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Choosing Your Hill
So much of what we’re enveloped in lately seems to be a battle over where to plant one’s flag. There is such an overabundance of information pulling us one way or another. I’m not just talking about...
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What the Next Ten Years Actually Held
redoing a 2025 blog post over a 2016 set of guesses about Italian wine in America Ten years ago this past January I sat down and made a list of guesses about where Italian wine in America was going. I...
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Ziff & Dale Decanted - The Strip Returns
It's been the better part of two decades since a corkscrew and a decanter first started arguing with each other in the back of a restaurant, after hours, over whatever was left in the bottle. Ziff...
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Selling the Sunlight
Recently I was, what else, talking wine with a friend. Sicily came up (we were sipping on a Grillo) and the notion of just how far Sicilian wines had come, not only in the aspect of quality, but in the...
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Passion Is the Yeast, Not the Grape
How many times do you read something, hear something, talk to someone, and the subject comes around to passion. I'm not talking about some arm-in-arm torrid romance that is splashed all over the...
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Don’t Pee on the Oregano
I don't know if this is a redundant type of notion, but once again I am thinking about wine, wine tasting, the wine tasting experience and the overall life experience. And the more I think about it,...
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The Wines of Campania: Tom Hyland Gives an Overlooked Region Its Due
Photo ©Tom Hyland 2026 Tom Hyland has spent the better part of five decades chasing Italian wine, and approaching 100 trips into the country to do it, so it's a little surprising it's taken this long...
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The Dog Days of Summer
Rocco, as I found him on July 20th July came and went. My month, and the month for so many people I know and love. I look forward to July every December, January and February. And then when it arrives,...
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1989 La Chapelle Hermitage - Thirty-Seven Years After
There is another story I really want to tell, but this one comes first. Last week I had a few fellows over for a birthday meal — they were all turning (or had already turned) 50, and I was 25 years...
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Annotations from a Life in Wine, Writing, and Photography
...my 6 bits worthThere is something about a birthday that both excites and terrorizes me. Of course, the excitement comes from an early age, with the anticipation of a celebration and all the ensuing...
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For those still hanging on to an identification that no longer fits?
(homage to Gianni Di Venanzo)Terry Theise has a new piece up wrangling for the defense of "fine wine" as a category. His method is to sort wine into three tiers — schlock, good, fine — not by how it...
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Vinitaly Books Passage on a Propagandist's Ship
There's a press release sitting in my inbox announcing that the Amerigo Vespucci — Italy's training ship, the so-called most beautiful ship in the world — is sailing into New York Harbor for the Fourth...
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After Drops of God: What Wine Means to Me in 2026
Of late, wine has been coursing through my thoughts. Not the alcohol — that's not what this is about. No — it's what wine did to my life, and how I have changed through it. I recently watched a TV...
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Reprise: Fathers and Sons
from the archivesGreat-Grandfather Assuntino Luigi Cevola in Palermo - 1890'sI never knew my Great-Grandfather, Assuntino, but I met him, thirteen years after he died in Palermo, in 1971. I was feeling...
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In Search of an American Burger with a Sicilian Surrealist in a Forsaken and...
In continuation from here... After the dinner Giorgio’s wife made for us, we sat around in his drawing room sipping on Cynar. It was August and Rome was stifling hot, humid and deserted by all but the...
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On Photography: No Sunsets. Not Yet
Since migrating away from the wine trade, I have been able to devote more time to a long-time love of mine, photography. Of late, I have participated in two workshops with masterful photographers. The...
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Highway 29 Revisited: Just Leave the Door Open
I'm walking around a wine shop. Filled with wines from all over the world. The place is abuzz with sales reps and suppliers waiting to sample their wines with the buyers. Customers dot the store here...
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Some posts age like Brunello, some like Vin Santo.
from the archives...On Italy, and what it does to a personMarch 2011· Italy: Without a Doubt"When it all gets to be a little too much, when the heat of the day goes from tepid to searing, when all...
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Taste the Island. Live the Story. Read the Press Release.
Ecce HomoAnother press release arrived in my inbox, this one from Sicily. Assovini Sicilia, the island's wine producers association, wanted me to know that their 22nd annual Sicilia en Primeur had just...
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Sicily's Other Master Class
Amaster sommelier flew into town last month and put on a master class in Sicilian wine. He was good — prepared, a little nervous, which in my experience is a healthy sign. He didn't exude false...
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