Wine Openers

Along with many of my online colleagues, I spent most of a week recently in New York City for VINO 2010, Italian Wine Week, sponsored by the Italian Trade Commission and promoted as the largest Italian wine event held outside of that country. The regional sponsors of Vino 2010 were Tuscany, Apulia, Calabria, and the Veneto.

The week was full of seminars and tastings and “Buon Giornos” as you met literally hundreds of wine producers, wine writers and critics and thousands of fans of Italian wines. Some of my colleagues have written excellent blog articles on their experiences, so I’ll share some blog sites and some dialogue on ones I’ve found most entertaining.

Susannah Gold at Avvinare wrote eloquently about her good friend and excellent winemaker Susanna Crociani of Montepulciano. Crociani makes a delightful Vino Nobile di Montepulciano DOCG and several other lovely wines, including a wonderful Vin Santo di Montepulciano DOC. You can read that post here.

The two Susanna(h)s were panel members for a seminar on the impacts of social media (Twitter, Facebook, and blogs) reaching out to the estimated 80 million or so “millennials,” those between 18 and, what, 28 or so. This generation of wine drinkers already is using social meida more than any other generation and the people who will direct the path that wine writing, drinking and conversation will take in the near future.

Other members of the panel included Alder Yarrow of Vinography,Doug Cook, Head of search at Twitter and founder of Able Grape, Steve Raye of Brand Action and Anthony Dias Blue. You can see the panel here, but you have to wade through a commercial before the panel video begins, and then you should fast-forward a few minutes to get past the crowd shots.

I attended a seminar/guided tasting on wines from Calabria led by Italian Wine Guy Alfonso Cevola. Titled: “Gaglioppo the Great: The New Generation Of Southern Reds”, the seminar featured 11 wines, not all of them Gaglioppo, along with a producer or representative of each wine. Among the wines were some made with Malvasia Nera, Greco Nero, Magliocco , Nerello Cappuccio, Nerello Calabrese and two grapes new to me, Arvino and Lacrima Nera.

The next day, the inestimable Charles Scicolone led a tasting on the wines of Apulia, of which he wrote eloquently on the i-Italy site here. What I hadn’t realized until spending an afternoon with Charles at Cipriani for a tasting is his intense dislike of barriqued wines. He prefers wines that aren’t hidden by oak and it was illuminating to see how precise his palate was in detecting oak overtones in what otherwise seemed pretty nice wines.

As he mentioned, he sometimes has to hold his tongue when talking to winemakers. He played the discretion card several times during the Apulian wine seminar, where several of the wines were heavily oaked, which overrides the natural flavors of the wine.

Charles also mentioned that his wife Michele’s newest cook book, “The Italian Slow Cooker,” is out and doing well sales-wise, which reminded me of Michele’s article on the seminar entitled “Italian-American Food…Why Don’t it get NO Respect?”

As she notes in her blog, it was the only seminar in three action-packed days that focused on food. Tom Hyland in his Reflections on Wine blog wrote both a food-related column and a general view of VINO 2010.

And that should be enough reading for now.