A Texas based wine writer and an Italian MW explore Italy and its wine regions–in a coffee table-esque book uniquely crammed with personal insights and rare candor.
To see this post with accompanying photos, click here.
At first this coffeetable book, suitable for gifting, struck me as indistingishable from the Italy and Italian food and wine books put out by publishers looking for another easy sell. Throw in a few photos of red Vespas, good looking models by fountains, and yet another ragu sauce recipe. (None of which are present in this volume). But as I started to read the two voices writing in tandem with each other in this hefty volume, I began to see candor and nuggets I would not have found elsewhere–at least not in an attractive, photo filled wine book.
Lonardi is unusual in the rarified ranks of MWs as he has been in the business as a producer, holds a degree in agronomy, and knows how to sell wine in New York. His is not solely a sensory path. (Though you gotta have those chops for sure to become an MW.)
Triumphs and Failures
In the book Lonardi shares experiences of hits and misses. Once, he refined viticulture for the better, harvesting at staggered intervals, not all at once, as a Chianti Classico estate previously did. As he describes it, the winemaker “was skeptical of vineyard work.” (A bygone era perhaps, as trends change.) With Lonardi’s intervention, “parcel by parcel harvesting became a cornerstone of our work.”
But he’s not afraid to acknowledge his own cringeworthy mistakes–they’ll horrify you if you are a lover of old vines. Arriving in Sicily in the early 2000s, with the ambition of “bottling Sicily’s greatness,” he cast aside “the old Sicilian model of bush trained vines and resilient local varieties,” opting to plant EU subsidized Chardonnay, Syrah and Cabernet, in VSPs and using Bordeaux winemaking techniques.
‘We planted continental models–dense rows of vines on weak rootstocks, trimmed and irrigated, arranged not for beauty or belonging, but for efficiency,” he writes.
“And so, we began the great uprooting. Old vines, deeply established in culture and climate, were torn out, We didn’t experiment. We just imitated, confident that quality would come from patterning ourselves on others.”
“I’d been chosen for my job because I had studied abroad, in France and California–the places we looked to for answers. Our guiding principles? ‘This is how the French do it.’ ‘This is how you make quality wine.’ ‘This is how you mechanize and save money.’”
But he writes, “after just a few years, Sicily spoke back. It subverted everything we believed.” Cover crops did not help, trimming in heatwaves stalled the vines, high density led to increased labor. In the end, he finds, the vineyard “improvements” failed completely and the wines were mediocre.
In the end, he finds that the Sicilian model did not need replacing–”It needed reclaiming.”
Starting in 2022 that’s what he did, championing the old vines of Marsala with his two MW co-learners
In a chapter on Friuili, Lonardi profiles Friuli born Marco Simonit as “A Shaman Among the Vines,” and admires his work on shifting wineries from hard to gentle pruning.
Although the concept of Italianity remains somewhat elusive, at least to me, a hint comes from Lonardi when he talks about Valpolicella and his growing desire to let the land speak with more transparency. At first he calls his idea Pinosophy, a word he says means “rooted in lightness, tension and truth”…based “on clarity of place, precision of flavor, harmony between fruit, acidity and texture.”
Now, “there is a world chorus singing in this key,” he says, concluding, “Lightness is not the absence of substance, it is the art of embodying depth with grace.”
MISSING PHOTO (click here for story WITH PHOTOS)
Celebrating the book’s release at a May 5 luncheon, Robin Shay, export manager for Marilisa-Allegrini’s Villa Della Torre, and auctioneer and broadcaster Liam Mayclem, KCBS Foodie Chap, with Shelley Lindgren at A16
Lonardi is now the COO of Marilisa-Allegrini’s new company, Villa Della Torre, where he is reshaping the vision, including a negociant approach by integrating old vine vineyards in Soave into the portfolio, and mentoring Marilisa’s two daughters who joined the business six years ago.
The Montalcino estate is certified organic and releases its wines in both Italy and the United States (as Made with Organic Grapes.)
Author Insights from Dupuy
Speaking at the luncheon, co-author Jessica Dupuy, shared the saga of the book publishing journey, saying that they self published the book after her agent could not find a publisher willing to release it as a bilingual publication. (Each chapter is presented in both English and Italian.)
Peppered with people profiles from start to finish, Lonardi introduced it as more timeless book about character building and career legacy lessons from role models.
“This is not a wine book,” he said. “This is a book of life, and it is a book especially for young people to understand how we can build our success, our professional career, and learn from all these people who are special.”
Biggest Surprise: The Role Mondavi Played in Italian Wine Leaders’ Inspiration
Said Dupuy, “One thing that, as a California connection, that I thought was fascinating was when we interviewed Gaia Antinori, Vittorio Moretti (who is the owner of Bella Vista and a number of other labels) and others–all of them, when I asked them, well, ‘who are some people that influenced you, who are some people that helped you in your career path?’ And without knowing that anyone had said this, all of them answered, Robert Mondavi.”
“It’s crazy. I just stopped in my tracks. Because I think as American–I work in wine, I have been writing about wine, I know Robert Mondavi. Of course we know that brand and many of you know everything he’s done, but I think I’ve kind of taken them for granted personally, and that really made me pause.”
“In fact, we had no plans to write about Robert Mondavi in this book, but after listening to them, there is an essay about that, and it’s because each one of them said it’s because of Robert Mondavi the first time I met him.
“For Angelo Gaja, Piero Antinori, Vittorio Moretti–it made them realize that Italian wine was possible on the tables of Americans, that Italian wine was possible and that people wanted us. If pizza and pasta are part of the American menu once a week at a minimum, then Italian wine can be, too, and it gave them license to move beyond and push through. And so it’s because…I can’t believe it, but because of Robert Mondavi, we have this story in front of us. So I think that’s really beautiful, that that was the inspiration. And I just wanted to share that story, because you’re going to find a lot of these in the book.”
No comments:
Post a Comment