mostly France), and cultural observations.

Can you tell I’m one of her biggest fans?

Over the years, she, her husband, and son have become our good friends. We try to catch a meal or a drink together whenever we can, although sadly not often enough.

And I had never been to her shop until this summertime in the LBC.

Parzen family stopped by for a way-too brief visit on our way to Santa Barbara County wine country last week.

She hooked us up with a glorious bottle of Xavier Reverchon 2016 Côtes du Jura Trousseau Les Boutasses, which I smuggled into Arizona a few nights later.

There it was consumed giddily by our friends and us, paired with pizzas from New Jersey Pizza Company in Flagstaff. (Why, btw, are the so many great pizzerias in Arizona? New Jersey Pizza Company was awesome and a visit to their website gives you a sense about how damn much these folks care — rightly — about their pizza and the way they treat their customers. Right on!)

This light-bodied but richly flavored wine had that “unbearable lightness” that makes the great reds stand apart from the rest. Super fresh on the nose and the palate, zinging but well-balanced acidity, measured wild berry fruit and a hint of freshly torn herb with just enough tannin to give the wine backbone. We all remarked how much we loved it as we slurped it down.

On a technical note, the Wine Country is located just off the 405, not far from the Long Beach Airport and a half-hour drive from LAX. It’s a great place to get hooked up.

Thanks again, Samantha, for the fantastic bottle, thoroughly enjoyed by me and my crew. We love you! And we love summertime in the LBC!

News of his passing first began to appear on Sunday: Ernesto Cattel, Prosecco col fondo pioneer and organic and biodynamic advocate, died last week. The cause was an unspecified long-term illness. He was 54 years old according to most media reports.

“Our motto was let’s start at the bottom and rise up from the cloudy to see our way clear,” said his business partner Mauro Lorenzon in an interview with La Nuova, a daily newspaper published in Venice and Mestre.

Lorenzon, a celebrated Venetian sommelier and owner of one of the city’s most renowned wine bars, helped Cattel to launch the Costadilà winery in 2006. Today, the estate produces roughly 30,000 bottles of Prosecco col fondo per year.

Their adage refers to the sediment (fondo or bottom) of ancestral method Prosecco, otherwise known as Prosecco col fondo, bottle-fermented and undisgorged Prosecco (col fondo means with its sediment). When the wines are stored upright, they are cloudy on the bottom and clear at the top.

Together with Lorenzon, Cattel did perhaps more than any other Prosecco col fondo producer to raise awareness of the winemaking style, now ubiquitous across Italy and immensely popular in the U.S. where it has been embraced by a new generation of wine professionals.

A member of the natural wine growers association VinNatur, Cattel was also one of Italy’s most strident advocates of organic and biodynamic farming in the Prosecco DOCG.

As Prosecco became an unbridled international success and commercial powerhouse in the 2000s, Cattel was one of the leading voices for artisanal winemaking there and he was among the earliest to farm Prosecco biodynamically.

Joined by a like-minded and determined group of young growers, he and his wines were viewed as a counterpoint to the “industrialization” of the appellation. With their wines and their advocacy, he and his fellow winemakers helped to revive a waning viticultural tradition that had been eclipsed by behemoth bottlers.

News of his passing has been followed by an outpouring of remembrances on the Italian-language internet.

“Ernesto Cattel was one of us,” said the editors of a Facebook page managed by Rete Contandina (Farmers Network), a group that raises awareness of local foodways and organic growing practices in Prosecco country.

“He was among the early ‘revolutionaries’ of natural Prosecco,” they wrote. “His passion and love were boundless. Good-bye, Ernesto. Good-bye to a great and unrivaled Maestro.”

In the obituary published by La Nuova, reporter Francesca Gallo called him “a paladin of biodiversity.”

Image courtesy of Diego Carraro (Venice).