Rediscovering analog and wine-ing about it
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Mainly because I’ve been thinking, writing, listening to winter and sort of pulling away from an online world that seems to be shouting at a funhouse mirror. I don’t want to sound like a luddite or a reactionary, but I think we’ve lost something.
Every human age has an idea or philosophy. I grew up in the America of the “free world” dominated by opportunity and expanding rights and an effort at objective “truths.” Now in our digital age, who cares? What seems to matter is purely grabbing attention — mostly with outrage, fearmongering and emotionally charged fairy tales. Not that there’s anything wrong with fairy tales, but they lose something when there are so many produced on an hourly basis.
What to do? I’ve been backing away from the screaming screens and going a bit more analog. I’ve put down my kindle and started buying paper books — preferably from bookstores when I can. I take an espresso in a bar with a local newspaper (Verona Arena), and I support the things I value. I look around and listen.
Robert in Venice before the start of the annual winter Carnevale
And I’m still here writing and reporting and opining on the people and places I think are important and interesting and meaningful in a very narrow sliver of the world.
Wine, at least for now, is still produced from grapes grown in soils and fermented in wineries. It hasn’t been supplanted by an app that hooks up to our cerebral cortex.
It is one of the products in our analog world that can produce beyond-delicious sublime sensations from sun, fruit and the subterranean world. I think of wine as a subculture of agriculture. And it’s been my culture for going on 20 years.
I document that culture in my books and in my principal journalistic outlet of my twice-monthly Robert Camuto Meets… column at winespectator.com.
Check out the most recent column “Carmenère on the Rocks” on the pioneering Venetian winemaker Stefano Inama who is bringing Bordeaux’s lost grape Carmènere back to the fore near verona.
Other columns from Champagne to Bruenllo Cucinelli can be found here (all free) at winespectator.com.