Tag Archives: David McDuff

New York Stories 5: 3 Jews, a Scot, a Piedmontese, a Turk, and 2 Swiss walk into a vertical of cult Barolo

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One Manhattan evening, top New York sommelier (and I mean, king of the hill, top of the heap) Levi Dalton (center, standing, my personal Philip Marlowe of wine) did a true mitzvah: knowing what a wonderful thing it would be for McDuff (left), BrooklynGuy (seated, center), Lyle, and me to get together, he managed to finagle a seat for each of us at vertical tasting and dinner at swank Alto with Peter Weimer, German Swiss cult Barolo producer, owner of Cascina Ebreo (Jew Farm) in Novello (Barolo).

Peter’s importer was also there, Dino, a simpatico German-speaking Turk and New York wine scene character, who also brought of a bottle of Giacomo Conterno 2002 Monfortino (see Lyle’s notes on the Monfortino).

Peter’s Torbido! is an aggressively traditional wine, made with native yeasts and long maceration, unfiltered. I thought 1999 showed beautifully and the 2004, however youthful, promises to be a superb wine. The big hit of the evening was 1998, which I also loved.

It was thoroughly great to see the Jew crüe and speculation as to why the farm is called Cascina Ebreo led to colorful exegesis.

Peter and Dino took many smoke breaks during the event, prompting me to recall an old Italian joke: who smokes more than a Turk? Two Turks!

I was happy to see Dino (whom I’ve known for many years) and to get to chat and taste the wines with Peter.

And wow, whatta mensch, that Levi Dalton, for getting the gang all together…!!! It was, as Lyle put it, a “Mt. Rushmore of wine bloggers,” or, in the words of McDuff, a “meeting of the menches“…

PLEASE do not say BABY BRUNELLO! And hypertextual blog love

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Above: Sangiovese 2010 at Le Presi.

Do Bianchi is by no means a “rant blog” so let me put this as gently as possible.

PLEASE DO NOT SAY “Baby Brunello” (or “Baby Barbaresco” or “Baby Barolo”)!

(And while we’re at it, please do not say “Super Tuscan” either!)

Baby Brunello: I recently heard this abominable lemma uttered by a colleague, whom I admire greatly for both his palate and his experience in the field, and I felt obligated to speak up against this oft repeated aberration.

Although fruit intended for Brunello di Montalcino often ends up in Rosso di Montalcino, the latter undergoes an entirely different vinification process (generally shorter maceration times) and is primarily made from younger vines and fruit grown in sites not suited for Brunello di Montalcino.

Rosso di Montalcino is intended for drinking its youth and is generally less tannic and more approachable early on. There are exceptions, like Poggio di Sotto’s 2002 Rosso di Montalcino, where Palmucci reclassified his entire harvest as Rosso. But why did he do that? Because the juice, however lip-smackingly delicious, was not worthy of the epithet “Brunello.” (Please note my use of the term in its etymological sense, Lat. epitheton.)

So, please folks, be Brunello and be proud or be Rosso and be proud but don’t use the [ugh] “baby” word!

Tracie P calls me “baby” but she don’t call no Brunello “baby”! ;-)

In other news…

Some wonderful hypertextual blog love has been happening this week. After our friend Giuseppe Vaira sent me and McDuff a stunning photo of sunrise over the Bricco delle Viole in Barolo, McDuff posted this fantastic topographical survey of the growing site and croosadabilia wrote a lovely ode to Piedmont over at ‘na cica de vino. (If you don’t know croosadabilia’s blog, check it out!)

I love (and am fascinated by) the way the blogging medium generates hypertext.

In my case, I quoted a Neil Young lyric, McDuff went the technical contemplative route, and croosadabilia waxed epigrammatic.

How groovy is that?

Barolo, I’m still in love with you on this harvest moon

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The world is such a grand, beautiful place, isn’t it? But it’s a small world after all…

Yesterday, trading emails about this and that, my friend Giuseppe Vaira of G.D. Vajra in Barolo sent me and McDuff this amazing photo of sunrise in Barolo (click image for full effect).

“Moon Nebbia Dawn on Bricco delle Viole. View of the western slope. October 5, 2010, 6:35 a.m., two days to the new moon.”

Barolo, I’m still in love with you… On this harvest moon…

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleepin’
We could dream this night away.

But there’s a full moon risin’
Let’s go dancin’ in the light
We know where the music’s playin’
Let’s go out and feel the night.

Because I’m still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because I’m still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart.

But now it’s gettin’ late
And the moon is climbin’ high
I want to celebrate
See it shinin’ in your eye.

—”Harvest Moon,” Neil Young

Did I mention that Giuseppe’s Dolcetto d’Alba is mama Judy’s favorite wine?

Sognando Piemonte (Piedmont Dreamin’)

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bricco boschis

Above: We got to drink a bottle of 2005 Barolo Bricco Boschis by Cavallotto last night. Photo by Tracie P.

As Tony Coturri told me the other day (and as Mama Judy mentions when we talk on the phone each week), California is having the coolest summer it’s had in anyone’s memory. Out here in Texas it’s H-O-T hot — not exactly what I would call “Barolo weather.”

But when our friend (and my client) Julio messaged and said he had a bottle of 2005 Barolo Bricco Boschis by Cavallotto that he wanted to share with us, we couldn’t resist.

And, man, what a treasure in this bottle. Here’s Tracie P’s tasting note: “bright cherry acidity with graphite minerality and a balance of earthiness, so balanced and savory and fruity; it just had everything in the right place…”

The wine is young and the curious thing was how generous it was with its fruit right when we opened and decanted it. But by the time we finished the bottle, it had begun to close up.

On a hot Texas summer eve, it made me dream of Piedmont and a few new-to-me destinations I can’t wait to visit when I return. Like the Museo dei Cavatappi, the Corkscrew Musuem in the town of Barolo.

paolo annoni

I was actually scrounging the interwebs for something else (for a consulting job) when I came across Paolo Annoni (above) and his amazing museum, which preserves more than 500 corkscrews from the eighteenth century to the present. As they say in Italian, this type of stuff is pane per i miei denti, literally, bread for my teeth, in other words, I can’t wait to sink my teeth into it.

serralunga

Another destination at the top of my list is the Vinoteca Centro Storico in Serralunga. I literally drooled over my keyboard when I read about it in the excellent blog authored by McDuff, who possesses one of the palates I admire the most.

Check out his post for details. Just the thought of grower Champagne and carne cruda is enough to make the mimetic desire kick in (at 9 a.m. in the morning, I can literally feel my saliva glands working as I type). Auerbach anyone?

aaaaaaaa… Sognando Piemonte…

The story behind Vajra’s Barolo Albe

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Above: The good news is that it looks like Vajra’s wines will be coming to Texas soon.

So many questions, so little time…

When Mr. Franco Ziliani took Tracie P and me to taste with Aldo Vajra back in February at the winery, I neglected to ask Aldo what the “Albe” in his “Barolo Albe” denoted.

Luckily, we got a chance last week to sit down with Aldo’s son Giuseppe here in Austin. (I’d never met Giuseppe before but I felt like I knew him already: his face and his family were familiar to me, however virtually, through the excellent blog of David McDuff, whose palate and writing I admire immensely and whose taste in music and Nebbiolo are unsurpassed.)

The designation “Albe,” he explained, is simple: it’s the plural of the Italian alba, which in this context, means dawn.

“You see, our Barolo Albe is a traditional-style Barolo made from fruit sourced from three different vineyards,” Giuseppe told us, “Fossati, Le Coste, and La Volta. When the sun rises in the morning, it takes about 20 minutes for the sunlight [dawn] to reach each vineyard. So, there are three different albe [dawns].”

I’ve tasted the 2005 Barolo Albe by Vajra on three different occasions this year, and, man, it just keeps getting better and better. As much as I love their flagship Barolo — the single-vineyard Bricco delle Viole — it’s always the blended Barolo that keeps calling me back. At each occasion, I’ve found that signature freshness and drinkability that Vajra magically seems to capture in the bottle (a quality due, no doubt, to meticulous, gentle vineyard management and an honesty in the cellar).

@David, btw, would love to hear your recent notes on this wine.

Above: The Vajra family begin bottling the historic Baudana wines in 2009 with the 2005 vintage.

We also re-tasted the 2005 Barolo by Baudana, which the Vajra family began bottling for the iconic Langa family in 2009. I can’t say that I am a big fan of the 2005: its woody notes are a turn-off for me. Giuseppe did tell me that for the 2006 vintage, the barrique is toned down. And he added that we’ll see great things from these historic vineyards in vintages to follow (where he plays a greater role in the aging regimen).

As an indication of the greatness and potential of these historic vineyards in Serralunga (Baudana and Cerretta), Giuseppe also pointed to Mr. Franco Ziliani’s recent post on the 1982 Franco Fiorina Barolo, which was sourced in part from Baudana (I translated Mr. Ziliani’s post for VinoWire).

In all honesty, I’m not such a fan of the wine as it is right now. But I do believe that its future in the hands of Giuseppe and his father Aldo has immense potential to become one of the great icons of Langa. Stay tuned…

And let’s keep our fingers crossed that Vajra wines make it to Texas this fall! I don’t know how much longer Tracie P and I can survive without super-old-school Vajra Moscato d’Asti!

Thanks for reading!

The Do Bianchi Vajra Six-Pack is live!

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I was able to secure a small allocation of Vajra wines to offer to my California wine club Do Bianchi Selections (click the link to view the offering). Tracie P and I dig these wines and I’m thrilled to be able to make them available to my subscribers. Wouldn’t you concur McDuff?

Leaving on a jet plane for Barbera (and recent good stuff in San Antonio)

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So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you’ll wait for me
Hold me like you’ll never let me go…

Above: Whole fish at Andrew Weissman’s Sand Bar in San Antonio.

It’s hard to believe but it’s true: tomorrow I’ll be leaving again for Italy, just three weeks after our return from our honeymoon there and our move into our new home, a little rental on the northwest side of Austin.

Above: Josh Cross’s Duck burger topped with foie gras at Oloroso in San Antonio.

Life has been so rich and flavorful lately, as the wine world seems to regain its footing and I can only thank my lucky stars for all the interesting projects I’ve got lined up for 2010. It’s a wonderful time for me and Tracie P (née B) but I know that the glow I feel is for the joy that she has brought to my heart. When she smiles at me, it feels as if the whole world smiles at me as well.

Above: A marinara with marinated, fresh anchovies at Doug Horn’s Dough Pizzeria Napoletana in San Antonio.

I feel so fortunate that I’m getting to travel to Italy for the second time this year — and with a group of really cool bloggers. We’ll be posting about our tastings and adventures in the land of Barbera over at the Barbera2010 blog. (Today, we posted an awesome guest spot from McDuff, one of my favorite wine bloggers, who wasn’t able to join us in realtime.)

Above: Alfonso and I enjoyed a bottle of Barbera last night in San Antonio at Il Sogno.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was. I can’t help but thank my lucky stars for this special time in our lives. I’m so happy to be surrounded by loving folks these days and all the good things that are happening work-wise right now. As my friend Slava back in New York used to say, I should “suck a lime.”

But it’s going to be awfully hard to board that plane tomorrow. I know I’ll be back soon but it only gets harder and harder to tell that lovely lady of mine good-bye. I’ll miss her terribly…

All my bags are packed I’m ready to go
I’m standin’ here outside your door
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye
But the dawn is breakin’ it’s early morn
The taxi’s waitin’ he’s blowin’ his horn
Already I’m so lonesome I could die

Oh babe, I hate to go…

Peepaw drinks some orange wine (in Orange, Texas)

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lunar

Above: Tracie B’s peepaw (grandfather) turned 90 this month. He and meemaw still live in Orange, Texas where Tracie B grew up. He tasted Movia’s Lunar with us over the Christmas holiday — orange wine in Orange, Texas on the Lousiana border!

This morning, when I read McDuff’s fantastic post about drinking Lunar under a full moon on New Year’s eve and his excellent treatment of the importance of the cycle of the moon in the discourse of natural and biodynamic winemaking, I couldn’t help but remember that we opened a bottle of the same wine, the 2005 Lunar by Movia, with Tracie B’s family in Orange, Texas over the Christmas holiday.

lunar

Above: Tracie B and I shared our bottle of Lunar with the B family as Tracie B was preparing her dumplings for the chicken and dumplings we ate the night after Christmas day.

I highly recommend McDuff’s post to you. And while not everyone is as crazy about Movia’s Lunar as McDuff and I are, it’s worth tasting: whether you enjoy it or not, it pushes the envelope of natural winemaking in unusual and perhaps unexpected directions. I, for one, enjoy it immensely and prefer not to decant it (although winemaker Aleš Kristančič recommends decanting). Peepaw and meemaw both seemed to enjoy it…

In other news…

fellini

Above: Tracie B and I agreed that we would have been better off going to see the new Chipmunks movie instead of the lame excuse for a movie otherwise known as Nine.

I’m going to break my rule of never speaking about things I don’t like here and tell you that the new movie Nine (a musical about the life of Federico Fellini) is a travesty, a lame excuse for a movie, and is wholly offensive to the grand tradition of Italian cinema and one of its greatest maestri, indeed one of the greatest filmmakers and artists of the twentieth century, Federico Fellini.

Here are some of the more awful lines from the movie, sung by Kate Hudson (fyi, Guido Contini is the name of the Fellini character played by Daniel Day-Lewis).

    I love the black and white
    I love the play of light
    The way Contini puts his image through a prism
    I feel my body chill
    gives me a special thrill
    each time I see that Guido neo-realism

It makes me wanna HEAVE. The folks who wrote and made this movie should be ashamed of themselves and should be barred from the movie industry entirely: there is no book to speak of, the songs and lyrics were seemingly written as a high-school drama class project, and the premise (Contini’s inescapable and pseudo-Italianate womanizing as an aesthetic disease) is entirely offensive to the Italian nation and its grand historic artistic sensibility — whether figurative or literary.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have found more aesthetic reward and intellectual enjoyment if we had gone to see the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, which was screening in the theater next to ours.

Champagne, Xerox, and Kleenex

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antonomasia [ahn-TAH-noh-MAY-zee’ah], the use of a proper name to express a general idea, as in calling an orator a Cicero, a wise judge a Daniel (OED, online edition).

Above: An unforgettable bottle of 1996 Billecart-Salmon that I shared last year with Jayne and Jon at Spago in Beverly Hills. We weren’t celebrating anything. But we were being treated by a famous winemaker.

In this week’s semiotic treatment of Champagne, we neglected to address one of the most fascinating semiotic implications of the lemma Champagne (at least, one of the most fascinating to me).

The term Champagne is a wonderful example of the literary figure antonomasia, from the Greek ἀντί (anti, meaning instead or against) and ὄνομα (onoma, meaning name), whereby a proper name is used to denote a general idea, in this case, sparkling wine.

Above: A bottle of Bollinger that we popped to celebrate pulling the first mix from Nous Non Plus’s 2009 release Ménagerie. The track? “Bollinger” (click to listen)! A song about our favorite Champagne and official band beverage. (We are a “French” band, after all, n’est pas?)

Other examples that immediately come to mind: Xerox and Kleenex. Both are proper names, in fact, brand names, yet both have come to denote generic items, namely, photocopies and tissue paper.

Let’s face it: even though we wine professionals and enthusiasts strictly use the term (toponym and proper name) Champagne to denote sparkling wines sourced from the place and appellation, Champagne, 99% of the intelligent lifeforms in the world interpret it as any sparkling wine. In his 1953 editio princeps of With a Jug of Wine, for example, food and wine writer Morrison Wood casually and regularly makes reference to California champagne.

Above: A bottle of Initial by Anselme Selosse that Alfonso opened for me and Tracie B last year to celebrate my move to Texas. Perhaps more than any other, Selosse is the most coveted and illustrious brand of Champagne in the U.S. It’s not cheap but it’s worth every penny. Check out this great post, from earlier this year, by McDuff.

Just this weekend, I was reminded of this fact when Melvin C and I visited a Walmart in Orange, Texas in search of some Prosecco for Tracie B, and I was greeted by a “stack” (as we say in the biz) of André California Champagne (“the best selling brand of sparkling wine in the U.S.,” according to the Wiki).

Whatever you plan to drink tonight for your New Year’s celebration, Tracie B and I wish you and yours a happy, healthy, and serene 2010. Thanks for all the support and love in 2009!

Breaking news: this just in from Italy

Thanks are due to reader Elaine from Italy who identified the champagne-method Nerello Mascaelese by Murgo (Sicily).

Also just in from Italy…

According to the Agenzia Giornalistica Italia, when all is said and done, Italians will have spent Euro 2.7 billion on sausage (cotechino and zampone) and Italian sparkling wine (spumante). “Salmon, oysters, and caviar” were no match for the famed boiled sausages of Modena (both delicious, btw). Nor did Champagne, with a “a 66% drop in sales,” rival its Italian counterparts.

On that part, according to a press release issued by the Prosecco di Valdobbiadene e Conegliano Producers Association, Italian agriculture minister Luca Zaia sent 60 “3-liter Jeroboams” of Prosecco to the staff of the “national radio and television stations.”

An early celebration of his upcoming governorship of the Veneto, no doubt.

Happy new year, everyone, everywhere!

One crazy ass psychedelic wine shirt

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Casual was the call for attire at the wine dinner I hosted on Saturday night at Jaynes Gastropub and so I decided to don the above psychedelic vintage 70s disco shirt (recently unearthed in a box that arrived with my library from my Manhattan storage). I’ve never really been able to figure out what it means. On the back, a bunch of grapes transforms into silver balls. On the front, silver balls reveal a convex image of a wine bottle and one of the balls falls to the ground and bursts. There is an upside down dessert sunset that lines the bottom of the shirt (from the wearer’s POV, it looks like a sunset).

I’ll post more on the dinner tomorrow so stay tuned: Australian wines I like! Yes, I actually found some!

In other news…

Tom, I thought you’d never ask! Tom over at Fermentation posted my BloggerView interview yesterday. Tom’s blog is currently the number 1 most-visited wine blog in the world and I was thrilled that he asked me to do an interview. I had a lot of fun with it and was flattered by Tom’s generous words. Click here to read.

Even more thrilling was the revelation of what will become my new tag line: “Guitar slingin’ somm and scholarly scribe of vinous humanism Jeremy Parzen.” Thanks, McDuff, for the new epigram and thanks for the generous shout out.

Lastly, due to an editing error on my part, one of my favorite wine blogs ended up on the cutting room floor of Tom’s interview: Wayne Young’s blog The Buzz is most definitely one of my daily reads. Sorry about that, Wayne!

In other other news…

Check out this way cool Austin slide show and profile in The New York Times Travel mag. It features the Broken Spoke where I’ve been playing some gigs lately.

Who knew that Austin was such a great place to live? ;-)

I moved here for LOVE. :-)