What's new so far (From France and Sicily)

a shot taken at Etna's summit

This fall has been a truly incredible time: promoting one book in French, preparing another book for next year and – in between—visiting places and tasting wines with transformative powers.

The French translation of Corkscrewed – entitled Un Américain dans les vignes: Une ode amoureuse a la France du bien-vivre—hit bookstores in September and has been very well received. Personally, the title makes me cringe, yet it has been heartening to see how open French people are to hearing a foreigner’s take on their terroirs. In general French society is so fatalistic these days and many seem surprised by the obvious: that France still has the greatest diversity of wine terroirs anywhere, that French wine regions are turning out more good wine than ever, and that it’s not too late to avoid France becoming one big international-style strip mall.

This last couple of months, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling on the French book circuit from Burgundy to Nantes Paris to Alsace and next weekend to France’s biggest book fair --Brive –la-Gaillard—in the middle of foie gras rich Limousin. On Nov. 12, I’ll be in Libourne for an evening at Librairie Format Livre, and a week later on the 19^th I’ll be at Yves Legrand’s nouveau celebration (Bojo and otherwise) in the mythic wine storage caves of his Chemin des Vignes in the Paris Suburb of Issy-les-Moulineux. Check out this video on Chemin des Vignes that appeared on France 24 (English) . Admission is free but by invite only. Those readers who will be in Paris and want invitations should drop me a line with a good mailing address.

This has been a great time to visit friends and make some new ones. In the French book world I’ve encountered some interesting characters from the renowned Geographer and former president of the Sorbonne Jean Robert Pitte (a great intellectual and bon vivant) to the witty and pessimistic (in a French Woody Allen sort of way) Denis Grozdanovich who in 1963 was France’s junior tennis champ to Ségolène Lefèvre author of Les Femmes & L’Amour du Vin.

Speaking of wine love, last weekend, we took a family trip to Paris (electrified by the big annual contemporary art fair known as FIAC) and my wife and I had dinner at one of my favorite wine shop/eatieres-- Les Papilles in the 5^th arr. Owner Bertrand Bluy pulled out one of his few bottles of Domaine de la Grange des Peres 2005 Vin de Pays d’Herault from the Languedoc, carafed the thing and gave it a good shaking. Rarely do I taste a wine so memorable that it recalibrates the internal wine-o-meter. This Grange des Peres is for me that kind of wine. It didn’t taste like a Mediterranean wine, or entirely a Northern wine, it had body and it had length. It was a wine you didn’t even want to analyze—we were lost in the pleasure zone and floated us through the streets of Paris on the 40-minute walk back to our hostel near the Place de la Bastille. The wine and winemaker (Laurent Vaille) will certainly draw me back to Aniane where I last visited while researching Corkscrewed. Interestingly the Grange is neighbors to Daumas Gassac and Aimé Guibert (who was exalted in Mondovdino as an anti-Mondavi hero even though his wine is expensive and let's be honest: nothing special). I have Daumas Gassac wines in my cellar that I have no desire to open. I doubt that will be the case with Grange wines.

While I am a proponent of naturally grown grapes and naturally made wines, this fall I have become more and more disenchanted with the natural wine world. Why do most natural wine bars and natural wine groupies tend to focus on the same small group of wines and talk about them over and over. There are thousands of wines of interesting natural wines out there—who wants to do Gramenon verticals? It’s struck me that for many natural wines have evolved into a narrow brand with a set of flavors. Sort of like those overly extracted woody Parker wines did in the 90s—just substitute volatile acidity for extraction and oxidation for wood character and you begin to get the idea. It is good to see the natural wine proponents in Paris starting to turn their noses up at no sulfur wines.

In early October I returned to Sicily with friends and we spent a few days on Etna—climbing to the summit and looking into the hot, steamy sulfurous maw of the central crater (Yeah we took the easy way up the north face in a 4 x 4 and hiked the last kilometer) and the rest of the time eating some of the season’s extraordinary crop of porcini mushrooms that was the result of heavy September rains. (Great for mushrooms but in many cases a disaster for the wines of the 09 vintage). Sicily has gotten into my bloodstream, and I find it difficult to be away for long. Its terroirs are deep and hopefully immutable. My next book (due out in September 2010) is at the publisher now Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey and it’s about wine and other stuff. Like life, some of the planets most incredible food flavors, and the anti- Mafia movment. A lot of other stuff.

Stay tuned.