mondosapore

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.  

       

Yes, you CAN

Subscribe to Muddy Boots via email.  

It's so easy even I can do it! 

Go here for the simple instructions.

Qualcosa di nuovo

Something new

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the first podcast of a series that Susannah Gold and I are planning to create over the next fews months. 

 Susannah is based here in Manhattan but she lived in Milan as a financial reporter for 12 years, meanwhile discovering a great affinity for all things Italian -- not least of which was the wine.  She studied hard, became a certified sommelier there (and here) and now uses her wine knowledge to act as PR counsel to various branches of the wine trade here and in Italy.

Each in podcast we'll take on a different topic -- this outing devoted to a discussion of organic/biodynamic viticulture and wine-making in Italy, next time (unless we change our minds) one devoted to aging wine, specifically if wine people have made a fetish of older wines.  

We'll plan to publish every two weeks but, then again, it might not quite work out that way.  

Click here to listen to Dom & the Somm 1.  (26:23).  

Buon ascolto!

A Muddy Boots controversyette

Clash of philosophies here in Domenicoland

Originally posted on Muddy Boots.  Not in this version

My weak-kneed partners are telling me to lay off the personal, "qualitative" observations.  Present only the facts or, to put it more bluntly, only the facts that are pointedly self-interested.  

For example, they jumped all over me after I posted the one about the wines I'd never import.  (Here.)  And Ken thought a throwaway line was inappropriate here.  "Put that stuff on mondosapore.  That's your safety valve.  You can say anything you want there.  It doesn't directly reflect on Domenico Selections.  That's what you've always used mondosapore for anyway."

They're wrong.  I'm right.

My retort is that if such light-hearted comments aren't thrown in once in a while, Muddy Boots becomes just another boring, smarmy corporate blog: one-note and conventional.  What the fuck's wrong with a little inappropriateness every now and then?  Are we in Victorian London?  Edith Wharton's New York?  Khamenei's Teheran?

Or anywhere there's W?  By the way, I put no stock in the official story that he doesn't drink.  If he truly doesn't, then he really is as stupid as we thought.  

What would you readers, all six of you pathetic dupes, say to support either side?  

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. 

  

Wine blogs & the limits of fandom

Yes, my personal priorities and viewpoints have changed, as I expressed in the previous post.  Another factor in my growing disaffection with blogging is the enclosed nature of so much wine-blogging.  That is, the nature of single-topic blogging is to develop a set of cultural norms that create an echo chamber of sorts, in which the same subjects, opinions and valuations become pervasive.  Everyone seems to jump on the controversy of the day and worry it to death with undue passion, even ferocity; and of course, the less important the topic really is, the more it gets chewed to rags.  

So we have waves of memes sweeping through, some of them relatively sporadic ("ethics" being a recent example) and some endemic (especially that favorite on slow wine-news days, the anti-spoofilation preservation society vs. the evil empire of Parker, Wine Spectator and so forth).  After you've been swimming in those murky waters long enough, you want to get out, take a nice hot shower and throw your bathing suit into the trash bin.

When you start feeling that way, it's really time to move on.  

I exchanged a few emails with one of the Domenico Selections producers on my reasons for quitting mondosapore, at least as my main blogging vehicle.  She made some astute observations.

...tu hai fatto un grande lavoro con mondosapore, però bisogna fare delle scelte e focalizzare le nostre energie solo sui quei progetti nei quali crediamo profondamente. Per fortuna siamo "esseri dinamici" e i nostri interessi si spostano ed evolvono, dunque mi sembra corretto e responsabile (anche nei confronti dei tuoi followers) rimettersi in discussione.

Poi non è che lascerai nessuno orfano, semplicemente ci sarà un'evoluzione.

E poi lo sai come la penso: viviamo in un'epoca di eccesso di comunicazione/informazione/scambi tremendamente superficiali/ansia di guadagnarsi quei pochi secondi di visibilità che ci danno la fallace illusione di esistere....per poi scoprirsi incapaci di ascoltare, o immersi nella solitudine.

Dobbiamo imparare a selezionare: informazioni, affetti, amicizie, per ritrovare una dimensione più verticale (di profondità intendo ) che non orizzontale, ovvero conosco tutto e tutti, sono informato su tutto, ma rimango on the surface.

Sorry, I don't have the time to translate this whole email.  But the words scelte (choices) and selezionare (select) stick out, at least in my mind.

I will translate the summative last paragraph:

[In this age of information overload] We must learn to select information, feelings, friendships to get back a more vertical, deeper dimension in life rather than a horizontal one where I may know everything and everyone, I'm informed about everything but remain on the surface.  

I'll add that my brother John remarked to me last night, "You got what you wanted from mondosapore.  You don't need it anymore."

So there's that too.    

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 

  

 

The end of blogging as we know it, Part 2

A while ago I wrote a rather downbeat assessment of where blogging was headed, wine-blogging especially. (Here.)  I noted that short bursts of information were undermining the feature-article model that has prevailed until recently -- Twitter, Facebook and a raft of single-focus social networks as well.  

So I read with interest this article in the NYT, "Blogs falling in an empty forest":  link.  

Here are some crucial paragraphs from Douglas Quenqua's story:

...Many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

(My emphasis.)

Early in the article the author spoke with a woman who felt she had written too personally for her own good, or for the good of her relationships with friends and family. How odd.  If you're posting it to the worldwide web ... no?

The Times article also makes it plain that most aspiring bloggers want to be taken seriously -- seriously enough to, say, go into mainstream and into the money.  (Does this ring a bell, wine-bloggers?)  

I'm amused by the fatuity of people who started a blog expecting, eventually, to live off the income the blog generated.  (Off what?  A few banner ads?  Writing puff posts for your sponsors?  It is to laugh.)  Experienced journalists can scarcely make a living any more, let alone some geek with a dream.  

Blogging as bait for a book deal?  I'd like to know often that's worked out for the 7.4 million active/semi-active bloggers.  Has anybody taken a look at the publishing industry lately?  Dream on, geeklets.

And in the story there is an acknowledgment that Twitter and Facebook have indeed drawn away plenty of "old-style" bloggers as well as given new ones access to a pithier form of communication with a built-in readership.  Not that we've all ditched our Typepad or Blogspot accounts, but we are no longer using them as our exclusive means of communicating with our target audiences.  Facebook, Twitter and so on encourage brevity (aka "the soul of wit") and are having an effect on the length and types of posts that appear in the blogs or, to be more precise, the standard blog sites.

I think blogging will be around as long as the technology exists and the human need to express oneself must be satisfied.  But in a few years I think it will be roughly as mainstream as using a rotary dial phone. 

Let's hear it for lighter bottles

Senselessly heavy, expensive wine bottles are bad business and ecologically irresponsible. 

For a heartening development anent lighter bottles, please check out this post on Muddy Boots:  Click. 

"Wine-blogging used to be fun" & other comic laments

Thursday evening and the week should have ended already.  What's taking it so long?  Oh, right, the rotation of the earth, etc.

Well, anyway.  If you're as discerning as I think you are -- you read mondosapore, don't you?  -- you'll discern that it's been a less than stellar week. Not a truly bad one, just frustrating and less productive than one would like.  "Less productive" -- that tags me as 100% American, doesn't it?  An Italian would frame it in, say, terms of philosophy or politics (Berlusconi, they say, is a dynamo of productivity when it comes to picking up teenagers).

I was going to a blind tasting of Beaujolais at the new Snooth office on Madison Ave. (ladeeda), but I couldn't pry myself away from a stream of legally significant emails to do so.  Dealing with expensive lawyers and grasping State agencies.  A bit of comfortable numbness is in order.  

Pictured above:  Angelo Peretti

Some good things have happened -- new accounts, the ordering of a Kindle, the overdraft at CitiBank (God knows they can ill afford it, ha ha ha) -- where was I?  Oh, some of that will be found soon on Muddy Boots.  Or, as Angelo Peretti wrote on his blog, "Moody Boots."  I got a chuckle out of that one.  My reply in italiano was that it's not Moody Boots, although I am moody despite the high dosage of Lexapro, though my boots are joyous when they tramp around in Italian mud.  It sounded better in Italian. Really.

Like many of you, I've been sucked more and more into the world of Twitter.  

It's at once amusing, boring, informative (un poco) and once in a blue moon revelatory.  I'm following some famous personages now - Ana Marie Cox (the ubiquitous TV commentator and the founder of Wonkette), Rachel Maddow, James Suckling, etc.  Only Ana Marie's tweets sound like the real thing. They're so full of Washington insider allusions that they elude me, unfortunately.  She's doin' a heckuva job, sticking the voodoo pins of ridicule into every waxen appendage and orifice of our undead political culture.

Here's Ana Marie...in low res!

It seems that my recent advice to Italian wine producers has caused reflection and even a sea change among at least a few of my target audience.  I received an email from a Veneto producer that he has taken my advice to heart.  I had earlier this very day received an email from Lucia Raimondi of Villa Monteleone of her concrete steps to reduce costs for herself, us and you, gentle tippler.  I'll write it up on Muddy Boots soon.  Really. It's done:  here's that link.

Rachel, looking a bit less butch these days: network TV glamour treatment

James Suckling, looking a lot more butch

 

Finally, there was a long thread on Twitter this week in which Lenn Thompson (chronicler of Long Island and other New York state wine happenings) lamented that "wine-blogging used to be fun."  Naturally he wants to return to those early days when no one thought about ethics (Q: Should I accept junkets to Spain or California?  A: Don't be a moron!) and before a notoriously disturbed wine producer upstate began his disinformatsya campaign against said Lenn. The man in question has already been booted off any number of wine forums, on which he posted an endless flow of information and opinions, beginning genially and veering into the belligerent and unhinged.  Even the tolerant Jancis Robinson expelled him after a while.  

Lenn, old boy.  You've worked hard for recognition.  You too have done a heckuva job.   As Lily Tomlin's father told her at the beginning of her career, "Babe, you gotta learn to be popular."  Cranks like "Don Giovanni" go with the territory. 

 

 

    

When the ship comes in

Please check out this post on Muddy Boots: Click!

Something about the wines we have coming in this month and by the end of August.

Ciao for now.

A winery we're bringing to New York

Please see the post and the linked article on Villa Monteleone, an excellent Valpolicella producer whose wines we will be carrying very soon:  Click!

Signs of stress: Parker vs the Bloggers

There's been much mutual snarling in the Parker and independent blogging camps of late.  Mr. Parker dissed and dismissed wine bloggers as a mob of ignorant, rumormongering, unprofessional morons. While RP made some valid points, I have to say that his tone -- his vehemence and energy -- smacks of panic, of an awareness that the new generation of writing wine-lovers isn't as overawed by him as their fathers were. 

The old order changeth, albeit with glacial slowness.

I recommend that you read Joe Roberts' very good response to Parker (replete with extensive quotes from the Wine Advocate piece) here:  click!    

Well, old Bob, you know what Chairman Mao said:  Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The end of blogging as we know it

I was talking about this the other day with someone who Tweets about 100 times a day.  A telling comment: "It takes away from my blogging time."

Of course it does, and Twitter is visibly encroaching on the number, length and depth of "traditional" blogging posts.  The reasons are simple and compelling.  You're limited to 140 characters.  But you don't have to sit still for a long time, staring at your computer, wondering how to fashion a neat little essay.  You spit out your thought, your observation, your plug, your bon mot, your link as you go about your business.  You can get instantaneous feedback.  It's fast and easy as opening a bottle that has a Stelvin closure: twist, glug, glug.

Tap tap, tweet tweet.

One can lament, as some will, the super-abbreviated messages and the dumbing-down of the medium.  Can't you hear the cry in trad media circles?  "Those bloggers were bad enough, but these damned Twitterers...! They're ruining [wine writing or whatever the subject]!!"

The cry will be just as loud and angry in haute blogging circles.  "We want to be taken seriously as journalists, but this ruins everything."

I know this isn't as hot-button an issue as wine-blogging ethics, about which more later, but I predict that it will grow into one.  Blogging will rapidly go from being a mainstream activity and means of acquiring information and forming bonds to nichehood.  Sort of like reading newspapers or watching "art films."

What do you think, bloggers, tweeters and those who love them?   

Real and blogging worlds meet

Every so often you meet someone you got to know through blogs, and who got to know you.  I always marvel at the precise way a wine blog (for example) draws a virtual string between me and someone far away -- Australia, Turkey, Poland, Brazil...and North Carolina.  

Yes, yesterday I met, in person, a fellow winelover, Thom Calabrese, who lives in Asheville, NC.  We met at Gabrio Tosti's store (another plug for you, boy), where he went especially to buy a couple of my wines (another plug for me, the shameless whore of self-promotion, fiddle-dee.  Thom didn't spring for the $55 one even though it is very rare and highly unusual and fascinatingly delicious.  But let's not quibble about a mere 55 bucks in a time of macrocosmic financial uncertainty, though billions have been thrown at less sure bets like Chrysler and Bank of America.)

But the point was...well, what was it?  

Oh yes, right, sure, uh-huh.  

That it's a funny, serendipitous old world on the Internet.  Thom C. found this blog via a wine friend in Asheville who used to live in Italy, and who moved to Asheville last year, a certain Michael Culley aka Michele Colline. Thom's been in the wine biz at various times, mostly on the retail side, and he shares a certain Strappo's life addiction to Italy and all things Italian, mainly the wine and food.  Not the execrable TV shows, however.  Or the habit of wearing those choking scarves, a mom-inspired fashion that leaves me both puzzled and annoyed.  Still, except for those things and the Camorra, there's more to love about Italy than not. (I even like the tight jeans. But I would.)

Whatever.  Thom was a great guy to meet.  We went to Schiller's, an outpost of the Balthazar empire, shared a flagon of rosado de Rioja and merrily killed a couple of hours.  

Image below. I did a search on Google Images for Thom Calabrese and this is one of the things that popped up to torment me.  Shit!  Fuck!  Hence the absence of "Oscars" on my notional mantlepiece.  Yes, Mum, I am indeed my own worst enemy.  By the way, "Thom Calabrese" may be the creation of the witness protection program.  There are no online pix of the man.   

  

 

      

Why Alice Feiring is necessary

Alice tweeted the blog post that she put up yesterday -- to sarcastic, devastating effect.  If you haven't seen this, you really should:  Click here.

It should come as no surprise to her readers that the winery she skewers is in the Golden State.  One of her online handles is Barola, and she blogs often about her visits to French vignerons, especially in the Loire.  Definitely not a New World-style fan. 

  

Alice Feiring.  

Photo from NY Sun, defunct and unmourned right-wing rag

As so many in the wine world know, Alice is a fierce proponent of natural, "unspoofulated" wines.  (Did I spell that correctly?)  You know, judicious use of oak, no micro-oxygenation, etc., etc.  Sometimes she goes a bit over the top in order to fire up her copy and the reader.  And sometimes I think she only needs to smell brett (the barnyard or chicken-coop stench) to declare a wine pricelessly old-school and so on.  She is an extremist, a fundamentalist.  She was born to shake things up.  She does, regularly.

In these days of runaway bullshit and meaningless buzzwords, we need Alice to call it all out.

    

Advice to Italian wine producers: Lighten up!

Sorry, folks, I'm cross-posting in a lame effort to get you to visit Muddy Boots.  

Today's post: a couple of pet peeves...

Dr. Debs digs biodynamic

For more about Deb Harkness' nice review of Trasubie, a BD Sangiovese/Syrah blend, go to Muddy Boots:

Click!

Gary Vay vs Robert Parker

So who is the real market maker?  Thanks to JB at Domaine547, who pointed me to the article, which no one else on the Robinson site could track down, I learned that Mr. Vaynerchuk has just inked a multi-million dollar, 10-book deal with Harper Collins, a venerable publishing house now under the universal thumb of Rupert Murdoch.  Jancis, the pride of Cumbria, goes on to say:

Gary is nothing if not a brilliant publicist.  The email from his current PR person announcing the deal also lets slip the following nugget, based on a single post called 'Gary Vaynerchuk as market maker' at the American site for enthusiastic newcomers to wine domaine547, thereby proving the value of all the social networking that Gary's career to date has been based on: 

14 vs 400

• When Robert Parker scored two wines in the 90s, the winery received fourteen orders in the weeks that followed.

• When Gary scored one of the wines a 93 on Wine Library TV, the winery received 400 phone calls and orders within 24 hours.

Taken with yesterday's news that the US is currently arguably the healthiest wine market (see America - the new wine frontier), things look pretty rosy for the scourge of New Jersey. 

If nothing else this development supports what I've long believed was happening, a major generational shift in the power to influence the marketing, selling and, yes, the making of wine.  

The tone of Jancis' piece also lends support to my belief that she's not rooting for the old guard. 

Read this: "I like them. What are they?"

Read "I like them. What are they?" on Muddy Boots.

While you're at it, tell me what this type of eatery should be called. 

A presto!