Wine Jabber

Il Muletto

Tuesday dawns beautifully mixed – partly cloudy, sunny, whatever. Gorgeous. I get to the winery by 8. Andrea, the new “new guy” – he’s a student at the oenological school in Alba – is scooping out pomace when I arrive (let’s call him “Andrea #2”). How excellent. Though he may “know” more, I’ve been here longer. Nyah nyah nyah. He’s wearing an Eels t-shirt and I immediately like him.

Last night I stayed until almost 8 getting the pallets ready for the container for the US. 20 pallets – shrinkwrapped, inventoried, moved – and I have blisters on the sides of my fingers from the rolls of shrinkwrap plastic as I ran around the pallets – ouch. I get home at 8.15, shower and crawl into bed. A few text messages, 15 pages of the new novel – “Atmospheric Disturbances” by Rivka Galchen, which is really, really disturbing, to say the least, but also touching and beautifully sad – and I am out like a light. I’ve been dreaming regularly for the last week to ten days – which is a really great thing. I rarely dream, so 10 days of dreams is … like … wow, man. Strange and powerful stuff. I dream of a leaky roof, and friends, and driving in a really strange car.

Winemaking is not like this.

Nope, nope, nope.

Even with my flippers, we don't crush grapes this way.

End o' the week.

The next day, referring to my delestage the day before, he tells me that as my skills improve, I will not need to keep shutting off the valve during the straining process. Also, he says, it is important and OK to step outside for a minute for air. Apparently, in Italy alone, 3-5 people die every year making wine – mostly when they are doing manual punch-downs over an open tank. They simply fall into the must and drown. Dangerous.

Also, the closing on the new home in Denver went without a hitch. I will begin moving after I get back to the states.

Friday Andrea and I begin moving the barrels of last year's wine out of the first ageing cellar (which will be warmed up for the malolactic fermentation) to the main ageing cellar. We use an electric forklift and I manage to get enormous splinters in the side of my calf as I brush past the rough wooden beans on which the barrels rest. As the week has gone so swimmingly well so far, I decide to ignore them. There will not be another fuss around the new guy!!! Later, back at my apartment that evening, it takes 45 minutes to get them out. Though they didn't go deep, the longest one is a half-inch long and as big around as a knitting needle. All I have is a pair of tonenail clippers and a stubborn streak. Finally they are out and I am in bed and asleep by 9.30.

Apparently, by Saturday, the consensus seems to be that I am doing fine here. Both Barbara (Luciano's fabulous daughter, who is the winery business manager) and Andrea tell me as much, though not directly. Hey, I'll take whatever encouragement I can get!

We do two svinatura on Saturday – essentially, taking the liquid off the solids. As soon as I arrive at 7.30, I am in the emptied tank, shoveling out pomace, while Luciano transfers it into the big basket presses. Good thing the fermentations are slowing down and that the O2 levels are much better – I am not nearly out of breath, even in the huge tank. (Yes, my hair is getting long, and yes, it gets really curly and wild when it is damp like in a tank.) After shoveling everything out, we roll the baskets out to the hydraulic press. The liquid from a first gentle press is combined with the free-run juice. The second press, at 200 bar, is vinified separately and the resulting wine (harder and more tannic than the regular wine) is sold off to some old guys, bulk customers who bring their own demijohns to the winery to be filled. All day is shovel, fill baskets, press, dump pomace, clean baskets … repeat. A tank of wine yields 3-4 baskets of pomace, so this is a long and slow process, as each press takes about 2 hours. We finish up after lunch.

By 2, most of the winery workers have left for the weekend, and Sunday will be a day off as there is no new fruit coming in until Wednesday, weather permitting. I am doing odd jobs around the winery when Luciano tells me to do rimontaggio (pump-over) for tanks 1, 6 and 7. You mean, by myself? No supervision? Wow, you really have left the inmates in charge of the asylum ...

I get everything set up, pumps ready, power set, valves open, and turn the switch. All of the Sandrone pump-over power feeds are on automatic timers, so nothing turns on for three minutes after the power is switched on. Three minutes of checking and re-checking. Suddenly the whine of the pumps starts ... and it is perfect. Two three-minute pump-overs on each tank later, I am wrapping up and wiping down splatters when Luciano walks in ... looks around for a minute, nods twice and smiles, and walks out. Whew.

Later, I am tasked with being the translator for Luciano while he is visited by Duncan, the way cool Australian winemaker staying with the Altares I mentioned in an earlier post. I think I do an OK job translating. My Italian is definitely getting better, but it somehow feels like I am having two parallel conversations that are not exactly the same. However, I do get to join the tasting, which is great – I haven’t tasted the current lineup since March.

Luciano shoveling the pomace out of the tanks. For a guy in his sixties, he is in incredible shape. He has the easy efficiency of someone who has been performing the same actions for a long time - a complete professional in every sense of the word. For example, when shoveling pomace, I manage to get bits of grape everywhere, while the mess on the floor when Luciano is shoveling is ... almost nothing. This pisses me off. I've shoveled plenty, and I should be doing better. By the end of the day, I am definitely neater. there are little tricks that I pick up by watching him carefully.

The basket lifted off the plug of solids after pressing. The solids go off to a grappa distillery. Every few days, a truck comes by and picks up the pomace for the Marolo distillery. In the meantime, the stuff is outside, covered, in the shade ... I remember that Poli, in the Veneto, picks up and distills his pomace the day it is pressed so that nothing can oxidize and give off-flavors to the grappa. This stuff will not be at that quality level, unfortunately. I've had Marolo grappas and they have a bit of the fire in the throat feeling that I find so off-putting.

Andrea cleaning the baskets after pressing. You have to scrape the remaining stuff out of the inside of the baskets so that the juice can flow freely during the next use.

Wet-My-Pants Day

Thursday morning I arrive at the winery at 7.30 and Luciano is waiting for me. I am already somewhat nervous – today is the day I close on a new home in Denver, so I am a bit distracted. Luciano greets me warmly, then looks right at me and says: “Emilio, up to this point has been fun and games. Now we get serious. On tank number three, I want you to do the delestage. Get to work.” He sits himself down on a milk crate, crosses his arms and waits for me to get moving. Gulp. Ok, ok, delestage – draining the liquid off the skins into a clean tank, then pumping the liquid back over the solids really forcefully to amplify the extraction process. In this process, the wine is passed trough a rough steel strainer to catch seeds and skins, then pumped over into a clean tank. I set up the huge bucket under the tank valve, with strainer and brush ready, the pump and hoses to get the liquid into the new tank, set up the power, check the closures on the second tank. Everything looks good to me. I turn to look at Luciano, who has not yet said a word – his arms are still crossed but he is watching me intently. I have no idea if I’ve forgotten anything, and he isn’t giving me any hints. I gently open the main valve and beautiful purple liquid begins to pour out through the strainer. (The pictures show Luciano demonstrating this process to me earlier in the week.) Once the bucket has partially filled, I start the pump and adjust it to match the rate of liquid coming out of the tank. The fermenting juice gets a LOT of air this way. While the liquid is passing though the strainer, I am supposed to use a traditional old twig brush to sweep the pips and solids out of the stream, and dump them into a bucket as they accumulate. At first, this is easy, but as the liquid lowers the floating cap of solids, a lot comes out really really fast. The first fifteen minutes go by no problem. Luciano is still sitting on his milk crate, having said a few words only to Andrea who came in with a question. All of a sudden, the cap has descended far enough that it is at the mouth of the valve and all of a sudden a shitload of skins and seeds are coming out, the strainer is overflowing, I can’t keep the stuff out of the way fast enough, the scoop I’m using to move the solids from the strainer to a bucket is overflowing with liquid … and I have to close down the valve to get caught up. Shit. Still Luciano says nothing. I continue the straining process, turning the valve and pump on and off as needed until the liquid is all out. I am so nervous while under "the gaze" I nearly soil my trousers. While I managed to get everything separated, it wasn’t very elegant. I now have solids left in the original tank, and the neighboring tank with about 35hl of liquid. I reverse the hoses to pump the liquid back over the solids, climb the ladder and fix the top hose – it can spray like crazy then the pressure is put back on. I turn on the pump, climb back up the ladder and begin spraying the liquid over the solids back and forth. The idea here is maximum contact and maximum agitation, so I never just leave the hose spraying in the same spot. Back and forth, back and forth. Round around the edges. Back and forth, back and forth.

At this point, Luciano climbs up on the catwalk on the other side of the tank to watch. I make even strokes over the surface of the must with the hose in a crosshatch pattern. I get the edges all churned up. I make sure I cover every spot. The CO2 coming off the tank is incredible and I am feeling lightheaded, but I refuse to stop. Finally the hose gurgles and the liquid stops. I climb down, turn off the pump, open the door of the tank to let the rest of the liquid flow into a bucket, and dump the remaining liquid, as well as the solids from the original straining, back into the original tank. It has taken an hour, and the net result is that the exact same wine is back in its original tank with the solids, but a lot of air had been added to the mix and the solids will be better extracted into the liquid. I gather up the dirtied equipment for cleaning, drain the hose pipes, shut off the power.

I step outside the fermentation room door for a breath of fresh air. Luciano follows me out.

“Bravo.”

Things start looking up.

Most of the Dolcetto was brought in while I was away, but it seems I am back just in time to heave crates of grapes into the destemmer/crusher, get completely covered in sticky juice, and help get the must into the tanks. I get cleaning duty that afternoon. Andrea tells me that it took two years of training to get to a point where he was allowed to clean the destemmer without supervision. My first try, I miss one tiny spot – Andrea is speechless. Surprise, surprise, surprise … the Swiss cleaning gene comes out and finally there is something at the winery for which I have a natural aptitude. Later on, I’m sent out to one of the vineyards, near Novello, to help bring in the last of the Dolcetto fruit. It’s on a steep, east-facing site.

We work through the rows, Luca driving the tractor with Christian and Ivan heaving the full crates of fruit on to the tiny trailer. Luca is a very interesting cat – he is in charge of all the vineyard management (Sandrone owns 70% of its vineyards and has long-term leases on the balance) and is a talented viticulturalist. I’ve always maintained that a winemaker’s skill emerges not in great vintages (anyone can make a great wine then) but in the worst vintages. Luca’s job is to make sure the fruit coming in to the winery is the absolute best possible for that particular vintage, vine type and vineyard site. As I’ve mentioned before, this will not be a great vintage – but the fruit coming into the winery looks pretty darn good to me. Luca explains that between the green harvests, removing foliage, picking and sorting operations, each bunch of fruit is examined at least 4-5 times before it goes on the sorting table. Bad bunches are lopped off green before they rob the plant of energy. Individual berries, if damaged, are removed during picking. Any fruit or bunches showing imperfect blossom, growth, and ripening effects are discarded. The fruit, when it arrives on the back of trailers to the winery, looks really good. Several people working at other wineries have told me that the early fruit coming in looked “like shit,” but I can’t share that assessment. Other than a little bit of shriveling, which Luciano does not mind one bit, the grapes look, smell and taste really good.

Luca is always wearing shorts – one of the few Italians I’ve known to do so. I follow his lead. (Even in the hottests days of summer, I rarely see Italians, or any Europeans for that matter, wearing shorts. I'd brought shorts but wore old jeans the first few days so as to better fit in. the first morning he sees me in shorts, Luca gives me shit.) Another funny thing I realized about Luca – he looooooves his tractors. He’s like a little boy with them. Also, his voice is distinctive – I realized, while in the vineyard where his voice would float over from a few rows away, that he has the exact same gravelly but liquid intonations of Sean Connery. The resemblance of their voices is, well, uncanny. I resist the urge to ask him to introduce himself as "Sandrone. Luca Sandrone." Or spout something out of Highlander.

Weekend in the Swiss Alps

I decide that avoiding Milan is of utmost importance and choose a route around it which works really great until I get to the 25-km stretch on back roads that ends up taking 90 minutes. Along Lake Como, the sun starts peeking out and the mountains emerge. Driving up over the 13 switchbacks of the Maloja Pass, then over the hump into the Engadine, its glacial lakes stretching out in front of me in the evening light. H and I go to a local restaurant for dinner - I have been craving "filletes de perche," filets of the tiny lake perch sauteed in butter. Mmmmmmm.

Friday dawns rainy and cool, scattered sun between showers, but the valley is still insanely gorgeous. I walk through town, past the rail station and into the woods toward St Moritz, the neighboring village, along back paths and around one of the lakes. Lovely.

Saturday was one of those insanely gorgeous fall days - not a frickin' cloud in the sky. C has driven down from Frankfurt with K, who turns out to be really nice. She's just bought a little place for herself and I get a quick tour - lovely retreat for her. We get out for a hike to the Boval hut up the Morteratsch valley – this is the hut where my grandfather, a mountain guide, died 54 years ago at 44 years old – exactly my age now. He left his wife and 5 daughters – how different things have turned out for me. The hut is located along the side of a glacier that I have been scrambling over for 30 years – and it is sad to see how quickly the glacier is dying. Warming is real – the glacier is collapsing on itself. Still, it is hard to be too sad on such a gorgeous day. The sun is shining, there is a dusting of fresh snow on the high peaks already, and the temperature in the light is warm enough for shorts and a t-shirt. At the hut, after a two-hour hike, we order some lunch – R, the hut steward, is still here. I’ve known him for ages, a really nice guy with grizzly beard, sparkling eyes and a great sense of humor. The hike down, though, is freezing- this side of the valley is in shade, and the wind has picked up a bit. Brrrrrr. At the base, still sweaty and gross, C and I ham it up for K.

Dolcetto Harvest

At 8 am on Thursday, I am at the Pe Mol vineyard on the top of the hill between Monforte and Castelletto. It is gray, cloudy, chilly – and we start picking before the forecasted rain. Lots of hail damage to this Dolcetto – with some mold as we get further down from the top of the hill. Christian instructs me in how to select – essentially, every bunch, after it is clipped from the vine, is completely inspected, all damaged and shriveled and moldy grapes are individually snipped off the stems before the remaining nice grapes are put in the picking baskets. As we proceed down the rows of vines, the ground underfoot is purple from discarded grapes. I estimate we are cutting off half the fruit. This seems to be a really smart way to do grape selection – the other times I had done picking it was for less scrupulous producers and the whole bunches of fruit were thrown in the baskets without a second glance – that was growing for quantity, not quality. Here, as the fruit comes into the winery, there is no need for a sorting table – the fruit that arrives has already been inspected. After two days of scrubbing tanks and the crush pad, this is a welcome change. I thought the Swiss were neat freaks – this winery gives them a run for the money. As we clean out the equipment shed and wash tanks and pumps, Luciano lets me know that the floor must be clean enough to eat off … I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. We clean and clean and clean. (More fuckup updates: I managed to track mud all over the tank room when I came in from the vineyard without remembering to change into rubber boots … sigh. I earn a reprimand from Luciano for that one.)

Ivan and I work together down the Dolcetto rows. We talk – he is a very cool guy, very smart, ambitious in an underhanded sort of way. His family owns land, orchards and vineyards in Bulgaria, where they make distillates – he is planning to resuscitate the family business and become the premier brandy producer in Bulgaria. I remember Jacopo Poli’s edict: a license to make grappa (or brandy) is like a license to print money. Hmmmm. Investment potential?

[Picture: Flora, Sabrina and Edda picking Dolcetto near Monforte.]

Ivan and I talk music, girls, business opportunities, religion, wine, work, growing up … or at least he talks, and I reply in my garbled Italian. I hope I’m not making any similar fuckups as the one earlier this week with Luciano.

It seems like an hour, but noon is upon us … and I am off for Switzerland for a long weekend. There is some personal business to attend to, and I will see my aunt H. My sister C will be driving down from Frankfurt with her boyfriend K – I am excited to meet him for the first time. I am ready for something different – I need to process everything I’ve learned so far, think about the “dos and don’ts” and also give my spinning head a chance to cool off from the Italian language overload. I notice that it is getting better every day.

Cuneo with the Altares

9.17.08 Cuneo with the Altares

Off to Cuneo, a charming old village about and hour’s drive from Monforte, for a tasting with Lucia and Elio Altare. I drive with Duncan, the wicked cool Australian who is working for the Altares for the month (he’s a winemaker near Melbourne) and the fancy-schmantzy place in the center of town has some crazy cellars underneath it. As a connoisseur of restaurant kitchens, I find this one quite nice – all induction cooktops, loads of stainless, and everything spotless. Still, I am tired and sore after a full day of picking, cleaning and scrubbing and what would have been an incredible opportunity during the March tasting trip feels somehow, a bit out of place now.

Still, onward and upward. The meal is nice, imaginatively prepared, Elio opens some older wines, and the company is excellent.

2004 Altare, Barbera d’Alba
Slight reduction on nose when first poured. Blows off with a bit of air. Nose of plums, medium-dark chocolate, minerals, even a hint of tar. Meaty mid-palate. Lovely finish, good balance, a lovely, harmonious wine. 3.0+

1999 Altare, Barolo
nose jumps with ripe dark cherries – very harmonious and equilibrated. Also hints of cola nut and tar. Blood and Roses! On the palate, good mouthfeel, balanced, flavorful, assertive but not overpowering. Lovely, good fruit, some secondary characteristics of dried cranberries, leather and violets coming through. Good acid and structure, still with tannins … really nice. Drink 2010-2018. 4.0+

2004 Altare, “Insieme” IGT Langhe
I’ve always found the Insieme wines to be a bit lost, somehow.. They are delicious and flavorful but lack a certain sense of soul. The cab from the blend really shows on the nose – cassis, green and black pepper, some earthy coffee notes, berries. It is delicious, yes, but in the same way tat loads of new world wines are delicious but somehow insignificant – they are easy to recognize not so much for what they have, but for what they lack. It is a delicious wine, but … 3.0-

First Day, First Fuckups

I’m at the Sandrone winery at 8.30 am, nervous as hell. I ring the bell, introduce myself over the intercom, and before the fifth word of my hopelessly mangled Italian is out of my mouth the voice at the other end replies, Oh, yes, we have been expecting you, Meeester Mainly, and the door is buzzed open. So much for all the Italian language discs I put on my iPod.

As I’ve thought about this moment over the last few weeks, I’ve resolved that I have to approach this experience as a complete beginner – I have to be humble, assume nothing, keep my mouth shut and just watch and listen really, really well. I recall that great passage in one of Rilke’s letters about being a beginner, always. It’s a lovely passage and I wish I had copied it into my notebook or something, but I can recall the gist. Approach things with humility, respect and love, and assume nothing. Here it is. I was also reminded by a friend a few weeks ago to just follow everything they tell me exactly. Not almost exactly, but exactly exactly. He illustrated his point with the godawful eighties movie : “The Karate Kid” – just remember: “Wipe on. Wipe off.” “Wipe on. Wipe off. Just like they tell you to do.” Ok, got it.

Picture: Luciano with the basket presses, disassembled for cleaning.

I wait for Luciano in one of the small reception rooms off the office. I’ve been in here at least a dozen times, tasting, but this feels really different – yes, he and Barbara, his daughter, did invite me to come to learn with Luciano in the cellars, yes yes, but this time I still feel like a supplicant awaiting my moment to kiss the feet of the pope. Or at least the bishop. Luciano walks in and greets me warmly, we catch up for a bit, then he asks me what it is I hope to accomplish with this “stage” at his winery. An important caveat here: Luciano speaks very little English – so I am struggling along in my wretched Italian. (Did I mention that the word “wretched” is among my top five favorite words ever?) Well, I reply – I am really here to learn, just to learn, I’ve read so much about how wine is made, I’ve watched it being made, I understand the basic chemistry and technique of it, blah blah blah, but there’s no substitute for real, actual experience. So all I want to do is learn – learn learn learn. Luciano nods appreciatively, takes me around the winery introducing me to his crew and his brother Luca, who manages all the vineyards, and suggests I come back at 1.30 after lunch to help Luca with gathering samples for analysis. I ask if I can hang out with the guys cleaning up and organizing the crush pad for the start of harvest next week. Yes, yes, off you go, scamp, he tells me with a laugh.

Half an hour later I am helping Christian, Ivano and Andrea organize pallets, sweep up dirt and mud, hang tarpaulins, set up the destemmer and crusher and other equipment when it hits me like a board in the face: the whole time I was telling Luciano that I just wanted to “learn,” I was using the wrong Italian word and instead was telling him I wanted to “teach.” Oh dear sweet Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Donkey. “Oh yes, Mr. Wine God, sir, I’d like to bring my little college-educated ass into your winery that you’ve built from scratch into world-renown and show you how it’s done.”

At least he was laughing ... still.

Shit.
Shit.

Shitshitshitshitshit.

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

Nice move there, Alan, you stupid, moronic, impolite, uneducated boob. The metaphorical tail is well-tucked in between the legs. Well, if nothing else, the world here knows that I’m the Newbie. They are all incredibly nice that whole first day, explaining things twice, and even speaking slowly the second time around, showing me around, buying me a coffee, humoring me in general. By the end of the day I’ve regained some of my pride, having done a “fine” job of collecting random samples with Luca in the seven Dolcetto sites. These samples are analysed overnight to see where the overall ripeness of a given vineyard is, and as such, influences the order in which sites are picked. Why they’ve given this job to such a blithering dolt is beyond me. I’m supposed to take 25 individual grapes from each row, 300 from each plot, all taken at random spots, some from the tops of bunches, some from the shoulders, from the middle or the very bottom, from big bunches and small … and I am so focused on being “random” that I randomly recall the rusty old hubcap full of shotgun holes that I found in Arches National Park as an undergraduate in Geology and kept as a souvenir, calling it the “Random Point Generator” … and I promptly lose count. Fuckety fuck.

Six finally rolls around. I am doing much better about keeping the mouth shut. I stop at the Altares for a coffee, then drive back to my apartment frustrated by my gaffes but still happy that I didn’t completely embarrass myself this first day. Well, yes, I did, in fact embarrass myself completely – just thankfully not into a tiny little ball of nothingness.

Yet.

Wipe on, wipe off.

Wipe on, wipe off.

The Books mentioned Yesterday

The first wine book: A few years ago, on a lark, I counted the number of people I’d employed over the six-year run I had owning Primitivo – I was expecting a few hundred, easy, maybe as many as 300 – and was literally aghast to realize I’d written paychecks to over 700 different people. I mean, I know that restaurants are turnover heaven, but fuck, man, this is crazy. (One guy worked for me for a total of something like 9 minutes, no joke. He had an excellent resumé, the chef liked him, he interviewed well – the day he started work, he came in with a very obvious snit, changed into the restaurant’s whites, and started chopping something or other on his prep list. A few minutes of chopping, all the while muttering and cursing to himself, and I’m beginning to think that I need to get this guy out of here pronto before he goes postal and shoots up the kitchen, the staff and the customers … all of a sudden, he puts his knife down, says “this is BULLSHIT” and walks out, still in the whites. He had the gall to come the next day and demands to be paid for his 9 minutes, about $1.45. My reply: “Where’s the uniform you stole?” He never came back.) Employees were always the biggest worry – will people show up? will they be sober? will they do their job? will they manage to get through a night without embarrassing the business? I had a great, small core of people – some of whom worked for me from the day I opened to the day I closed – but I also had my share of wastrels, scoundrels, thieves and the just plain lazy. Plenty of these I fired almost immediately, many hung on for a few weeks or months before disappearing – but a few managed to hang on long enough, doing just enough to cling to their job until the “wham-o” moment of understanding what it took – a kind of Bourdainian clouds parting, the shine of heavenly light and the sudden induction into mysteries of “le système D” – to eventually turn themselves into badass think-on-their-feet hardworking professionals. Of these I am the most proud. It was with these people, I realized, the ones who were resistant, initially, to learning anything, that I learned how to teach about wine – how I took people whose idea of a good time was takeout pizza, Fantasy Island reruns and a box of Gallo “Hearty Burgundy” and turn them into people who not only could speak intelligently about the differences between, say, Volnay and Pommard, but could also appreciate them enough to realize that those Fantasy Island reruns and pizza were much better served by a small-lot Zinfandel, a quaffable Monastrell from eastern Spain, a Grenache-based Côtes-du-Rhône, or a well-made Chianti, preferably from the Colli Senesi. Along the way of educating all those palates (kicking and screaming the whole way, some of them), I realized I’d learned something about and had a talent for getting people to trust their own tastes and impulses – I mean, heck, if after all the wine education you got as a server at Primitivo you still preferred that aforementioned Hearty Burgundy and could articulate why, well, then, all power to you. I’ll just be over at the end of the bar, drinking that Brunello by myself.

The second book grew out of the love I’ve come to have for the region, people and wines of Barolo. This tiny area in Northern Italy is where, after a life of tasting, I’ve ended up – I went through all the usual phases: Bordeaux, California Cabs, Burgundy and Pinot Noir, Syrah from the Northern Rhône, German Riesling, Zinfandel, Amarone, Rhône Rangers from southern California, Loire wines, Brunello, Super-Tuscans, Aussie Shiraz, Rioja, Alsace, blah blah blah. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to appreciate finesse and balance over power and extraction. Big wines speak loudly and forcefully, can dominate a conversation and even be occasionally charming and fun. Think of the guy at a party (we all know him) a little balding, bit of a paunch, wearing the most godawful loud Hawaiian shirt, speaking in a voice that makes sure everyone in the room knows exactly what he has to say and not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, bit of a fake tan, overgesticulating to covey youthful vigor and strength … that’s what I think of most Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines. Sheesh, guy, I understand that you’ve a need to overcompensate for something, but do you have to let the whole frickin’ world know? I would much rather be with someone, or something, who allows for the ebb and flow of conversation – great Pinot allows this, as do some Grenache-based wines from Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Priorato, and I will admit a particular weakness for traditionally made Brunello and Barolo’s sibling Barbaresco. But at the end of the day, the thing that excites me most in wine is Barolo. There is nothing in my mind or to my taste that combines the purity, complexity and focused power in the same way that well made Barolo does. (Caveat: I am most emphatically NOT talking about the overoaked and overextracted wines of some Barolisti – these are wines that, sadly, that reflect neither the terroir or the subtlety of Barolo. I’m talking of the wines that, whether made in modern or traditional style, still reflect the basic characteristics that make Barolo, and Nebbiolo-based wines generally, so unique.) Over the last 15 years or so of visits to region, I’ve only grown more certain of this love for Barolo – and this fall I am working with Luciano Sandrone in his cellars, learning to make the wine. It will be an interesting adventure, I am sure.

The last book – a kind of police mystery – I want to set along the Italian-Swiss border in the valley where part of my family comes from. It’s a place I know as well as any, and have been hiking and climbing those mountains since I was young boy. Borders, boundaries and transitions fascinate me, and the alpine borders are some of the most heavily trafficked for contraband – narcotics, humans and all sorts of stolen property – and it seems like a character is growing in my mind whose stories I would want to hear. I’ll leave it up to you to see if you’re as interested in him or her (I haven’t yet decided!) once I finish it.

Comments? Suggestions? Criticisms?

As a complete aside: I’ve been reading like a fiend since arriving. I’ve finished:
Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping
Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men
Manuel Vazquez Montalban: Tattoo

Open Now: Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses

On Deck: Steve Erickson: Zeroville

Playing right now: Amy Winehouse, Back to Black, “Tears Dry on Their Own.” I have to admit I am really enjoying the trashy-self-destructive-sixties-junkie-soul sound.

The Altares invited me over for Sunday midday dinner. Elio and Lucia have to be two of the sweetest and most genuine and generous people I have ever met. Silvia always makes me feel right at home by teasing me mercilessly (I grew up with three younger sisters …). Duncan and Tes, an Australian and a Japanese working the season with the Altares are at the table as well, and are made to feel just as at home (these guys, by the way, rock - more on them later). There are cheeses and cured meats to start, then a bollito of beef shoulder with vegetables from the family garden. Silvia makes and amaaaaaaaazing cake for dessert. It is so lovely to have friends like these in far corners of the earth.

Finally went to the Supermercato. In the fridge: 2 bottles rosé, Robiola cheese, a packet of raviolini, butter, yogurt, five bottles mineral water, greens, carrots, apples, parmesan, local salami, blood orange juice, coca-light. Starting to feel like home.