Banish Care

Synopsis

Title: Vino Italiano

While this book is a wonderful appellation by appellation guide of all of the Italian winemaking zones, it does presume a certain amount of prior knowledge and can generally be classified as for people with “just enough Italian wine knowledge to be dangerous to themselves.” There are some basic black and white political maps attached to each section, but again they presume a general prior notion of topography in the reader. Often this topography is described in the narrative texts, but as always, I recommend using the World Atlas of Wine as a companion while reading this book. In fact, Vino Italiano is a perfect mate with the Italian sections of that Atlas.

On schizophrenic women and Italian wine

As I touched upon in the prefacing anecdote to this review, Italian wines were my first love and my first avenue into the world of fine wines. While I have been in love with Italian wines for several years and while I seek out new and exciting ones all the time, I find myself constantly in a fog of misunderstanding and more importantly, I find myself constantly exploring and discovering new things. As Vino Italiano hopscotches along from zone to zone it becomes clear that no precedent set in any one section endures to the next. In fact, a casual reader might assume that iconoclasm is paradoxically a rule and not an exception when it comes to this winemaking tradition. The casual reader would be right on this count. If you are a bit more advanced (let’s say you know a thing or two about all the major French appellations), it’s probably best that you check your left brain at the door—you’ll find little such consistency here. Even within any of the individual zones there are reversals of rules and norms even from one town to the next, often a mere 10 miles away.

The following was initially meant to be an introductory anecdote to introduce a review of the excellent book Vino Italiano by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch. As most of you know, brevity is not my strong point, so I decided to break the review up into this anecdote with the actual review to follow. Please bear with me. I think a lot about cutting down what I do into more digestible parts.

Upon reading the title of Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch’s new book Vino Italiano, I was reminded of a sort of employee picnic I attended some years ago. I was young and working in a small Osteria in central New York State run by a crazy Piemontese gentleman by the name of Giovanni. While Giovanni was almost completely insane and dependent on more substance than Lou Reed, he was a great guy to work for most of the time. From him I learned a lot about Italian food, wine, and culture while sitting in on his early morning espresso and grappa sessions, right before he would go down into the basement and add pot and prescription painkillers to the mix to become unintelligible in every way. It was really at his hands that I became a true fanatic of Italian wines and simply wine in general. He had loaned me a book by Terry Robards, former long-time wine columnist for the New York Times and, as it turned out, the proprietor of a small wine shop in a neighboring town from where I grew up. The book was inscribed by Gio and addressed to Gio as he had given the book to himself on one of his birthdays. Mr. Robards was obviously a huge fan of Italian wines himself as I remember long sections of that book where he urged buyers of ultra-premium Bordeaux to look towards appellations like Brunello di Montalcino and Barolo.

Giovanni had under his employ as his dishwasher an older Neapolitan gentleman by the name of Guido. It was rumored that Guido had a bad gambling problem and indeed he would disappear for days or weeks on end without notifying anyone. In his stead, Gio would often hire some young kid who would instantly get the boot the moment Guido came rolling back into town. Guido spoke very little English, was impossibly vitriolic and reeked of booze, tobacco, and clothes that he probably didn’t even change weekly. He was short and bald and his teeth and lips were stained brown from the chewing tobacco he used. How Giovanni and Guido came together in that unlikely area in central New York, I’ll never know. All we knew of Guido was how much he hated us and the entire litany of slurs that southern Italians are known to utter in the direction of northern Italians. And let me tell you, these slurs were rarely ever delivered in good humor. But like an old embattled and embittered married couple, neither Gio nor Guido seemed to want to give the satisfaction of ending the relationship finally.

Having just read about the passing of Robert Mondavi at the age of 94, I felt compelled to say a few words. It may be difficult for many casual wine drinkers to truly know Mondavi's impact on American winemaking and in fact on American culture. To many, the word "Mondavi" represents a brand with all carefully crafted connotations that a focus group could come up with. But he is a man. A lion, in fact who believed in the golden land of California and fought off whole legions of doubters to prove his belief. His fervor was an inspiration to winemakers in California and in fact, quite far abroad.

Ultimately, he was sabotaged by his own success, though this was not something he endured silently. In a way his life is a parable that is applicable to the whole endeavor of Californian winemaking, indeed to any area that strives to erect a towering honor in a place where only scrubland stands. His is a lesson against corporate leeches who wish to grab, with hostility if necessary, all the fruits of creativity and decades of risk and toil without themselves bearing the burden of any of that risk or weight of vision.

As with the betrayal of Julius Caesar, Mondavi's less violent demise marks the age of decadence in California. An age when multi-millionaires plant vineyards out of nothing and demand hundreds of dollars a bottle on their very first vintage. An age when bucketloads of money change hands over small pieces of paper that may be affixed to the stuff itself, but have little to do with the toil and talent necessary to put an honest product inside.

To the profiteers and egotists of Californian winemaking, may I gently remind you of the man that passed away today and how hard-earned all his glory was and in whose name you currently earn your ill-gotten gains.

I do not want to belittle Robert Mondavi's life by ending on a negative note. What he did and what he gained through decades of ceaseless toil taught the world, not just California, to sit up on its hind legs and take quality seriously. He epitomized pouring the depth of your character and your soul into your work. And there's no vessel better to receive it than your wine. Goodbye, Mr. Mondavi, I hope you find the hills of heaven to be as lush and shimmering with promise as you once did the verdant but neglected land of Napa.

Spring has sprung, and like many across the world, thoughts turn to cold, refreshing beer—although for many different reasons, I suppose. The image of beer in the United States is something of a paradox. The inflammation of wine enthusiasm came at the absolute zenith of beer domination by a small number of bland and likeminded breweries. And so, sadly it seems, wine and beer have seemingly taken diametrically opposed positions among imbibers (let’s not complicate the picture with spirits, yet). To me, the products of any of America’s huge breweries are really alcohol for people that don’t like the taste of alcohol, or anything else for that matter. People often criticize drinkers of so-called “girl drinks” for wanting the effects but none of the real flavor and I would level that same criticism against “light” beer drinkers. Real beer, light in color or dark, is not afraid of flavor or character, is made with an artisanal mind, and can provide the same or similar sense experiences as wine. Anyway, now that I’ve driven away at least half of my scant few readers, let me make an impassioned plea to wine drinkers to drink more beer.

As a person whose vocation often requires I taste wine throughout the day, I commonly come home and with great relish, open up a fresh bottle of beer. In fact, I would say that beer is an almost perfect companion to avid wine consumption and especially to the hopelessly over-wined. I can’t imagine how much more tasting stamina I could have had during those absurd marathon tastings that I’ve been victim to if maybe a small glass of cold fresh beer would have been served throughout the tastings.

I often get asked by my wine drinking friends as well as my beer drinking friends why I’m drinking beer at all, supposedly being a “wine guy” who is curiously forbidden beer. First, to my beer drinking friends I might suggest that what they like is really not beer, but a weak brew tasting faintly of cardboard steeped in seltzer water. To my wine drinking friends I often ask, why aren’t you drinking beer? Maybe because of the former set of friends, beer has been mongrelized, leading us to believe that its only mode of being is to be unobtrusive enough to be guzzled by the gallon. To my more open-minded friends I might ask, can’t there be a bit more to it?