mondosapore

this party is over

Last post on mondosapore. Yes, this time it's really

Ovah.

Now to get back on message...

For news and views on Italian wine and the wine of Domenico Selections in particular, please go to Muddy Boots.

Grazie mille!

10 random songs I never skip

When the iPod brings me some unexpected treat -- not usually the Gregorian chants or doo-wop numbers -- I never fumble for the skip button.  I listen to the song with total concentration and enjoyment.  Ten of them are...

- Download Jumpin Jack Flash

- Download 04 All Blues

- Download 1-01 Flying Down to Rio

- Endless sleep-JODY RENOLDS

- 01 Astral Weeks

- Pretty Thing

- Download 4-13 Dallas Blues 1

- 02 So Long

- Twilight Zone

- Download 04 (I'm Gonna Move To The) Outskirts Of Town

Just a few...

Natural wine, apotheosis of

The first version of this post was published in March of last year. Since then the New Orthodoxy has marched disputaciously on in its jihadic way.

I've always loved those What If stories, like "What if the South had won the Civil War?"  "What if Hitler had triumphed?"  "What if Attila the Hun had died somewhere in Pannonia before he got to Italy?" 

These are all cliches, and the stories usually wind up with the restoration of our manifest destinies.  You know, the USA and the CSA are reunited in sea-to-sea glory, though nothing is ever mentioned about the status of black people.  American insurgents topple the violent, corrupt, comically incompetent regime of the Nazis, "Hogan's Heroes" meets Abu Graib.  The Roman Empire soldiers on and Pope Leo is consigned to the dustbin of history; in a few centuries the Romans hit the beach at Miami and the eagles of the Legions stand guard over Boise in another century or so, with everyone speaking some sort of Latin.  (We call it "Spanish".)

These are obvious and well-hashed story lines for alternative history.  But no one, to my knowledge, has attempted an alternative history for modern wine.  Not that it would alter a thing, but it is a useful exercise in salutary masochism to imagine What if...

How to become a big-time importer who is fawned over in revolting ways

It's been a stressful week here in Strappolandia. 

Like, for example, I thought I was having a recurrence of 1993's heart problems.  Cold sweats, pains all over (chestward as well), nausea, deathly paleness, gasping for breath.

No, 'twas just depression, anxiety, panic attacks.  They act like heart attacks, sort of. The tests came back with HYPOCHONDRIAC written all over them.

Depressive hypochondriac at that. 

Still, what with Joe Dressner having his well-aired brain tumor and Kermit Lynch plinking out folk ditties, I wondered what I could do to become recognized as an important, aspirational sort of wine importer. You know, I'm not getting any younger and even though this wine gig is a new thing for me, I've got lots and lots and lots of Life Experience, which ought to count for something, no? 

I confess that I can't hang my hat on some magical mantra (sorry for the shoddy alliteration) like Natural Wines*. Cue the heavenly choirs. 

Yummy Italian Wines You Can Afford doesn't stake out the high-road position. Autochthonous Italian Wines isn't exactly a crowd-pleaser either. As the implacable Jeff Mazen would say, "It's business!" Business. Certo, sell we must. We're selling. Things are good. Shipment may get waylaid or forgotten about, but things are generally pretty, pretty good.

But it's not just business. It's ego. It's pride. It's the deep human craving to have one of those Sally Field moments every now and then." So," I ask meself, "what can one do to create an aura of almost hieratic importance in the world of wine importers?"

I've come up with a sure-fire Five Point Program to stoke the mystique of Strappo, the Odysseus of wine importers.

1. Always wear the shades. Never take them off no matter how wretched the lighting. (Nice when you're bored and want to catch a cat nap.) It is necessary to cultivate that aura.

2. Always wear jeans, the cruddier and more threadbare the better. Preferably with expensive Italian shoes and no socks and a Brioni shirt hanging untucked, as with a discreet sneer at bourgeois niceties.

3. Always refer to Rudolf Steiner and Luigi Veronelli with casual reverence. It can be done. This will win over the nut cases and the ones who revere a man who made a career of staying for free at many interesting stately homes throughout the country.

4. Mention at least three obscure grape varieties in the first five minutes of any conversation, e.g., "You simply MUST try a Tintore. It is the future of Italy!" (A categorical pronouncement always wins adherents.)

5. Regale all and sundry with anecdotes from the field. Literally. Per esempio:

    I slipped and fell deep into the winter mud of the steep vineyard. Raffaele smiled wisely and said,     "Now you know what it is like to be a natural-grape farmer. Is never easy. We fight the bugs. We     fight the mold. We fight the heat. We fight the cold. But our passion for our tradition, that is what     make us carry on."

 Doesn't it all bring a tear to the oulde eye? Doesn't it promise authentic bliss in the glass? Doesn't it make me look like the intrepid son of a bitch you aren't, you routine-bound slave to your under-water mortgage, three kids and SUV payments?

On such wee foundations grand reputations can be erected. 

    

 

* The Peroni Nastro Azzurro beer I'm drinking now proclaims "Tutti Ingredienti Naturali" on the collar label. Boh.

No spleen. No shirt. No blog

After some reflection I've realized why wine blogging lost its allure for me. I'm no longer angry all the time.

It's true.  Anger, the desire to ridicule and expose the institutionalized bullshit of the wine world, frustration with my own shitty existence -- all fueled the fires of spleen that got me going and spurred me to rip it up.

As I've read the occasional blog post and the frequent Twitter and Facebook entries in recent weeks, I've noticed the aggression and anger in a lot of them. And the sniping and the bullying and the small-minded assertiveness that seem to propel the bloggers as they jostle for mind-room and bigger-media exposure. I'd ask an irritated "what the fuck is that all about?" except that I know the answer.

As with everything else in our culture, the initial impulse to communicate rather quickly becomes a choice to a) inform b) perform or c) reform.

If you choose to inform in a wine-blogging context, you write even-handed reviews and provide background information without too much editorial coloring.  After all, you're not there to be an advocate or polemicist, your mission is to tell people accurately about a wine, a grape, a region, etc.  In other words, you offer balanced, relatively objective reporting (relative objectivity being the only kind there is). You sane and sober reporters know who you are.

Most of us are less disciplined and more egoistic. We wish to perform. We have an attitude and perhaps a few little axes to grind. We're tummlers. There's an element of aggression in what we do, but there's also the saving grace of play. There's nothing inherently wrong with this choice, but the sheer numbers of bloggers who elect to go this route contribute to excesses in rhetoric and phony controversies. The strategies of "performance" are varied and tricky, and some of the choices made do add a lot of unnecessary noise to the blogosphere.

In other words, a lot of silly, annoying bullshit. Sophomemes, I'll call them. Most of us tummlers are guilty of perpetrating this sort of stuff from time to time.

Finally, in my neat tripartite taxonomy, are those who are on a mission to reform. A self-appointed elite who display all the characteristics of all self-appointed elites: loneliness and contempt.  For they few are bearers of a superior knowledge and purveyors of scorn for all who fail to attain their standard. Quick to sneer, eager to denounce. Foolish in their pretense. 

Once this would have been the point at which I launched a satirical attack on such intolerable asses. But I can't work up the spleen. Splenetic no longer, I am mild as a lamb. My venom has been milked. The fires of hatred have been banked. 

Baby, I'm over it. Got others things to lay waste my powers upon. Arricazzoderci.

   

   

    

Si si, je suis un bloggueur

Yes, ladies and germs, it's been a while.  About two weeks since last I posted on this blog.  And the last few posts were just cross-posts to Muddy Boots.  

Yet, ladies and germs, I occasionally miss the old frisson that a really topping post gave me and, I assume, some of you.

Though, ladies and germs, I am glad to be free of the compulsion to write whatever crazy thoughts came into my head, perpetuating, say, a drunken rant for all posterity or till I cease to pay for the registration of this URL.

Even so, l & g, given the sort of nasty customer I am, there remains a need to spew venom on the happy warriors and poseurs of the wine and wine-blogging worlds, and this will be the place to do it.  Example: from the "town hall meetings" on "healthcare reform" I'm getting a vibe only slightly more vicious and ridiculous than the endless debate on (say) "natural" vs. "industrial" wines, or whatever terms people use to support their faith.  Add gun-toting to the mix and it will be a fun post with a bloody outcome.  Like a wine Hamlet, where everyone dies.  This prospect pleases me for some reason.  

       

Another dreadful podcast

I am a scemo.*

I intended to post another podcast of Dom & the Somm with Susannah Gold.  Somehow I recorded 'cast 2 over 'cast 1.  Really, I don't know what happened.  Forgive me, Susannah.  You should probably do the sound engineering thing next time. 

Anyway, here's the link to the latest thrilling episode of "Dom without the Somm":  click.

It's short -- 7-8 minutes.  

I tried the video version but the results were hideous to behold.  (Note to self: ALWAYS WEAR THE SHADES.)

 

It's all my fault!

* Halfwit, dummy, dope.

Hello, walls

Kids, precious kids, I haven't posted plastered -- or, really, just a bit high -- in a long time.  See, this is why I keep mondosapore going, albeit on life support.  I need to fucking vent, ragazzi miei, I need to display to you the Full Terry.  

I confess my guilty secret. After dissing the late, would-be great Michael "Call me Diana" Jackson on Facebook, I broke down and bought Thriller at the iTune Store ce soir.  But, to be fair to me, I also downloaded the Michael Stanley Band and other such 80s dreck and effluvia. Not to mention Echo Beach by the inimitable and rare Martha and the Muffins and -- hold your breath the first Pearls Before Swine album.  "The past is broken.../Life in our time is..."  Ferkakten?  Mayhap.

And double BTW, the wine of cherce ce soir was the Greco di Tufo from Angelarosa. A 2007 that's losing its youthful bloom and acquiring a more mature, nutty, savory nature.  So sue me, Polly Pure.  

To quote that great Michigander, "Fuck you Tipper Gore, fuck you, Ms. Cheney...." Very amusing, non?

I think you'll see what I mean if you follow a linklet or two.  

Finally, to quote the New Beatles, the Bay City Rollers, "Saturday Niii-hiiiiiiight, Saturday Niii-hiiiiiiight." 

Oh, baby, you KNOOOOOOOOW what I like. 

This one reminds me of me daughter when she was little and we had fun and the family was happy and mental illness and

cancer had not entered our innocent lives.

 

This is like Frank Sinatra's tenth farewell tour, isn't it?

Back by popular demand?

It seems I can't give up mondosapore entirely.  My partners are begging me not to.  My sense of loyalty to a vehicle that's helped change my life is a factor too.  Anyway, you know, I need to vent and be my untrammeled self.  

So I'll post maybe once a week.  Or twice if I get a bug up my ass.  (Italians, note that widely used and rather vulgar American expression.)  Simply taking this blog out of the category of must-dos to an elective relieves some pressure and enables me to approach it with some of my old insouciance.  (Hm.  Since when have I ever been insouciant in my entire life?)

Allora.

That's really it for now.  Sorry it's not too momentous, but there's plenty of momentousness going on these days, and all the turmoil, pain and hope can be summed up in one short name: Neda. 

  

Bloomsday & Bloggings Wake

June 16, 1904.  The day reconstructed by a self-exiled Dubliner in Trieste and Paris, whose finished work after years of obsessive rewriting was both the pinnacle and the destruction of the novel.  I refer, of course, to that masterpiece by James Joyce, Ulysses.  

I read the book all the way through three times, twice in the same year.  I haven't got the patience to do it a fourth, and that's my loss.  

Then I think of his last work, Finnegans Wake, over which he obsessed for nearly twenty years, and would have obsessed over longer in new editions if he hadn't died right after his escape to Switzerland as the Nazis spread like ink over France and most of the Continent.  A mad book.  Some sort of mad apotheosis.  This I've never had the patience to read all the way through.  I suspect you need hallucinogens to do so.

There's been much about the changes in blogging of late.  I've weighed in on it.  Fredric Koeppel has. Lenn Thompson has, mostly on Twitter.  Alice Feiring has too, so much so that she's thinking about giving it up, or she says so at any rate.  I'm rather tired of it but now have to maintain not one but two blogs to connive at getting Domenico Selections a bit better known.  Blogging’s gone from being a labor of love to a labor. I think this is, to some degree, inevitable, not least because my goals and my energies are necessarily focused elsewhere.  But we all reach a point where what we're doing no longer seems to work as well as it did or we just grow tired of it.  

You know my heart's not in it as it once was.  The visits and page views numbers reflect the shift of my energies and interests going back to October.  I used to care deeply about the triumphant rise in the bar chart showing a growing readership.  I studied the figures and trends obsessively.  Now I barely look at them. I know the levels are lower than they've been in over two years.  

I do believe it's time to -- not exactly pull the plug on mondosapore, but to devote more time to Muddy Boots.  It means a narrower, less self-revelatory focus, of course.  None of my rants, drunk or sober, no wildly off-topic posts.  For such venting mondosapore will still be personally useful.

Short bursts of op-ed from me will generally suffice.  Twitter, Facebook, the usual minimicromedia.  

Will I really put this blog, the focus of so much energy and passion for so long, out to virtual pasture? Yes yes I will I said yes 

  

 

Get through airport security FAST

This is a public service post not for you, my sophisticated world-jaunting readers, but for your usually home-bound aunts, uncles, parents, dippy girlfriends or clueless slacker brothers, etc., etc.

I don't know exactly what it is, but modern airport security -- annoying and intrusive as it is, not to mention a witlessly literal reaction to jihadis (take my belt off??  what kind of explosive device could be in there?) -- can be prepared for and got through with something like a contemptuous efficiency. You know, "Take that, Homeland Security fearmongers!  Take that, moron shoe-bombers!"

Yet I observe, on my frequent forays to airports everywhere, most people dither and fuck up and make the tedious process even more tedious than it is. And it keeps me from quality time in the Crown Room lounge.  So listen up, people, because you've been pissing me off.

Would Pilgrims like all this?  Probably not.  Unless you were an Indian.

I am offered a freebie at Ravello

And I grab the hell out of it.  

Thanks to the kind intercession of Luigi Reale, one of the grand Domenico Selections producers of Campania, the glamorous and radiant Janet D'--, PR Director of the Hotel Caruso in Ravello, got me a glorious afternoon by the pool.  (I'd link you to her Facebook page, but she wouldn't appreciate your slavering advances.)

She did ask me not to take pictures of the guests in case "someone wasn't with his wife."  I did my best.

Do I feel like a whore for accepting this delightful gift?  Do I feel unethical?  Do I feel played?

Grow up, kids.    

Because every once in a great while, kids, there really is was a free lunch.  

Looking from the pool zone to the main building

You see the same English couple in both these pictures.  They ate by the pool when I did.  The husband seemed a bit shocked by the bill.  Well, hell, rich Germans, Russians and Mariah Carey stay here!

The view more or less northward

The view more or less eastward. Directly below, Minori.  Maiori is at the top of the photo.  What you can't see here is a new concert hall, designed by someone famous whose name escapes me, which will do nothing to wreck the view once it's completed.  

I just like this one -- the house with the Roman roofline standing on its own. And the blue bus!

Ravello can induce vertigo, and not solely for the prices

Riflettendo

12:50 PM, 15 May

 Gete,

Tramonti (SA)

 I came here for a couple of days of relax, as they say here.  I rose very late.  I haven’t left the room and its terrace, not even for a coffee.  I have certain artists plugged into my head – Peter Tosh, Fats Waller, Clyde McPhatter, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Coleman Hawkins – an endless playlist of nostalgia and hard-won wisdom.  These aid reflection. 

There isn’t much to look at here except the moody skies and descending mist, which is cloaking the green hills with another microlayer of protection against the coming summer.  The lower hills, rounded and terraced to the summits, are fertile today, remnants of an infernal vulcanism many ages ago.  The highest are too steep and rock-ribbed for anything but some clear-cutting where the soil is thickest and the trees are in the rain shadow.

These things aid reflection. 

Reflection should be the aim of rest, riposo, true relaxation.  Vacation, where you empty yourself of everything you need to rid yourself of.  If only for a brief respite.  Few of us elect to let go that much.  Mystics and spiritual directors, among others, tell you to let things go and block things out so as to let the soul speak to you in its hesitant whispers.  The trick is to listen without seeming to.  Try hard and it stays mute.

These hours have given me the unhurried measure to reflect on my various lives, le mie vite, but it’s strange that the most vivid and moving memory has nothing to do with me at all.  I didn’t even know the names of the people.  I’m not even sure of the date or season.  Sometime in the 90s.  I do remember that.  I was living in Akron, Ohio. 

There was some sort of adult education program at my church.  (I used to go to church.)  The guest speaker was a retired rabbi.  After his talk, he opened it up to questions.  A very small, neat lady in her 60s, who sat somewhat to the right of me, posed a question that almost broke my heart this morning. 

She asked the rabbi if he thought there really was a heaven.  Because, she said, missed her husband so terribly; they had always loved each other so. 

I have never heard so much love and loneliness expressed so directly, so urgently or with such raw sincerity.

I don’t remember what the rabbi said.  He seemed taken aback by the woman’s ache to know.  

I do remember that he answered her with tenderness and kindness. He offered hope.

After a shitty, sweaty day...

You need to decompress.  Once I would have spent an hour rowing my guts out. Or riding a stationary bicycle at insane rates of speed and resistance.  I used to have rooms devoted to such machines.  That was when I lived in Ohio.  I've come to my senses, or che son vecio, and I eat pizza and drink wine.  Copiously. Ah! 'tis very bliss after years of steely self-discipline.

Of course now I live in that abode of sin and fruitiness, NYC, so what do you expect?  And we HAVE NO SPACE in our teeny apartments.  And I refuse to pay a grand to join a health club.  And the $10 city rec center across is the street isn't quite comme il faut.  And...I've run out of excuses.  I'm a lazy old dick with a 38" waist.  Oh. My. God.

So here we are at the end of the day, reacting randomly to some of the silly bullshit on the InterTubes.  Such as...

* Arlen Spector's defection to the Democratic Party.  As Glenn Campbell said when Waylon Jennings won a Country Music Award, "It's about damn time!"  (A Country Music Award?  They reward such crap??)

* According to a surely trustworthy poll cited by Huffington Post, only 21% of US voters identify themselves as R____.  I can't quite digitate the word, sorry.  

* Speaking of awards shows, the last Miss America contest I watched saw Vanessa Williams win.  And unwin.  To another Black Lite babe, Suzette Charles. When was that?  

* What is Ms. Charles doing now?  Changing quarters in an AC casino?  We know what Vanessa Williams is doing.  

* "Wine flu[e]" continues to frighten and perplex the people.  Not to mention the even more shocking vine flu.  Site traffic is up here at mondosap thanks to the virtual illiteracy of most nationalities in the English-speaking world. Ignorant yobbos of the world, I salute you.

Buona notte, kiddies.  

  

  

When you're 64

To Marcia Sue (Meysha Simcha), who would have been 64 today.

Download 09 When I'm Sixty-Four

Memes bred deep

I tend to dismiss theocentric philosophies.  They seem to operate in a double-talking neverland.  But it occurred to me one day that theologies and mysticism do have profound effects on everyday life.  Two examples came to me -- one readily, the other weeks later.  No doubt there are plenty of others.

1. The mathematical concept of zero.  It was the creation of Indian mathematicians.  Could it have come into being without the underlying concept of Nirvana? 

2. Virtuality.  This was crucial in the development of computing.  Would it have been conceivable without the underlying argument of the there/not there, same/not same of the Holy Trinity?

     The ghost in your laptop

Porca vecchiaia

The title means (translating in a genteel fashion) "wretched old age." 

No matter what endeavor you follow, no matter what sort of vigor you exude, someone is sure to make you feel like a sorry-ass washed-up has-been.  I get it all the time.  The first time I got it, about 7-8 years ago, was a terrible shocker.  I got off a bus in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and the driver piped up with, "Have a good day, Pops."  Pops.

Last week I stopped by to chat with Vincent Mosso, the sommelier at Gemma, and he said, "Good to see you, Pops."  Pops.  What really rankled is that Vincent closing in on 60 himself. 

So, OK, maybe he was being ironic and friendly. 

But still.  Pops!

Naturally the feeling is magnified when I walk into a place where everyone looks like they're under 30.  This look of astonishment when I drag in my Winecruzer, hand them my card and begin my spiel.  Sometimes I even wonder if the sale I made was a sort of pity fuck.  (Though a sale is a sale, innit.)

There are days when I feel la porca vecchiaia in my mind and in my aching bod.  For example, it was until now a little-known fact that arthritis causes me terrible pain in my hands, elbows and knees.  I refuse to take meds for it, yet more meds, and I resolutely refuse to limp.  That's just not what one does when one loves one's work.

Sempre avanti, ragazzi del vino! 

     

Italian views: March 2009

I'm not up to writing a long post -- never mind three or four -- about the recent wine search in Tuscany and Abruzzo.  I'll content myself with a few photos.  Hope you find them interesting and/or pleasing. 

A dopo.

Some of the terreno of Castello di Poppiano in the Colli Fiorentini (Florentine hills) sub-appellation of Chianti.

Typical of the soil in that area.  Clay & stone.

Report: Today's Gambero Rosso Tre Bicchieri Event in New York, NY

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Supercrowded as always.  Some producers had either run out of wine or left their table by 6:30, several even sooner.  I got the impression they were saving themselves for Vinitaly.

I was there for the press briefing at 3.  There were fewer print journalists than usual and more bloggers.  The main benefits: no waiting in line and a first shot at the wines.

As usual, many more reds than whites had been awarded Tre Bicchieri.  The whites that I tasted seemed to have a narrow range of flavors and textures, as if one person had done all the tasting/judging.  Not true, of course, but it struck me that way.  There was far more diversity among the reds with regard to types and flavor profiles.

Last year I focused on the South.  This year, the North.  With of course a few in between, especially Abruzzo e Marche.

In truth I went less to taste than to observe and schmooze.  I saw a number of the usual suspects -- writers/bloggers like Koeppel (OK, so he's an accredited print journalist too), Italian Wine Guy, East Village Wine Geek, Dr. Vino and the contrarian Alice Feiring.  IWG asked me to taste a wine that Alice liked very much, one of the few.  Too barnyardy for me, ergo right up Alice's alley.

I chatted with some interesting and very engaging producers, including Stefano Illuminati, Ruggero Brunori (a neighbor of the Trevisanis and a good friend of the irrepressible Adriano Liloni), and the elegant, beautiful Elisabetta Foradori, whose Teroldegos I admire.  She said, "I put all my passion into my wines."  I replied, "It shows."  The wines mirror their maker; she looked and spoke as I would have expected after drinking her wines.

SECOND IMPRESSIONS

Favorite albums meme, etc.

Let's say that I've had a goodly amount of wine this evening.  Let's say that it was a day spent on the computer and phone.  Let's say that I spent much of the day with the iPod plugged into my ears.  And let's say I'm highly suggestible in such circumstances.

Marco Romano posted a link on Facebook that got me started on this...what, line of reasoning?  Ha. This line of free and progressively freer association, rather.  

Consider:

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. They might not be what you listen to now, but these are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you're it!

This from Tom Watson of our fair city.

My first thought was, How cool!  How stimulating!  Etc.

Then I thought, "Jesus Christ, fifteen?!?  I'm too old to give a shit about that many albums.  Time and the erosion of youthful dreams -- even of Memory itself -- have obliterated almost everything that didn't have profound and highly meaningful consequences/associations/etc.!" 

So it went to ten, then to a mere trickle, five measly albums which, nonetheless, shaped and expressed my wormlike existence more than this struggling worm, stranded in a drying mud puddle in the middle of the busy thoroughfare, could hope to express for himself.

Anyway, 15 albums required too much research and thought and all that.  Forget about it.

"So, Wormboy," you may ask, "what are these oldies?  Is your addled old head full of Paul Whiteman orchestrations and Helen Reddy's Greatest Hit?"  (YES, BY THE WAY, AND EMPHATICALLY NO.)

But I am stalling.  Because my choices are so ordinary.  So unintellectual.  So...low.  I, personally, don't care how it reflects on me.  When it comes to public assessment, well, that's always another story.