Over the past couple of weeks here on the American in Pollenzo blog, we’ve started to take a look at the morality and ethics of wine writing. Before we continue, I wanted to take a step back and start to formulate a list of “functions of wine writing.” It’s inspired in part by (although not … …read more
Above: A section of the wall that separates the United States and Mexico along the Tijuana-San Diego border where I grew up (photo, “Art on the Tijuana Wall,” via Jonathan McIntosh’s Flickr Creative Commons). Like many Americans today, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around President Trump’s new ban on immigration from seven “majority-Muslim” … …read more
Above: Mulberry St. in New York City circa 1900, the epicenter of the early wave of Italian immigration to the U.S. (image via Wikipedia Creative Commons). Last week, I posted about my trip to Los Angeles and San Francisco and three spectacular “Italian” meals in three different “Italian” restaurants between the two culinary capitals on … …read more
Image via the A16 Facebook. Over the last three days, I’ve eaten in three of California’s most popular and successful Italian restaurants. On Sunday night, I was at Terroni in Los Angeles (not the greatest name, I know, but an immensely successful restaurant). Monday night I was at Sotto in LA (where, full disclosure, I … …read more
Above: Clint Eastwood in the starring role of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece “The Wine Blogger with No Name.” Last week, I shared a note about a recent blog post by acclaimed British wine writer Jaime Goode, “Jamie Goode’s crucible: It’s tough to make wine writing pay.” In his post, Goode wrote about the “ill-health of wine … …read more
It’s a good thing that my mother doesn’t read my blog (or any of the blogs I contribute to) because she surely wouldn’t like what I am about to say. My mother, now 83, grew up in the era of the great American gastronomic wasteland. A daughter of the midwest (South Bend, Indiana to be … …read more
It was in 2006, when I was still living in New York, that I began blogging about wine. I started out with a crude html-driven site. WordPress had just come online but I was lightyears from learning about the new platform that would rapidly become the standard for websites across the internets. The mission of … …read more
A week before Christmas, evidently to brighten the mood and lift the Christmas spirit, the famous British wine writer Jamie Goode published a post that got a lot of attention in the enoblogosphere: “The ill-health of wine writing.” Here’s an excerpt: It’s not been a great year for wine writing. Several fellow writers have lost … …read more
Above: Edoardo Valentini wines are regularly included in Italians’ lists of top wines each year. I can’t ever remember it appearing in a top 100 list by an America wine-focused publication. In just a few weeks, the Slow Wine Guide 2017 Tour will come to the United States, including Texas, where I live. (The editors … …read more
From the department of “food for thought”… Text, extratext, metatext, paratext… None intrigues me more than hypertext. “hypertext, text which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders” (Oxford English Dictionary). In 1997, critical theorist Gérard Genette, a giant among literary scholars, wrote: “Our ‘media’ age has seen the … …read more