Do Bianchi

Photo via Grub Street.

Beyond writing about wines under $25, my mission as wine writer at the Houston Press is to offer coverage of fine wine in Houston and Texas.

So what could be better than an interview with my friend Ray Isle, Houston native, who’s on his way to Texas next month for the Austin Food & Wine Festival?

You can read the interview here.

And here are his thoughts on Italian wine (topic of one his seminars) that didn’t make it into the Houston Press post:

Cesanese was a discovery for me not too long ago (particularly the wines from Damiano Ciolli, who’s a very talented young guy). In fact, in general Central Italy fascinates me — it seems like it’s been a little bit bypassed, attention-wise. Marco Carpineti’s wine in the Lazio are great; a lot of Abruzzese wines are terrific (I think La Valentina’s Binomio bottling is a standout); and there’s been a crazy wave of good Lambrusco coming in, which has been a godsend for dinner parties, as far as I’m concerned. But what’s great about Italy overall at the moment is it seems as though you can’t go to an importer tasting and not run across a producer you’ve never heard of before who’s doing something ambitious and interesting.

Ray is such a cool guy… I’ve promised him a night of honkytonking while he’s out here. Ginny’s Little Long Horn Saloon, anyone?

“Frank Cornelissen came from Belgium to Etna,” wrote Eric the Red in a recent New York Times piece, “where he makes extreme wines unlike almost any others on earth, which people tend to love or hate.”

Cornelissen’s supremely polarizing wines are a wine director’s worst nightmare. Because they are entirely unsulfured, there is extreme bottle variation in any allocation and secondary fermentation (and the resulting spritz) is more common than not. Because they are unfiltered and unfined, the wines are cloudy and have all kinds of nasty looking bits floating around in them. And the volatile acidity in the wines — there’s no way around this — can make them smell like shit when you first open them.

So why did I put them on my list at Sotto in Los Angeles (where I’ve been curating the carta dei vini since the restaurant opened on March 5, 2011)? And why did the general manager, Dina Pepito, agree to let me, against her better judgment?

It’s a lot easier to serve Cornelissen’s wines at home, where you have all the time in the world to let them rest upright and let their sediment fall to the bottom. When we’ve served them in our home, we made sure to give them ample time to repose and we’ve drunk them over the course of an entire evening, following along as the wine changed from first glass to last.

When I worked the floor at Sotto on Saturday night, there were ninety people on the waiting list trying to get in. It’s one of the hottest A-list tables in LA right now. And in all that hustle and bustle (between the CAA dick-waggers and the Chardonnay-drinking housewives of Beverly Hills), a sturdy Gaglioppo works great while a delicate Etna blend tends to be unsettled by the roaring din of the rich and famous.

And even though the allocation we managed to get certainly doesn’t meet the criteria for “fine wine,” we store the bottles with our verticals of Taurasi, Cirò, and Graticciaia because the wines need to be handled with the same gentle tenderness.

When the wines became available to us thanks to Amy Atwood Selections, I put them on the list because I wanted to offer our guests Natural winemaking in its most extreme expression. From the Natural wine police to the consumerist hegemony of wine punditry in the U.S. today, everyone agrees that 1) these are impeccably Natural wines; and 2) they represent, to borrow an expression from Roland Barthes, “wine degree zero.” These are wines to which literally nothing has been added. Nothing, zero, zippo… (If you don’t know the wines, read this profile by Matt Kramer in the Wine Spectator, of all places!)

And of course, I wanted our wine list to reflect the renaissance of winemaking that’s taking shape on the northern slopes of Mt. Etna.

I sold a couple of bottles of the wine over the last weekend (when I was visiting for staff training and to “work the floor”).

One was to a table of wine geeks who had read a preview of the list in one of LA’s sea of food blogs. It was amazing to watch their eyes light as the stink blew off and they slowly nursed the wine. “I’ve never tasted anything like this,” said one. “The wine is slightly sparkling,” noted another.

I sold another bottle to super glam Eastern European lady (Hungary?) who sported a Farrah Fawcett hairdo and who was in town to visit her daughter, who was dining with her.

“I cannot drink wines with sulfites,” she told me. “I break out if I drink wine with sulfites. I can only drink natural wine,” she added, clearly unaware of what the volatile term natural can mean to wine professionals these days.

“As it just so happens,” I said, “I have a wine to which, I am 100% sure, no sulfites have been added.” (We actually have a couple on the list.) And I opened the Contadino (the same as in the photos above).

She wasn’t entirely thrilled by the wine but she didn’t send it back. She was normally a “Merlot drinker,” she told me. And in one of the most bizarre moves I’ve ever seen, she ordered coffee after dinner but kept nursing the wine with her coffee. (Disgusting, right?)

I don’t think the wine made much of an impression on her. But I’m assuming, since she didn’t call to complain, that she didn’t break out the next day.

And in our small little way, we made the world a little safer for Italian wine…

Stay tuned for my next post about my recent visit to Sotto: “The Racism of Corkage.”

Folks often ask me just what it is that I do for a living…

After receiving my doctorate in Italian (UCLA, 1997) and getting my start in the wine writing business as the chief wine writer for La Cucina Italiana (1998-2000, New York), I began working as a freelance copywriter for New York-based importers of Italian wine and spirits.

What started as a print-media monthly newsletter for Fratelli [Fernet] Branca (in New York) quickly grew into a business that provided content to importers like Terlato Wines International and Kobrand. Read the rest of this entry »

This just in from the department of semiosis…

Above: A vanity shot of Italian wine scion Lamberto Frescobaldi (photo by Herbert Lehmann).

Truth be told, I would have missed this nugget if I didn’t follow top Italian wine blogger Franco Ziliani’s Vino al Vino (because I don’t follow the blog where it appeared in English).

In an interview last week, American wine pundit W. Blake Gray asked Florentine aristocrat about 2008 accusations that his Brunello (Castelgiocondo) had been purposely adulterated by the winery. With skillful sprezzatura (dissimulation) worthy of a Renaissance courtier, Frescobaldi neatly responded that “In the beginning of 2008, our wine was suspended from the market. After eight months, after a lot of analysis, it came out that everything was fine. The wine was given back to us. We could start selling the wine.”

What he omitted is the fact that he couldn’t sell the wine as Brunello di Montalcino and the fact that he and his lawyer were both convicted by the Italian courts of selling adulterated wine.

Here’s a English-language synopsis (posted by Franco and me in October 2010) of a report published by the local edition of one of Italy’s leading daily newspapers.

According to the article, Frescobaldi was sentenced to three months in jail for the crime (although the penalty was reduced to a fine).

W. clearly states on his blog that some of his content is advertorial in nature and I wonder if Frescobaldi paid for this coverage. Gauging from how W. cheers Frescobaldi’s unabashed passion for “New World” wines (W.’s term, not his subject’s), I wouldn’t be surprised…

Lamberto, you may be slick. But you’re no Baldassare Castiglione!

So glad to be heading home today…

Homeward bound
Home, where my thought’s escaping
Home, where my music’s playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me

What’s the most important ingredient in pig’s head ragù?

Nomina sunt consequentia rerum.

Chefs Zach and Steve carefully carve all of the tender meat around the pig’s head and then grind it for their ragù at Sotto in Los Angeles where I curate the wine list together with my friend and colleague, the inimitable Rory.

I usually have the classic pizza margherita (my favorite) when I finish my shift. But last night I decided to mix things up a bit and had the housemade sausage and broccoli raab pizza with freshly chopped red hot chili peppers. It paired unbelievably well with the Nanni Copè, the new and supremely sexy (read ACIDITY) Pallagrello Nero from Caserta, with the earthiness of the wine holding the spice of the pizza in check.

I’ll be at Sotto again tonight: please come on down and see me and I’ll pour you something great…

In the wake of yesterday’s post and remembrances of the great Italian wine maven Lou Iacucci, a number of people who knew him wrote to me or commented here on the blog.

Of all the remembrances, I was perhaps most deeply moved by what my friend Francesco Bonfio, president of the Italian associations of wine shops, wrote, paraphrasing a quote uttered by Lou: “I do not want to drink italian wines that taste like French wines and I do not want to pay for Italian wines at French prices.” (Francesco attributes the quote to an interview in Wine Spectator, which I’ll have to track down.)

Amen, I say…

Alfonso sent a scan of an obituary published shortly after Lou’s passing in Civiltà del Bere (vol. 12, ,2 April-June 1988), “Lou Iacucci succeeded in introducing thousands of people to Italian wines.” I’ve uploaded them (2 pages) as PDFs and you can download using the links below.

One of the profile’s subtitles reads: “Many mourn a friend who was a friend of Italian wine.” Italian wine insiders will recognize many of the names of Lou’s peers and colleagues quoted in the article.

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I’ll see you tonight and tomorrow night at Sotto in Los Angeles, where we’re launching my new 2012 list…

Lou Iacucci, I re