Abruzzo and undersea bugs: A fish dinner in Francavilla.

Brodetto. This adventure starts with an off-hand comment by Fausto Albanesi. He was visiting North Carolina, presenting wines at a variety of Torre dei Beati-themed events. I said the Rosa-ae Cerasulo was really good with all types of seafood (amazing for a Montepulciano-based wine) and he mentioned that is was made in an uncommon way, half like a white wine, half saignee. Then we talk about fish. “In the morning small boats of fishermen sell their catch on the beach near my house.”  A peculiar look was in his eyes. I sensed this was really a central thing in his universe. I wanted to check it out, partly to understand Fausto, and mostly because I love fresh seafood.

When planning my trips to Italy I get the important things on the schedule first. In an early email to Fausto I said I wanted to cook Dover sole bought the morning of my arrival in Francavilla al Mare. Sort of my rider for showing up: It’s a little ridiculous, but I’m demanding like that.

Francavilla was destroyed by retreating German troops at the end of World War II. It had been a popular tourist resort, and still has some bustle mid-summer, but it is fading. Adjacent Pescara, a city Fausto takes pains to point out did not exist 100 years ago, is clearly ascendant. Public works and seafront renewal projects in Francavilla seem interminably stalled, in Pescara they progress, and successful bars and restaurants line the city’s “old town” and beachfront area. Fausto has to admit the gelato is better in Pescara. I opt for acacia honey and Montepulciano grape must scoops. In the midday sun of spring’s first warm day they are both worth the short drive north.

I pass layers of Galassos as I follow the unmistakable, intense smell of fish cooking in liquid up to Fausto’s third floor apartment. I’ve never been to his home before, so I’m checking every nameplate. Everyone in the apartment building shares the last name. His wife is Adrianna Galasso, her cousin runs one of the region’s very big and not very good wineries of the same name. “He thinks we are crazy, to make wine like we do,” Fausto says. “At the beginning he said we would certainly go bankrupt.” I press him for a while on the mentality of large-scale industrial producers in regions where that trade seems to me to be slowly dying. I naively wonder why they don’t choose to make good wine, like Fausto. The reward would be three times as many euros per bottle, at least. I think it’s a strong economic argument to back up the ethical reasons for organic farming. Fausto says they have a booming trade in dirt-cheap (like 1 euro) bottles in Belgium and other northern European hypermarkets. I feel like I live in a bubble.

He works just outside of the remarkably beautiful mountain town of Loreto Aprutino, 30 kilometers to the west. In the course of a day Fausto has everything: snow on Gran Sasso and sunny beaches of the Adriatic. We look at pre-Renaissance frescos on the walls of the town’s most beautiful church, including a depiction of the Torre dei Beati, or Tower of the Blessed. It’s my favorite kind of religious art, a post-coma fever dream from a noted artist depicting the afterlife, full of rivers, reptiles, multiple headed tormenters of the damned, and milk and honey for the lucky few. The paintings are fascinating. Fausto laments the lack of investment in restoring the old church. But I’m not nearly as interested in the inside of beautiful old buildings, and am itching to get back into the incredible topography of the town outside. We climb to its highest point, to another church where giddy young women are mid-rehearsal for a wedding, wobbly organ music blaring. The perfect little core of Loreto Aprutino is almost empty. Fausto explains few people live here year-round anymore: its vitality is gone. Valentini own the largest building in the hollow center, a hotel.

As a first course Adrianna serves a cold calamari salad, tender and bright with olives, capers and spring onions. Then amazingly fresh shrimp arrive, sautéed in butter, with mild peppers and onions. Are they so perfect because of the head-on preparation, or because we are three blocks from the Adriatic?

Then comes the amazing thing, the brodetto. Fausto bought 13 different varieties of fish for this special dinner. It’s overwhelming. There’s one that looks like a sea cockroach. I ate it hesitantly, particularly the second one that was full of roe. The locals said it was the best one. I couldn’t say no… but I thought it. We are used to shrimp, and they look like bugs, too. I see a langoustine or two, and one or two “normal” small fish: Dover sole, for example. A local flounder is tender and good. A tiny catfish-like creature looks up at me from two close-set eyeballs on the top of its head. Another particularly ugly bottom dweller has a harelip and snaggly teeth, and skin like a toad. There is a mottled, hand-sized fish with a yellow-orange head. And maybe a small snapper? Brodetto has a special ceramic serving fish, like all great regional specialties. Fausto and Adrianna are ridiculously generous hosts, so they’ve prepared two of these 12+ inch vessels for our feast. Along with the frutti di mare component are abundant cooked tomatoes and a broth I could drink for days, the liquid of everlasting life and vitality. Luckily it is custom to sop this sauce up with piles of bread, so I don’t have to resort to indecorous slurping.  

The meal is special: I feel honored. I ask Fausto and Adrianna’s articulate daughter if they eat seafood often. “Not really, three or four times a week.” I can see the appeal of Francavilla al Mare.

Day 11: Colli Tortonesi

It was a good day to get inspired, a great last day before going home. Seventy five degrees and sunny with a light cool breeze, one of the three or four really perfect days in a year. Weather-wise. Other things are good, too, but I wake up still feeling like a stuffed pig, my insides crowded with regional specialties, ancient grains, homemade cakes from Italian grandmothers. A normal night’s sleep isn’t going to shake off a week of force-feeding Italian style. So I went out for a run, seeing again my buddies the brutal hills between San Marzano, Moasca and Canelli. It really lifts my spirits and turns the 5 kilo lead weight in my stomach back into a 5 pound lead weight, or maybe now it is aluminum. I stick to protein during a late breakfast: Bruna from Carussin does something to scrambled eggs that is indescribably good, and there is a liter of raw cow’s milk to be drunk. It feels light: context is everything. Thanks to a glitch in the house wi-fi I can hit the road with no additional fiddling.

I few kilometers south and the Piedmont becomes green and flat, and stays that way almost to my destination. Agricultural and uneventful. I like it, I’m feeling mellow and unambitious and the terrain suits my mood. No harrowing switchbacks or fold-in-the-mirrors moments on roads threaded between ancient stone houses on this route, at least until the very end. It’s a day when I’m feeling like rolling with it. The critical filter can be turned off a little, too, because I know we are working with Chiara and Michele from Oltre Torrente. After a state-side tasting of samples and an initial visit by Luc during the dampest days of winter, my stop at their cellar is formality and a great deal of information gathering. They made it into the portfolio weeks back, lucky (or unlucky) for them!

The cellar is an example of inefficiency at its finest, three tiny old stone rooms stacked on top of each other, with disconnected spaces around the village for bottle storage. Soon they will move the warehousing of wine to one larger location.“Right now we have wine everywhere in Paderna!” Chiara says. The small cool underground cellar that houses the remnants of last year’s vintage will become a room for keeping reserve wines. Currently they have no space to age anything, in a few days when Michele bottles the 2013 whites and 2012 reds the room will be totally filled up.  

Chiara is from Milan. The choice in 2010 to move to Paderna was a little random: they considered Oltrepo Pavese, (“too expensive!”) Le Marche, many more. I think it’s clear Colli Tortonesi is the right choice, even if hoped-for funding from the local authorities never materialized. “We thought they would give us (a grant) to start something new in Paderna. Now that seems unlikely.” In spite of nonexistent financial backing, the couple managed recently to purchase an additional hectare of 100-year-old vines, and will probably buy another small north-facing parcel from an old farmer who currently rents it to them. “He keeps threatening to rip up the vines,” which is an unsubtle rural negotiation tactic. Today Oltre Torrente has 5 hectares to utilize, and will make about 15,000 bottles this year. That’s up from 5,000 in the first year, 10,000 in the second… the goal is to get the estate to 30,000 bottles eventually. Ambitious, but it’s a good size, and I think they’ll make it.

They had to pick a farm somewhere. Chiara had studied at the university in Milan, got her PhD and took a year-long spot at a university in the Netherlands. It was clear to her that positions in academia in Milan were unlikely to be forthcoming. Perhaps the school retains one too many tenured professors teaching conventional viticulture from a different era. And Michele was always making wine elsewhere in Italy: the couple needed to find a place of their own.

Chiara likes raising two small kids in a village where all the locals eat lunch together in the only restaurant. “Everybody knows your business (and has opinions) but you would never starve.” And the kids still see plenty of Milan, diverse perspectives to absorb.  

We talk about everything: it’s pretty easy with Chiara. I’m on their side. Through lunch and a nice walk up steep north and south facing Timorasso, Cortese, Barbera and Dolcetto vineyards I get closer to her philosophy. They use minimal sulfur, around 30mg per liter for their white wines. One day they might experiment with an orange wine, but she says lower sulfur “is like playing Russian roulette in reverse. Occasionally it works out but usually….” I pretty much agree. A tiny amount of sulfur strikes me as reasonable, not dogmatic or dangerous.

They are organic in the vineyard. Honeysuckle is in full bloom on the ridge road separating their north and south facing vines. The south-facing ones border the cemetery, so I make dumb zombie jokes. Chiara says she is more afraid of working there because of wild boar. The cellar has a couple rows of 5-hectoliter concrete tanks. There is squeaky-clean stainless steel upstairs with new white (and red) wine in it, and a small stack of mostly second and third use barriques in the cellar. The make all the reds as individual crus, then blend. The 100-year-old Barbera is ridiculously fruity, the 60-year-old Barbera parcel is more structured, with secondary flavors of smoke and spice. It’s an estate of 10+ tiny parcels, so blending them together is the only sane way to make the wine.

They are young, they don’t really have any money, and they make wine in a place probably smaller than your garage. I can tell Chiara really likes Paderna, and it’s easy to do business with people who share your viewpoint and aesthetic: I see Fugazi, Iron Maiden and Fela Kuti cds on the shelf of their apartment, which is attached to the side of the church at the top of Paderna. It’s a house with amazing views in every direction and architectural potential that doesn’t exist where we live, as far as I can tell.

I can’t really get more excited about an estate without needing a brown paper bag to breathe into. The Timorasso is a special wine, saline and bright and ripe. We will sell lots of their richly appley Cortese and a cool, clean vino rosso, but for some of you Timorasso will become wine crack. I know I will have a hard time letting go of it, except I want to create a scarcity of these wines in their cellar and in our warehouse. Awesome people, youngish, full of energy, working 24-7 with two little kids in tow. They are going for it and trying not to think too much about how crazy this project is. Because Michele and Chiara are really obsessed with wine. They collect it like you and I do, it’s a mission/life’s work, the path they are on. It probably feels like the thing they have to do. This place really is the best. And there is a badger on the label.

Day 6: Tilio and the Sheep

When Tilio Gelpke was eight years old he was taken out of school, and a lifetime of working with sheep began. His father, a Swiss architect, bought Corzano e Paterno in the late 1960’s and imported 50 sheep from Sardinia, to clear the land of bushes. Tilio says goats would have been better. Sheep prefer grass, goats like larger vegetation. “Together they make a good team.” He started learning to care for the animals from a Sardinian family that relocated to Tuscany with the initial herd.

We are talking in the middle of a milking parlor. It is loud, aromatic, and a fine balance of order and chaos. After a while it becomes the sensation of watching people get onto subway trains, or file into seats at a large theater. There is bustle, followed by placid moments of chewing, and the methodical attachment of pumps. The sheep file in and jostle for favorite positions: they don’t like wet spots on the floor. I feel the same way. When an animal with four legs slips, limbs go in all directions. Usually its head smacks the concrete. A two-day-old lamb wanders through the milking lines, then down to us in the center of the room. It strikes me as amazing how alert and active this little creature is, in comparison to barely awake 2-day-old humans. They register a comparable level of cuteness, in my opinion.

Tilio attaches pumps and checks microchips in the first stomach (sheep have two) with a handheld device, to verify identities and record production levels. Today he is the angel of death. Animals that are very old (generally over 12 years) have malformed teats, or simply do not produce average levels of milk are marked with a dark green stripe. It is bad to have a green stripe.

“If an old animal dies on the farm I have to pay 50 euros to dispose of it,” he says. “If I only get 10 euros from the butcher… I hate it, I hate dealing with them, I’d rather make illegal sausage on the farm, but the regulations make us do stupid things. People can buy a pig and slaughter it at their property to make sausage, but I cannot do the same with my old animals (without violating EU codes.)

“Fifty years ago there was so much concentration of productive food: it was a garden.” Tilio says everything was grown here, not just olives and grapes. People had to maximize the potential of the land. “Each stone you see, someone has turned it a few times. How far do I have to go back to find an era like this? Probably before the Etruscans.” Across more recent millennia the land had to be intensively farmed, to support the population density of Tuscany. Tilio says that until the last century 20 people would live on the production of 10 hectares of land, while giving 50% of the harvest to their aristocratic masters. “It was slavery,” he says. But it made people wring every ounce of productivity from their territory. Vines were trellised along fruit tress, and vegetables co-planted between the vines, and anywhere else that wasn’t too rocky or steep.  

“Romans had a dependency on grain. Florence could not have had the Renaissance without a greater concentration of crops.”

It is initially unsettling to have a long conversation about the wastefulness of modern Tuscan agriculture surrounded by dairy sheep and pasture land, in a region whose most striking visual characteristics is abundant and often scrupulously cultivated olive groves and vineyards. But Tilio’s point is we must take a longer perspective. “In the 1950’s someone with 50 sheep would have a wealthy family.” His family have 650. His neighbors have productive land planted with olive trees that they do not use anymore, because the labor is too expensive, even to produce valuable Tuscan oil. The way they farmed the land did not support them. So it goes fallow or becomes de facto pasture.

Tilio tells his life story as a struggle to regain productivity for the farm. He built the first stable in 1986. “Corzano e Paterno still has animals because I am stubborn. At first I was also the only salesman for the cheese. The stress and reality of what we were doing came when they (cousin Aljoscha Goldschmidt and his partner Toni) had a ton of cheese.”

“My cousin said we must throw it all to the pigs. I threw none away.”

Tilio learned quickly that his market for their farmstead cheese was not the grocery store. “Fresh cheeses lose weight. Retailers don’t like it, which is why they prefer industrial cheese.” Restaurants in Florence were a much better market, able to sell a selection of diverse pecorinos. The dairy thrived, and today they can barely keep up with demand.

Tilio takes issue with the emergence of industrial cheese that tries to look like small farm cheese. The ubiquity of these products in Italy sounds similar to what you find on a casual grocery store tour in America.

“Cheese makers have no secrets. It’s something we have been making for 10,000 years.” A mistake created their first “signature” cheese, Buccia di Rospo. Instead of tall round pecorinos, the cheese came out as squat bloomy disks. The expression Buccia di Rospo was used by Aljoscha to say the cheese was rotting: literally “It’s toading off.”

Locals complain of the reappearance of the occasional wolf. Tilio thinks this is part of the same larger picture. “We have (problems with) wild animals because agriculture has changed. Wolves follow the wild boar and deer. When I started (working life at Corzano) we had pheasants. Those were the large animals you would see. Now we have wild boar as big as a pig. When you see them on a motorbike I say ‘Please, you go first.’”

Hunters imported larger boar from central Europe. They thrive in the food-rich fields of Chianti, growing fat on the Sangiovese grapes from vines they vandalize. “When I was a child they were hill animals, small, to get between rows. The Hungarian ones give birth twice a year.” And now they become overabundant.

Tilio has lived through boom and bust years in Chianti. “It’s an Italian disease. When something is working well they can spoil it in a very short time.” I hear this kind of shockingly deprecating language from many farmers working in Italy. “1973 was a terrible vintage and they sold it like it was a normal wine, and killed the market. Then it took many years and someone with money, it was Antinori but it could have been anyone, to fix it again.”

He then gets positive “We learn so much out of growing food.” We are outside, sharing stories of trips to Morocco, cheese making friends in New Jersey, details of farm life. A sheep dog wanders between us. “He thinks of himself as equal to us, a peer.” Tilio says. “I call him but he will not come. He has a job to do.” I realize I’ve been here a long time, and it’s not yet 8am. Time to depart. My work day is starting.

Day 4: Anarchy in Emilia

I just met the three nicest people on the planet. They live in a flat green part of northern Reggio Emilia, close to a nondescript highway overpass, down enough kilometers of gravel path to make me question the existence of their farm. 

A short row of blue beehives sit in the driveway. Low trellises of Lambrusco Nostrano and Fogarina vines surround a small cluster of buildings: house, cellar and barn. Alberici Amilcare arrives from his field dressed in green coveralls and socks and sandals. He has farmer hands. He smiles often and it is a great smile, it conveys. I don’t understand his Italian, sotto voce with short spaces between syllables. But his daughter is an amazing conduit, her eyes are full of emotion, her words direct and real. I’m not surprised at all when Arianna says she plays the viola. Her family are 90% heart: that energy needs to get out! To write about vibes is weird. I feel waves of creativity, sincerity and raw emotion from Arianna. I feel (and I can see) how she feels about our just-born partnership. She is really into it.

I get a huge charge of energy from this rare moment in my work life. We are bringing a couple thousand bottles of Lambrusco from their organic farm to America. To us it is an exciting thing. They have old vines and rare grapes (Nostrano and Fogarina) and they have done something special with their materials. The wines are hard-wired to make you happy, I can’t see how a person could miss their appeal. They are a mood changer and absolutely the thing you want when sitting down with a pizza or some snacks at 5pm (or 1am!) 

But the crazy rush of happiness that I get comes from the moment when we are in their kitchen after tasting. Arianna’s mother is making espresso for us in a Bialetti, her father is talking about how Veronelli loved their wines and how the red and black on the Fogarina label are the colors of Italian anarchists, a dedication to his memory. I say to Arianna how happy I am to start selling their wines in America. And I am happy: I love the wines and the place, and I’ll make some money from this organic Lambrusco sold at a moderate price. But she is SO happy. They make 10,000 bottles. It matters to her in a way I am sure I can’t fully understand, and I think a big part of it is pride. Their little farm, miles down a one-lane gravel track on a nondescript piece of quiet Emilia country, will have wines sold in America. This is a really great day for her and maybe her parents, too, a defining day. And their happiness is a huge buzz for me. I feel great. It’s selfish, I love the feeling and it sinks deeply into me. We are starting something together, Piedmont Wine Imports is entering their story in a middle chapter, after decades of quiet dedication to a rare way of farming, thanks to Luc seeing a needle in a haystack and having the clarity to pursue it. I show up and soak in all this amazing positivity. We are really doing something, a small piece of the world is better now than a few days ago. Because three people are really happy. The long arc of their aspirations edges closer to fulfillment. Maybe Merck can make a pill for this, but this real-deal charge of energy comes from the look in Arianna’s eyes. I can't get over it. The intensity in her eyes starts 100 meters inside her, or started 15 years ago at the germination of a thought. I will ride that high all spring and summer.

So now it’s laid bare. I am an energy vampire. My work is extremely selfish. You probably knew that: in Italy I feel like a professional dinner guest. But it is not handmade dinners or rare mountain wines that make me do this: they are a decoration. This feeling of life and the ability of humans to create positive change in other humans turns my wheels. Alberici Amilcare and his daughter created (and deserve) all their future success, via decades of sweat and small decisions. We show up, validate what they already know, and take away an amazing positive charge, and really sellable wine.

Someone else would do it.

Day 3: Astigiana

There is a haze. Mountains are absent and second row hills are a dim outline. That’s the end of complaining, because it is a perfect March day in Piemonte. The air is cool and fresh, a breeze comes occasionally from the north but you can tell it has lost interest. Running through the hills between Nizza and Canelli I see a young girl picking violets with her grandmother, harvesting flowers from the damp clay embankment and stone wall on the uphill side of the path. It is timeless, and hard to reconcile with the dull industrial zone lined with warehouse stores like “Enotechnica (for fixing all your bad winemaking problems) and Idrotechnica” (for solving with gears and piping some other industry’s woes) that I trudged past just a few kilometers ago. On my return route along the ridgeline I see a trail of violet petals at 5 meter intervals. I wonder if the wind stole them, or if she was on an adventure.

Three days away and all children are bittersweet reflections of my daughters.  

Chickens and roosters charge down steep fields of bright green first grass, barking dogs follow them and me. An old man bent and pruning has draped his coat at the end post of a row of Barbera vines for the first time this year. A woman sweeps the courtyard patio between a normal rambling brick and stone farmhouse and its barns, a brown cardigan covering her faded floral house dress. A free beagle is savvy enough to spot me and take another route at a distance of 20 paces, the intelligence of an independent animal living close to civilization. It’s the dang countryside, mostly hills covered by vines, scattered houses and the occasional wine estate or agriturismo. It is not picture postcard perfect but it is close, and I like being in it.

I’m running in anticipation of pizza, working up an appetite. I chose to skip lunch, unless you count cheese and salami, which I do not. When running through an impressive group of wines at dacapo in Agliano Terme at midday I snacked on a few glicini and slices of really tender, fresh salami, bright red and probably illegal in America. There was a decent semi-soft cheese too, but the salami was the deal.

Dino Riccomagno from dacapo is coming to America soon, specifically to New York to celebrate his son’s 18-birthday. He’s worried his son will just want to hang out in the mid-town Abercrombie & Fitch and Apple store. My guess is once he gets a whiff of downtown and Brooklyn, shopping will be a low priority. Dino can (and does) wear bright green pants. No American male can do this. Same goes for white pants. Yesterday, while involved in heated discussion with a particularly large Italian gentleman about the state of his driver side door window (it was broken, by him running into my open car door, but luckily not me, as I exited the vehicle) my interior narrative was “well, no matter how this fistfight goes, he’s the guy in a lavender sweater, which means I win.” Pastels may be present in the preppie fishbowl at the university nearest you, but the vibrance and audacity of color chosen by Italian men is unsettling to an outsider.

Luckily it was just a loud exchange of Italian words, delivered in a way that could seem deranged and pre-altercation to people from the USA. We walked away.

 

I take a fair number of pictures of Dino’s stainless steel Italian stove while he is finding some bottle or other for us to taste. There’s a new Grignolino from a half-hectare vineyard that Paolo Dania (the winemaker) and Dino (the viticulturalist) just purchased from a neighbor. Piedmont Wine Imports will buy this wine for summer, and then you can have some, too, for a while. A half-hectare doesn’t make much wine.

Also the Nizza “cru” Barbera from dacapo is much improved with the 2010 vintage, for the first time in my experience it justifies the elevated price from their elegant Sanbastian Barbera d’Asti. To be Nizza a Barbera must be from 20-year-old vines at least, and from land 200 meters or more above sea level. The vines must be southeast or southwest facing. It’s a more serious wine. The Metodo Champenoise sparkling wine is consistently better than most Blanc de Noirs from Champagne that I try. It is 90% Pinot Noir and 10% Chardonnay, with a really pronounced Pinot character until the linear, mineral finish just sort of brings everything to a point. It’s high caliber.

The I drove to Canelli: to Cascina Barisel.

I know Franco Penna well. He lacks the self-righteousness of natural farmers, and he has a good sense of humor. He’s not an outwardly ideological guy. In his cellar while tasting no-sulfur natural yeast Dolcetto, in the middle of 15 hilly acres of scrupulously tended chemical-free vines, I think I see the core identity of Franco. He is action not talk. His talk is lively and gently irreverent, untethered to the professionalism of Cascina Barisel. He wants people to taste his wines because they taste good, and that is how he presents them. He is quick to discuss the wines of other estates that we taste together, and he seems to enjoy interaction with other winemakers. He has opinions. He is very generous. The estate’s cellar is very well maintained. Many additional hours of labor clearly go on at Barisel to create even-keel, understated and exceptionally affordable wines. I scan down a sheet of available quantities: there isn’t much wine! Franco prices his wine to sell “I have to make a living with wine, this is not a rich man’s hobby for me,” and to drink. They are seamless and perfectly representative daily wines, clean, direct and good.

The sun may be shining but rainwater is still draining down the hills of Astigiana. Light chalky clay soils stick to my fancy leather shoes and stain one of the three pairs of pants I possess. So much for packing light! I don’t go to the top of Franco’s hill, I stop mid-slope among stunted mean old Moscato vines, sick of sticking and sliding and wondering how much better the view could really get. A truck is delivering bottles, it’s time for me to get out of Franco’s way and out onto some little road. We’re meeting up again soon for pizza anyway.

Day 2 My pizza demons and the Val di Susa

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I believe shadowy forces are aligned to make good Italian pizza unattainable to me. Infuriatingly just out of my grasp. I travel extensively in Italy and make pizza a priority, but roadblocks (sometimes literal) are thrown in my path to pizza worth eating. Pianos fall from the sky, hippos step on my cell phone. 

I submit to you item of evidence #53 in my case for individual persecution by a wickedly unfunny pizza god.

Franco Penna and I are driving up a one-lane path to a very promising bed and breakfast sited on top of a hill on the periphery of Nizza. The evening sun paints everything salmon, the breeze is mild and I’m coasting to the finish line of an epic two-continent two-day work and travel stint, grimy and nodding off against the side window. Franco says “ that place makes very good pizza,” and points to a building literally at the bottom of the path from my temporary residence, a 10 minute walk, 5 minute jog, probably 45 second peddle-free bike ride along a grade of hill that would make the journey home worthy of an extra slice. I’m bolt-up awake, feeling like Franco jabbed a syringe full of horse adrenaline and Merck blow into my jugular. It’s going to happen, I have no formal dinners planned with farmers, no pesky early morning appointments scheduled in a different province, I have no cash but hey I saw a place called GIGANTIC on the side of the service road not a mile away, I’m certain they give cash back on purchases, or have a “bankomat” next to their pallets of plastic-wrapped plastic-containered plastic food that you can eat with plastic folks on plastic plates probably at a plastic picnic table with a plastic umbrella shading your eyes from the fake sun of their indoor multiverse. The streak ends, the slump is over, pizza is thown in my path. Oh wait, they are closed on Monday. It’s Monday.

Hey Italy, I have a cure for the retail portion of your economic crisis: be open when I want to buy things. Dammit.

It’s not like I have been abstemious: I had salami and Toma Piemontese for breakfast. And a croissant and espresso. And a couple glasses of unfiltered mountain wine, served straight from the tank by winemaker Franco Celso on an arbor in the shadow of a steep stone-by-stone ancient terraced vineyard that wound back into the alps. Rocca del Lupo, his backyard.

The wine is wild and pretty delicious, purple in color and just “finished” 15 days ago. Last year’s wine is all gone. This mountain used to be packed with small family vineyards, now Franco is the last, the only one to ever sell his wine bottled and outside of family relationships. There is hardly any wine to be had now, he’s old and down to farming two fields, maybe a few thousand bottles at best. The labor involved would give pause to an athletic young person: Franco’s daughters have chosen modern lives in banking and lawyering. I counted hundreds of rough hewn steep stone steps on this maybe 2-acre site. Even the trellis poles are hand hewn from alpine rock! Incredible. To be honest I’d take a lifetime of toil for little money while feeling cold Alpine air and facing the snowy mountains of the other side of the Val di Susa over lawyering. The farm has a blunt beauty rare even in remote wine locations. I will dream of it. For a while I was pulled up the vineyard slope and into the Alps. It felt like finding a font of sanity. It was a hike that could not be denied. Work can wait.

Franco admits he just cuts the grass, nothing else. No chemicals. He asked if I’d want my wine filtered or with added sulfur. I took a deep breath, stuck to my guns and say no. You make the wine, I buy the wine. I do not make decisions about the character of the product, particularly when the wine I’m tasting is as real as it gets, a place in a bottle, with a bad sexy-lady label for no additional cost. Maybe I’ll discuss that issue down the line.

His father got a technical Oscar “from Tom Hanks!” in 1992 for the lamps he made for cinemas. 100 years ago famiglia Celso made bicycles. In the late 1960’s Franco Celso lived in northern California. He is an interesting dude, he rolls his own “to slow my smoking” and runs "for a few more years at least" an artifact to agricultural traditions we can see shrinking away before our eyes. Scant few members of the next generation are doing this here. Actually no one. 

Reaching lunch took a very long time, and blew up any plans I had to make fresh pasta ever again. In fact, I had fresh ravioli filled with Castelmagno cheese in a completely empty restaurant in Cavour, a mountain town west of Turin, that was better by a fair distance than any ravioli I’ve ever had in America. No contest, not even close, put the fancy edge cutter down you upstart watered-down third generation wannabe trattoria chef hack. It was shockwaves of flavor inside perfectly cooked paper thin but not meager pasta. I stopped the Italians talking politics on at least three occasions to say “the pasta is perfect” to make sure other sentient creatures registered what was happening on our plates, the disturbance in my universe. The first course had been mediocre (carpaccio was fine, vitello tonnato was not my favorite interpretation of that dish, too dry) and the dessert really only had one exceptional element, a gentian semifreddo. But the pasta was worth writing home about.

So Italy throws down the gauntlet, as it often does with first meals. I was tempted to skip dinner, to leave perfect ravioli as my last food thought of the night. Now I’m convinced I can attain a simple healthy meal in the small-but-pink restaurant next door. It would be a first in my land of feasting.

Day one: NYC

Day one: NYC

Who books a 6am flight on leap forward day? After 78 time changes in a lifetime these terrible, existentially unsettling days still strike without warning.

Discounting the tossing and turning and every–ten-minutes alarm checking it begins at 4:30am, mute waiting by the back door of my house with an empty–but-sturdy bright orange suitcase for company. The rugged neon thing is for stuffing with wine samples, it rests on top of a ubiquitous mid-size black rolling suitcase now heavy-enough with clothes to hurt my wimpy right elbow. Four hours earlier the black bag felt pared down to essentials. I stink at traveling light.

It’s a 12-day trip. It’s too early for coffee. My ride is late (and a different-than-expected driver, another story) and I mill in the darkness, drinking orange juice and keeping quiet, feeling preemptive sadness at leaving home for so long. This small old house has been home for 48 hours and is a shattered mess of boxes and improbably placed necessary items. One child’s sock on the stove, an assortment of sauces for an absent kimchi pancake in the vacant fridge.

On the ground in NY at 8am on a Sunday I have Manhattan to myself, except for the 100-yard line to buy cro-nuts. That guy must feel like a genius.  It is cold and I wander by The Dutch on the path to another brunch, which suddenly feels too far uptown for my pale blue fingers. It’s March and I am perpetually guilty of optimistic clothing selections. After a Soho coffee stop (it’s a beverage! It’s a hand-warmer!) I successfully kill enough time to be on Sullivan St. precisely at 10, when The Dutch opens. It is a popular place, vast by NY restaurant standards, but I have table anxiety. From hunger.

The food is really perfect in several ways. At once it feels decadent (I’m eating fried rice topped by two fried eggs with a side strip of pork) and reasonable. The eggs are perfectly cooked, eating them reminds me of how intermittently I nail the sunny-side up egg at home, and after all, eggs are good for you. And the rice is mixed with a generous but not aggressive amount of kimchi, which always makes me feel good. Driving back-and-forth to my new house the other day, with a 100% crap-laden car, the phrase “Kimchi: food of the gods” pops into my head. It’s not a very good slogan, but it does indicate how my subconscious feels about kimchi. Many levels of me like it.

Critically, the portion size is just right. I start with orange juice and coffee (because it is Sunday Brunch and that is the law) eat six oysters because I like oysters and appetizers, then have the fried rice. I leave feeling great, like an eating genius. Because portions are so blown up in the USA this dish arrived looking appealing… but a small ”where’s my mound of food dammit!” thought bubble pops up in my peripheral temporal lobe when the waiter delivers it. Halfway through the course I consider the causes of my super-size food eyeballs. It’s a bowl of egg-and-meat covered fried rice. That dish should only be served big to professional rugby players and small family groups.

Other than some healthy snacks (quinoa, anyone?) that I pick up in the village to avoid the air fare and get straight to sleep post-boarding, The Dutch served my last American meal for quite a while. Italy, the gauntlet is thrown down! For some reason Italy does not look intimidated….