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Like no other place on Earth ~ The Etna Report 2024.5
It happened, after tasting over one hundred wines in a three-hour period, that the vinous impact of Etna became overwhelming. But not before the realization that what Etna means to someone like me goes...
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Always Coming Home: A Sicilian Sojourn Pt.I
Imagining cultural difference that sheds light on the limitations of one’s own culture.Riding on a bus, from Catania to Palermo, my time on Etna was done. I had apprehensions about coming back to...
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What Does the Future Hold for Wine in Sicily? A Sicilian Sojourn Pt. II
“You’ve got it all wrong, Alfonso,” a young influencer tells me. “You have to get yourself in front of the camera, show your face, strut your stuff!” Yeah, that might have been OK for me 30 or 40 years...
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From the archives: Remembering Dad, Dallas, JFK & a bottle of Thunderbird
Friday would have been my dad’s 98th 109th birthday. How the world has changed since he left us in 1985. I was thinking about that as I was driving past Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository the...
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End of harvest notes: So, "where we at?"
“Are you still doing your wine blog?” I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard that lately. Usually followed by “For some reason, I haven’t been getting them.” Which was news to me, as I hadn’t...
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Everything I Know About Wine I learned in Ballet Class ~ A Revision
Well here we are December 1st! Wow, what a year it’s been. For me, it started off with surgery and a knee replacement. And then, like a snowball – on a one-way road down to hell - it just kept...
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Dispatch from the wine cellar: Is there a place for Italian wine in 2025?
After Thanksgiving I started a project: reducing, eliminating, paring down and finely tuning my wine collection. After 40+ years of amassing wines, I realized there were wines that were: 1) too old, 2)...
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Strange Bedfellows ~ Non-Traditional Wine and Food Matches
Photo by Louis CevolaIn my life, there have been those occasions when a seemingly odd wine and food combination made perfect sense. Far from traditional, these moments offered insight into the arcane...
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Onward Through the Fog ~ A Treatise on Montepulciano d’Abruzzo
At long last, the red wine known as Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is having its day in the sun, basking in the glory from the newly anointed acolytes in the world of wine writing and wine influencers. I say...
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At Long Last – A Prescription for Uncertainty
This week I cleared out the RSS feeds for wine writing links. Since I’m not following the wine news anymore, and not part of the wine news-making claque, why track it? There’s this unspoken “rule” in...
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A French Gladiator on Italian Soil
A young wine friend texted me a photo of a bottle he had in his presence, a 2013 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Pucelles. In the secondary market that wine sells for about $350 today....
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Destroying Memories with Invisible Eyes
Temporarily shut in by the arrival of snow (and winter), I was remanded to a nostalgic dream space that has been annexed by an external calamity of Biblical proportions. It’s a strange land, this Gulf...
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The End of the Golden Age of Wine
Wine, associated with appreciation and enjoyment and part of a cultural and culinary movement that was defined by the freewheeling social and economic post-World War II era, succumbed in America today...
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The Sunset Trip
It seems, more and more lately, that aging folks just can’t step away from the dais. Whether it is confined to the wine and spirits trade (and that includes those who write about it) all the way down...
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The Depthless Abyss
Somewhere in time - when you remember another time - things were deeper, truer, bluer, more connected to a believable reality. But here we are, with this pitiful excuse for a genuine moment. We’ve come...
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Oh, The People You’ll Meet! (At a Wine Trade Tasting)
Oops!... I did it again - Went to a wine trade tasting and seminar. Something I used to do, lots and lots of, when I was visible. But now, it is a rare appearance I make for these things. In any event,...
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The Wine That Wasn’t - Anymore
I’m just going to come right out and say it: I don’t like being me anymore. I was born a wine, but I’m tired of being locked up in this dark, dank, confined space, year after year. If this is living, I...
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The Bullshit-ification of the Italian Wine and Food Experience in America
Inspired by Jon Lovitz of Saturday Night Live fame... I had an epiphany recently. And it was, the new reality in America is that the old maxim – Money talks, Bullshit walks– has been hacked. It appears...
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Who in Hell Knows Where This Ride is Going?
In Memory of Patty Wright-Ferrini... Yesterday a dear, good friend died. We met in college, that’s how long we go back in time. She was a force of nature, always positive and upbeat. Not to say she...
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Happiness, happiness…
…everybody wants happiness. Round and round we all do race, everybody looking in a different place. Yeah, pretty much how it seems. I see so many wine professionals rushing all over the globe, living...
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