Last week in Naples, fellow American wine writer Alder Yarrow asked me this :

Was not my latest book, South of Somewhere: Wine, Food and the Soul of Italy based on a kind of nostalgia for a way of life that was dead or, at least, dying ?

No, I said.

It was late. We’d been drinking, and we were sharing a ride back to our respective hotels in the crazy volcanic landscape of the Campi Flegrei. In the following days I thought about his question some more.

First off, I loathe nostalgia — that dangerously deluded mindset that ignores the way things really were in the “good old days.”

Rather, I think it’s important to look back to understand the present. Today’s 21st century wine scene in Italy — to me a golden age of wine quality — didn’t come out of nowhere but was built on the shoulders of past generations.

Let’s be clear : up until very recently old-world wine growing was mostly misery. What are dead — thankfully — are the oppressive systems like sharecropping existed across much of Italy years after World War II and the use of arsenic as pesticide that persisted decades later.