That’s me, The San Diego Kid, back in 1978, when I was just 11 years old, the year the whole world changed around me (but that’s another story, for another time).
Now, mind you, it ain’t that we ain’t coming back to Austin, Texas. That’s the Kid’s home now. But summertime is here and the Kid has a hankering for some ceviche and some waves… and some natural wine.
Want to drink what me and Tracie B drink? Send me an email and I’ll add you to my email blast list: I’ll be doing a 6-pack offering next week, including some of my favorite wines and Dora and Patrizia’s Vino Nobile di Montepulciano — stinky and natural like we like it!
The story has been told many times but was first recounted famously in English by Eric: somewhere in the 1960s and 70s, the eccentric Italian noble, Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, developed what are still undeciphered methods of vinification and aging that allowed him to create unique, powerful, nuanced long-lived expressions of Malvasia di Candia, Sémillon, and Sauvignon Blanc. The secret at the Fiorano estate (located in the region of Latium, just north of Rome)? Mold… mold on the covering the aging casks, mold covering the bottles aging in the cellar.
I’ve had the great fortune to taste the wines many times. The first occasion was when they arrived in the U.S. in 2005. They had been rebottled and relabeled expressly for sale in the U.S. market and they commanded and continue to command a price that reaches beyond my means. But, man, they were good and they still are.
Yesterday, my friend Susana Partida, owner of Salute Wine, who brokers the wines in Texas, generously brought a bottle of the 94 Malvasia to lunch in Dallas (she and I became friends because her sister Felice cuts my hair at the James Allan Salon in Austin!).
Above: We lunched yesterday at Adelmo’s in Dallas, the see-and-be-seen wine industry hangout, where the simpatico proprietor Adelmo allows trade to bring wine. Adelmo is originally from San Vincenzo in Maremma (along the Tuscan coast) and he grew up in Florence. It’s always great to taste with him and glean wine knowledge from his many years in the business. He sent over some pâté and crostini after he tasted the Fiorano with us — his recommended pairing.
Would the prince have called these natural wines? Probably not. But are they? I believe they most certainly are. When you drink these extraordinary (and extravagant) wine, you taste the hand of an Italian aristocrat who recognized the nobility of the grape and the place, who got out of Nature’s way and let her do her work.
This was a wine, as Tracie B put it last night over our dinner of quesadillas, that “speaks of a place, of tradition. It’s real and it’s a product of its environment and of the culture, not of technology and manipulation.”
Susana generously sent me home with a half a bottle (we each had a glass with our lunch) and Tracie B and I lingered over the wine through dinner and a movie: Il postino, also from the 1994 vintage. In my more militantly Marxist university days, I might have dismissed this poignant romance as cloyingly engagé. But now that I’m a “Brunello socialist,” I can openly say that I found the movie irresistibly charming and ingenuously touching. Maybe it was because I remembered what Brunetta said about Troisi’s performance, in his History of Italian Cinema (translated by yours truly). Troisi, he wrote, gave “the world his career’s most heartbreaking hymn to life and love.” Maybe it’s because Tracie B’s generosity of heart and her wonderful spirit are rubbing off on me… The answer probably lies somewhere between a glass of 94 Malvasia and a kiss…
In other news, more mazel…
Mazel tov, Ale! His Wine Advocate scores and reviews are in and Il Poggione’s current releases are enjoying high marks from Antonio Galloni. Any one who reads Do Bianchi knows how much I love Il Poggione’s traditional-style Brunello and it’s great to see the winery get the recognition it deserves. These reviews and notes are testament to Antonio’s love of terroir-driven Italian wine. Chapeau bas, Antonio. I’ve been a fan since the days of your Piedmont Report and I love what you’ve done with the Italian notes at WA.
Another Italian wine guy, whose palate I respect immensely, Tom Hyland, also posted recently on a vertical of Il Poggione here.
Above: Sardinian-born Francesco Secchi, owner of the Ferrari Italian Villa chain in Dallas grows all of his own herbs, including Sardinian mirto (myrtle). Who needs Viagra?
It’s getting to be that time of year that people start bragging about their fig trees. There are those who brag and those who deliver.
Italian Wine Guy and I had dinner last night with clients of mine, Francesco Secchi and his son Stefano (below), owners of Ferrari Italian Villa in Grapevine (Dallas). The food was very good, but the figs… aaaaaaahhhhh the figs… the figs wrapped in perfectly sliced prosciutto were FANTASTIC. The 30-minute trip from Downtown Dallas to Grapevine (where Stefano presides over the kitchen) is a small price to pay for this paradisiacal experience. I highly recommend the wood-fired flatbread and antipasti misti. (It’s so hard to find well-sliced prosciutto, btw, anywhere in the U.S. and I was thoroughly impressed by Stefano’s deft hand at the slicer.)
Jaynes Gastropub was named one of the top 5 gastropubs in the U.S., together with the Linkery (also in San Diego) and the Spotted Pig (NYC). Not too shabby, mates! And they said this whole gastropub thing would never take off! ;-)
Btw, I’ll be announcing some very exciting news about me, Tracie B, and Jaynes in just a day or so… stay tuned…
In other other news…
After running a wine dinner in San Antonio on Monday night and then working the market all day yesterday and today in Dallas, I cannot wait to get home to my super fine lady, the lovely Tracie B, tonight. Her nachos and some natural and stinky old natural Dolcetto di Dogliani happily await me. Life could be worse…
Above: Produced by Carlo Ponti, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Contempt, based on Alberto Moravia’s novel, Il Disprezzo, was an Italian and French co-production. The results were decidedly better than last week’s Italissima at Vinexpo in Bordeaux.
It would have been enough that Franco rightly chastised his French counterpart and longtime sparring partner Michel Bettane for the selection of Bordeaux-inspired Italian wines to be presented in Bettane’s seminars at last week’s Italissima, a would-be Italian wine fair held in Bordeaux in conjunction with but with no official affiliation to Vinexpo, the annual see-and-be-seen French wine trade fair.
“Instead of calling it, ‘Italissima, the Italy that you love,’” wrote Franco, “they should have called it ‘Italissima, the Italy that they love,” where the ‘they’ stands for presumptuous French critics who do not know the real Italy of wine. In fact, they don’t understand it at all and they wouldn’t understand even if they seriously tried to study it…”
Wouldn’t the French be offended, asked one commenter to Franco’s post rhetorically, if Italians were to present French wines made with Italian varieties as authentically French?
But making matters worse was a slew of reports and blog posts about how Italissima participants were left sadly disappointed by lackluster turnout and poor organization. One Italian blogger called it a pasticciaccio brutto, borrowing from the title of Gadda’s 1957 novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulano written in Roman dialect (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana).
Adding insult to injury, the French daily Sud Ouest called the event the “pavillion de la discorde,” a “monster,” and a case of “parasitism,” where the organizers were trying illicitly trying to piggy back on the exposure of Vinexpo just 200 meters down the road.
There was an even a report of wine destined for Italissima being hidden by Vinexpo organizers and a claim by the Italissima organizer that she had been attacked by one of the Vinexpo organizers.
Some of the greatest movies ever made were the French and Italian co-productions of the 1960s, like Godard’s Contempt. Maybe it’s best if dreamers of French and Italian partnership stick to movie-making.
Above: Tracie B and me’s favorite wine to pair with Torchy’s trailer park tacos is Inama Soave. It has just enough richness in the mouthfeel to wrap itself around the intense flavors of the spicy pork and salsa.
It’s summertime in Texas and that can mean only one thing: BYOB trailer park tacos.
After we watched The Hangover at a matinee yesterday (hilarious, especially the raunchy closing credits), we headed out to spend the steamy summer evening with Tracie B’s childhood friend Jennifer and her husband CJ (check out their cool wedding photography blog), munching on chips and salsa and tacos, sipping Soave and Sangiovese at the Trailer Park Eatery in Austin — trailer park dining world capital.
Above: One of the trailers at the Trailer Park Eatery makes tacos, one makes burgers, and one makes S’mores — yes, S’mores. How’s that for an impossible wine pairing Dr. V?
Inama Soave is always one of our favorite pairings for BYOB tacos because of its bright acidity but also because it has a certain richness and unctuousness to the mouthfeel that wraps around the texture of steaming hot, soft corn tortilla stuffed with juicy roast pork and delivers ineffable pleasure.
I also thought the 2003 Villa di Vetrice Chianti Rufina Riserva showed well. I was a little hesitant to buy this wine: I’ve had too many 03s from Tuscany that are too stewy. But this wine was a beauty: 100% Sangiovese, grown at proper elevations (your ears pop as you drive up to Rufina), and vinified in a traditional manner. Great acidity, great plummy fruit, and lightness in body balanced by tannin that I just can’t resist. Both of these wines retail for under $20, btw, perfect for BYOB tacos.
There’s no doubt about it: Austin has some of the best Mexican food I’ve ever eaten — from the haute to the bas.
Of the entire corpus of Dante’s writings, his Inferno — the first canticle of his Commedia, with its gallery of eternally damned, their sordid tales, and their punishments — is indisputably the most popular (in part because of its inherently cinematic and more immediately accessible content). The other two canticles are much more dense and more difficult to penetrate but they are equally — and in many cases more — inspired, as Dante travels up toward heaven through Purgatorio (see the terraces of Purgatory left) toward Beatrice in Paradiso.
The word vino or wine appears twice in the Commedia, both times in the Purgatorio. In the first instance (Purg. 15, 123), Dante refers to his fatigue, “like a man overcome by wine or sleep.”
In the second, wine plays a much less mundane role. In Purg. 25, 76-78, the Latin poet Statius compares the miracle of winemaking (natural winemaking, I might add) to how God creates life:
E perché meno ammiri la parola
guarda il calor del sol che si fa vino,
giunto a l’omor che de la vite cola.
And, that you may be less bewildered by my words,
consider the sun’s heat, which, blended with the sap [must]
pressed from the vine, turns into wine.
(You can read the tercet in context at the Princeton Dante Project here and I’ve included the Princeton Dante Project commentary to Statius’s lecture on embryology, the physiology of the spirit, and the formation of the aerial body below, together with a link to the entire commentary.)
I had been thinking about this tercet after I posted in Saignée’s 31 Days of Natural Wine Series on the “miracle” of winemaking. (The series continues through July 18 and is definitely worth checking out.)
This passage from Dante is a great example of how Western thinkers and poets saw winemaking as a divine act. I find it beautiful how Dante (in the voice of Statius) uses the example of winemaking to illustrate how life is formed — a concept not easy for the mortal to grasp. As the heat of the sun starts fermentation, so the miracle of grape juice being turned into wine begins. Juice for thought, no?
Thanks for reading and buona domenica! Tracie B and I are off to the movies now…
From the Princeton Dante Project, a great tool for reading, browsing, and studying Dante’s Commedia:
Statius’s lecture on embryology may be paraphrased as follows. He is willing to deal with Dante’s desire to know how the aerial body is formed ([Purg XXV 34-36]): (1) After the ‘perfect blood’ is ‘digested’ (the fourth digestion) in the heart, having now the power to inform all the parts of body, it is ‘digested’ once again and descends into the testicles; (2) it now falls upon the ‘perfect blood’ in the vagina; it is ‘active,’ the latter ‘passive’; (3) the male blood now informs the soul of the new being in the female; (4) but how this soul becomes a human being is not yet clear ([Purg XXV 37-66]). Once the fetal brain is formed, God, delighted with Nature’s work, breathes into it the (rational) soul, which blends with the already existent souls (vegetative and sensitive) and makes a single entity, as wine is made by the sun ([Purg XXV 67-78]). At the moment of death the soul leaves the body but carries with it the potential for both states, the bodily one ‘mute,’ the rational one more acute than in life, and falls to Acheron (if damned) or Tiber (if saved), where it takes on its ‘airy body,’ which, inseparable as flame from fire, follows it wherever it goes; insofar as this new being ‘remembers’ its former shape, it takes on all its former organs of sense and becomes a ’shade’ ([Purg XXV 79-108]). This ‘lecture’ is put to the task of justifying Dante’s presentation of spiritual beings as still possessing, for the purposes of purgation, their bodily senses even though they have no bodies. Souls in Heaven, we will discover, have no such ‘aerial bodies,’ but are present as pure spirit.
Above: Josh used apple juice to baste the pork shoulder.
Folks in Texas like to smoke. No, no, no… It’s not what your thinking. They like to smoke their food.
Above: Smoked pork shoulder was the main attraction.
In other places where I’ve lived, lots of folks like to break out the hibachi or Weber when summer arrives. But, in Austin, a lot of our friends will stoke up the smoker, sometimes the night before.
Above: Josh’s dad gave Seana and him this new smoker as a housewarming gift. They just moved in together and last night’s was a house-warming party. Congrats Seana and Josh!
Last night, Tracie B and me went to a “smoker” party at our friends’s, Seana and Josh.
Above: Bacon-wrapped jalapeños stuffed with Philadelphia cream cheese.
Josh smoked up whole apples, whole cloves of garlic, a pork shoulder, steaks, bacon-wrapped jalapeños stuffed with cream cheese, and bratwurst.
Above: Seana’s deviled eggs. All I can say is HELL YEAH! They’re almost as good as Tracie B’s Mee Maw’s. ;-)
We had a blast at the party, listening to Michael Jackson and arguing over the finer points of his career, remembering all those moments from high school when you heard a song for the first time or how many times you played it over and over on cassette tapes. (Check my friend Shawn Amos’s moving and funny remembrance of Michael Jackson.)
Congrats, Seana and Josh on y’all’s new place!
In other news: flash back 1978…
Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke was released in 1978.
The Jacksons released their first self-produced album, Destiny and their single “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” hit number 7 on the Billboard charts.
Where were you when you heard the news? I was outside San Antonio, at the end of the work day, in a traffic jam and on the phone with Tracie B, who saw the lugubrious headline flash across a feed on her computer screen.
Whatever your feelings about Michael Jackson (or lack thereof), you knew his name, you knew his songs, you knew his image, and you knew how he changed the world. He was one of the greatest songwriters and performers of all time and my generation came of age with him — whether you liked his music or not. I have always loved his music and his songwriting in particular.
Last night, Tracie B and I slowly sipped Clos Roche Blanche Cabernet Franc as we listened to MJ on our Ipod and danced and sang along to all of our favorite songs. Then we watched some of the Larry King conga line freak show.
I once had a job, back when I was a grad student back in the 90s, archiving video footage of Motown artists (for Berry Gordy’s publishing company Jobete). In one interview with the young Michael Jackson, the journalist asked him how he felt about racism he encountered while touring in the South. “Sometimes you go to a movie theater,” he said, “and someone says something mean and it just ruins your whole day.”
It’s amazing to think how the world changed in the arc of Michael Jackson’s lifetime — and ours.
RIP MJ
If they say
Why, why, tell em that is human nature
Why, why, does he do me that way
If they say
Why, why, tell em that is human nature
Why, why, does he do me that way
I like livin this way
Life’s been a little stressful lately and there’s so much negativity going around right now in the world of wine that I thought it was time for some “just for fun.”
It had been a while since Tracie B and me popped any Movia. So Sunday night, we invited our friend and fellow natural wine freak Josh Loving over for Tracie B’s famous fried chicken and mashed potatoes and a bottle of Puro, which Josh — the consummate wine professional — ably disgorged (check out the video I shot below).
Dinner was served accompanied by one of my favorite records: Cold Shot! by the Johnny Otis Show. I love every track on that disk and “The Signifyin’ Monkey” is probably the most famous. But my favorite favorite track is “Country Girl.” Toward the end of the song, Johnny Otis doubles the following aphoristic chiasmus with his guitar: You can take foxes outta the country, but you can’t get the country outta foxes. It’s one of the mysteries of life but that line just kills me every time. Check it out, as Josh disgorges the wine:
You’ve probably seen Puro disgorged at Do Bianchi before but in case you haven’t, it’s really easy to do (as in the vid above). Winemaker Aleš Kristančič makes the wine using the méthode champenoise but he leaves the lees and sediment in the wine (i.e., he doesn’t disgorge before release). You store the wine upside down in your fridge (using a cardboard cylinder that comes with the wine) and then you disgorge it upside down in a basin of water. The wine will be totally clear (as in the photo below).
Although Bollinger remains the indisputable official wine of my band Nous Non Plus, we have been known to disgorge a bottle of Puro… or two.
Life could be worse…
In other news…
Today, “the absolutely fabulous Alice Feiring,” as Tracie B likes to call her, is up to bat at 31 Days of Natural Wine. Alice is a dear friend, a great lady, a mentor, and one of the few things — besides Katz’s pastrami and Barney Greengrass whitefish salad — that we miss about New York City. I love the wine she talks about and I can confirm what Cory writes in his intro, that “very Alice Feiring” has become a canonical wine descriptor. How cool is that?
Above: The label on Gasparini’s Capo di Stato (Head of State) depicts Charles de Gaulle as Alexander the Great. The original owner of the estate, Count Loredan Gasparini, was the descendant of a Venetian patrician and doge. Imperialist leanings with your Cabernet, anyone? I used to drive through Venegazzù in the Trevisan hills where this wine is made nearly every week on my way to play gigs when I was a student in Italy in the early 90s.
Last night, following meetings and a business dinner in Dallas, I headed over to Italian Wine Guy’s house for a killer bottle of wine and one of my favorite films, Pasolini’s Accattone (1961)
In my view, Cabernet Sauvignon is a terribly misunderstood grape. In the U.S. and Italy people tend to drink it when it’s too young and too tannic (and as a result, too many modern-style winemakers trick it out to make more “drinkable” early on). This nearly 30-year-old beauty was stunning: lively acidity, truly silky tannin, and gorgeous red fruit. I haven’t tasted any recent vintages of Capo di Stato lately but this wine was made before the barrique craze took off in Italy (following Maurizio Zanella’s historic trip to California with Luigi Veronelli).
There was some irony in sipping such an extravagant bottle of wine and watching a film about a Roman small-time pimp, set in the squalor of the outskirts of Rome. Accattone was Pasolini’s first film and it launched his career as a leading and highly controversial filmmaker and intellectual.
In this sequence, Accattone, played by Franco Citti (remember him from The God Father II and III?), has accepted a challenge and bet that he can survive a dive from a bridge into the Tiber after consuming a large meal. The danger, as is perfectly clear to any Italian, is not the dive itself but rather the contact with water immediately after eating. Throughout the film — which is sometimes funny and ultimately very sad — Accattone (The Sponger) is constantly complaining about how hungry he is and devising schemes to get a free meal.
In other news…
Check out Tracie B’s Joly post over at Saignée, part of the 31 Days of Natural Wine series there. I’m at a Starbucks outside Waco right now catching up online. I’ve had a rough couple of days with work and other stuff. But knowing I’m going to see that lovely lady tonight is like sugar in my bitter coffee.
In other other news…
You can download a really cool new Italian DOC and DOCG map here.
That’s me, The San Diego Kid, back in 1978, when I was just 11 years old, the year the whole world changed around me (but that’s another story, for another time). 
Posted by Do Bianchi 
Posted by Do Bianchi 
Posted by Do Bianchi 
“Instead of calling it, ‘Italissima, the Italy that you love,’” wrote Franco, “they should have called it ‘Italissima, the Italy that they love,” where the ‘they’ stands for presumptuous French critics who do not know the real Italy of wine. In fact, they don’t understand it at all and they wouldn’t understand even if they seriously tried to study it…”
Of the entire corpus of Dante’s writings, his Inferno — the first canticle of his Commedia, with its gallery of eternally damned, their sordid tales, and their punishments — is indisputably the most popular (in part because of its inherently cinematic and more immediately accessible content). The other two canticles are much more dense and more difficult to penetrate but they are equally — and in many cases more — inspired, as Dante travels up toward heaven through Purgatorio (see the terraces of Purgatory left) toward Beatrice in Paradiso.
I had been thinking about this tercet after I posted in 
Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke was released in 1978. 
Where were you when you heard the news? I was outside San Antonio, at the end of the work day, in a traffic jam and on the phone with 
Life’s been a little stressful lately and there’s so much negativity going around right now in the world of wine that I thought it was time for some “just for fun.”
