Wine News - January 01, 2006 |
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Welcome to
VOLUME IV,
NUMBER 1 of Wine News, the e-Letter from the WineCountry.IT network. (Would you
rather see the e-Letter on your favorite browser? Use
this link. Usa il link seguente se vuoi leggere
le News in italiano).
It's done! The new year has started and, hopefully, it will turn out to be a more peaceful year and one with fewer natural disasters than 2005. Let's drink a toast to this!
We are almost ready for the January 11 Italian Flavor Forum III at the San Francisco's Italian Consulate General. Hopefully, the storms that are currently ravaging California and have flooded good parts of it, from Napa and all the way down to Los Angeles, will be gone. With a little luck we'll be enjoying one of those mild afternoons that pass for winter days in the Bay Area.
Unfortunately, the Senegal Italian Flavor Forum appears to be on holdand, at least for now, we'll be postponing it. On the other hand, the premiere of the Italia Gourmet Show / Italian Flavor Forum IV of March is moving along and promising to be a truly exciting event. If you are an importer, distributor, buyer for a supermarket, reseller, wine bar manager, sommelier, wine and food writer, you won't want to miss it.
For your pleasure, we have published a long, eight-part article about the cult status enjoyed by Fernet-Branca in San Francisco. This city drinks more of that 'magic potion' than any other place in the world. Only Argentina is as much in love with the drink as our City by the Bay.
Other articles include an insight of Turin and Piedmont preparation for the Winter Olympics and one about the first Chinese winery to export wine to the US. Should we be worried about this? Will the Chinese be the next threat for the wine industry in the US and worldwide? I guess we will have to wait and see.
That's all wine lovers. Enjoy your reading and Happy New Year.
Loris Scagliarini,
President |
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Articles
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Vito a San Luca wins the Trophy Carta delle Carte 2005 |
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 Vito a San Luca, in the outskirts of Bologna, Italy, won the Trophy Carta delle Carte 2005 (Best Wine List 2005), awarded by the magazine Bar Giornale (Bar Journal).
The Trophy Carta delle Carte 2005 was organized by the monthly Bar Giornale, in collaboration with CALP SPA - Cristalleria Artistica La Piana, a glass factory from Colle Val d'Elsa, in the province of Siena.
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Moletto News – December 2005 |
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We have received and published the September / October issue of Moletto News, the periodic newsletter published by the Azienda Agricola Moletto.
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 "It's an acquired taste first and foremost, like coffee or wine," says Hobson's Choice General Manager Chris Dickerson. "First time you have it is like, 'Argh! This is absolutely horrible.'
"That's because you're used to drinking Jäger," Dickerson continues. "And stuff with a lot of sugar. This is a lot crisper and cleaner, and you feel a lot better in the morning. It's terrible at first, but in five minutes -- it's amazing -- you'll feel a whole lot better. Then it's time for another one."
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Part 8 of 8 |
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 Coming through the doorway, you pass beneath a shelf lined with Fernet empties, which stretches into a long, narrow room -- a polished wooden bar on the left, a few small tables on the right, and a small lounge in back. The jukebox plays a steady gale of kitschy, nostalgic butt-rock -- Mötley Crüe, Guns N' Roses, and AC/DC -- a soundtrack suited to the tastes of the quarter-life-crisis patrons who greet each other with hands on the smalls of backs, fraternal shoulder pats, and the too-friendly hugs of people whose bonds are largely based on getting shitfaced in common physical spaces.
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Turin 2006 Winter Olympics:
A showcase for Piedmont quality wine and foods |
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 Antonio Saitta, presidents of the provincial administration, and Valentino Castellani, president of Toroc (Turin Organizing Committee XX Olympic Winter Games), pointed out that the next Turin Winter Olympics, which take place from February 10, to February 26, 2006, will be the perfect occasion to showcase for Italian quality wines and food, especially the 30 or so typical products from the 'Paniere della Provincia di Torino' ('Basket of Goods from the Turin Province'), one of the official Winter Games supplier.
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WineCountry.IT
Columns
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Italian Native Vines
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Molise, is a small Italian region which used to be the other half of Abruzzo-Molise in the past. There is but one red native vine in this region and, after WW II, it was almost completely abandoned and substituted with other varieties.
Currently, thanks in part to respectable producers such as the Azienda Agricola D’Uva Angelo, this interesting grape is coming back, and is used in the production of bothDOC and IGT wines.
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We open 2006 introducing the Cantina di Bazzano, a winery from the Bologna area in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, which has been producing Pignoletto for about three quarters of a century. This wine is made from the grapes local native vines of the same name.
The Cantina di Bazzano was founded in 1928 by a small group of farsighted, entrepreneurial vintners. After a truly successful beginning, characterized by constant growth of wine production, the vineyards in the area were almost destroyed by a phylloxera vastatrix infection that annihilated the Italian vine heritage almost completely in the 1930s.
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With the the recipes for December 2005 we have completed "The Chef's Corner" series. To check out all the recipes or re-visit the suggestions given by the Scuola Alberghiera di Serramazzoni's chefs and sommeliers, go to the column index.
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Italian Flavor Consortium |
Italian Flavor Forum III
January 11, 2006
Consulate General of Italy
San Francisco, California, Usa
Special edition dedicated exclusively to the best San Francisco Bay Area restaurants, wine bars and resellers.
By invitation only!
Premiere of
Italia Gourmet Show /
Italian Flavor Forum IV
March 14 - 15, 2006
Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, California, Usa
A unique trade show in California and the US West Coast. Two days dedicated exclusively to Italian food and wine dedicated to professionals only.
Workshops, conferences, tasting and pairing of regional wines and food, many of which brought to the US for the first time. An opportunity to taste, compare and purchase the best of Italian gourmetood and wine by the Bay.
By invitation only!
Wine and food professionals and writers interested in participating, may request invitation by filling out this form. |
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Chinese producer Chateau Changyu-Castel has started importing wines to the United States, including one varietal of French origin that has been extinct in Europe for quite a long time.
Wine is the Italian agricultural product most exported to the United States. The data for the first ten months of 2005 confirm a trend established over a long period of time. 
Our story begins above the ocean with the dearly beloved namesake of a reclusive Italian count lying stone-silent in a child's coffin, among the suitcases and souvenirs in the cavernous belly of a commuter jet bound for the New World. 
When you hold a shot glass of Fernet-Branca to your nose, the first thing that strikes you is the physicality of the smell, which, if such a thing exists, is like black licorice-flavored Listerine. Put it to your lips and tip it back, and the assault on the throat and sinuses is aggressively medicinal. For many so-called "Fergins" uninitiated to the drink, it can be accompanied by a feeling that may either bring a tear to the eye or lunch to the esophagus. As a bitter Italian aperitif of more than 40 herbs and spices, it most often gets compared to Campari and Jägermeister, though by measure of accuracy, it's equally similar to Robitussin or Pennzoil.
"I had a man who just called me who was 67 years old who stayed on the phone with me for an hour, talking about what the drink meant to him," says Cattani. "About how he always had to take it as a kid and it's been in his family as a medicine. He keeps one [bottle] in the kitchen and one in the bathroom."
Count Niccolo Branca oversees the process today. Fermented for a year in oak barrels and then bottled in Milan, the mixture arrives here in cases of six green 750-milliliter containers filled with liquid that looks black through the glass of the bottle, deep brown in a shot glass, and slightly green in the light. It leaves an oily coating in the glass, a permanent stain on clothing, and has to be scrubbed out of white linoleum and the drinker's teeth.
When Prohibition laws were passed in the U.S. in 1919, the myth of Fernet-Branca was a salvation: Imported as a medicine, it was perhaps the only package liquor legally sold in the States. A year before the 18th Amendment was repealed, the demand for Fernet-Branca was so great that the Branca family, then in its fourth generation of ownership, opened an American distillery in New York City's Tribeca. The paperwork of the distillery lists deliveries to more than 40 San Francisco drugstores, most of which were in North Beach.
Supple and the senior Fogarty tell the story of Fernet's slow expansion from old-school North Beach businesses. Today it's the younger generation of the bar and food service industry that's largely responsible for the liqueur's vogue. From its deep roots in the Italian-American community, the gospel of Fernet was spread by bartenders and servers to the customers in the city's foodie set. Fernet-Branca found the route to San Francisco's heart through its stomach.
