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Happy 100th Birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti!

One of my favorite poets of all time wrote one of my favorite poems of all time.

The poet is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Godfather of the Beat Generation, whose bookstore, City Lights, in San Francisco, has been a beacon to all would-be writers, poets, satyrs and intelligentsia since 1953. Ferlinghetti turns 100 today.

Crowds gathered in front of City Lights this afternoon to celebrate the occasion while Ferlinghetti stayed out of sight, largely because his vision is, well, largely out of sight – he is nearly blind.

From 1 pm onward, celebrants, artists, poets, unusual dressers, and particularly hirsute partiers gathered to hear area poets read and to share stories about Ferlinghetti, with whom so many celebrants appear to personally have had a relationship.

In Jack Kerouac Alley, beside the store, attendees signed a LARGE birthday card for Ferlinghetti.

Local folks who attended the afternoon festivities:

My favorite poetry book of Ferlinghetti’s has always been A Coney Island of The Mind, containing my personal favorite poem, untitled, which starts out “Sometime During Eternity,” which is Ferlinghetti’s dirge about how Christ has come to be referenced.

I own several copies of A Coney Island of the Mind,even one translated into Italian, and one signed by Ferlinghetti. Since publication in 1958, the book has sold more than a million copies, making it one of the bestselling poetry books of all time.

When I lived in Toronto, Canada, I made numerous visits to San Francisco on business – often to review restaurants as I was the food editor and restaurant critic of the Toronto Star, then the third largest newspaper in North America.

And on every trip, I’d work in a visit to City Lights, to check out the unusual collection of books, magazines and floor dedicated to Beat literature. There was no other bookstore in America quite like it then. And, if you were wondering, there still isn’t.

I took the photo of Ferlinghetti in front of his store (top, above) in the summer of 1975. For me, it’s a sublime memory of that day, when we talked, exchanged ideas, and felt good about us, our country, and our place on this spinning orb.

But that was 44 years ago and a lot has changed since then. Especially how we feel about this country.

Over the years, Ferlinghetti has made unusual public appearances – he often popped up at times you wouldn’t expect. One such appearance was at the 1976 filming of The Last Waltz, the final concert of the Canadian-American rock group The Band, held at Winterland Ballroom, in San Francisco.

The film documented the Band’s last-ever performance and during the event, Ferlinghetti appeared to speak some nonsensical lines, which were included in the film’s final cut.

I wanted to attend the birthday festivities today at City Lights to commemorate Ferlinghetti’s gift to us all, his words of wisdom and wise-ness, and his coruscating view of so many of our cultural icons and habits.

For a fresh understanding of what makes the poet tick, you might read Ferlinghetti’s just published autobiography, titled Little Boy.

Happy 100^th Birthday Lawrence; thank you for making my voyage on the Good Ship LIFE so enjoyable – much more so than had you not also been a passenger.

This Book Should Come with a Free Promotional Corkscrew!

“I drink between one and one-and-a-half-bottles of wine a day,” says Gerry Facciani, who is both a friend and now an author – of the book above.

Gerry’s self-published book, The Drinkers Guide To Healthy Living, makes the case that one can drink as much wine as you like as part of a healthy lifestyle.

Citing the cardio-protective ability of wine, and resurfacing many of the things we’ve read about resveratrol, anthocyanins, flavinoids and antioxidants in the press... and stringing together hypotheses and test data, Gerry makes a case about the positive, physiological aspects of wine early in the book.

In many respects, the earliest chapters of Gerry’s book aren’t so much a persuasive thesis about the benefits of moderate drinking; they are more like a collection of clippings from numerous, informed sources, which support a common hypothesis. The Gerry Facciani Clipping Service has plumbed the depths of newspapers, medical research libraries, and scientific studies. 

I started out highlighting all the salient arguments why wine is good for me  with a yellow marker...  and by page 37 decided that so many pages were solid yellow... that it was far easier to dip the book in a pail of yellow watercolor paint and then use white-out to un-highlight the very few sentences which I DIDN’T want highlighted!

Resistance is futile!

There are so many references in the book about the health- and performance-boosting properties of wine that it sounds like wine may just be the magic Elixir of Life. (Good thing that I have a cellarful of the elixir...)

Results of some of the cited clinical tests are hard to believe: for example, one clipping’s insistence that even the common cold can be warded off by drinking sufficient quantities of wine:

According to a 2002 Spanish study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, “when individuals consumed 14 or more glasses of wine per week, the relative risk of developing the common cold was reduced by 40 percent, compared to teetotalers, with red wine providing superior protection against the common cold.”

What’s not explained here, of course, is whether the wine drinkers in this study also partook in extraneous activities, when they weren’t drinking, which possibly strengthened their resistance from catching a cold (jogging, running, etc.).

This is either Gerry Facciani, or this is Jerry Facciani. It depends on which page of the book you reference.

Specialists and friends who wrote an endorsement for the author in this book, spelled Gerry’s name both with a G (Gerry) and with a J (Jerry). Sometimes using both spellings in the same paragraph!

Even Robert Parker, the esteemed wine critic, who is one of Jerry’s closest friends, spells his name two different ways in the foreward of the book.

In fact, Gerry’s name is so blatantly misspelled throughout the book, that I’m beginning to think that, to be considered a good friend it is essential to misspell his first name. So I’m raising a glass to you tonight, Sherry Facciani!

One other copy editor’s question: Where’s the apostrophe in the title?

If the book were aimed at one drinker, the title should be The Drinker’s Guide to Healthy Living. If Gerry meant to speak to ALL the drinkers out there, it should have been The Drinkers’ Guide to Healthy Living.

Speaking of healthy living, Gerry does a good job of summarizing present thoughts about diet, nutrition, and the need for exercise and stress management in the middle chapters. As well, he speaks about the health detriments of immoderate drinking.

Gerry in his wine cellar.

Given his passion for wine and the sheer quantity, which he enjoys daily, I asked Gerry about his favorite wine regions.

“For sure, my favorite regions include California, especially those producing Cabernet, Zinfandel, and Syrah. I also love the Rhone and Bordeaux wine regions of France. I’m also a big fan of Shiraz from Australia.” 

Gerry has had a colorful career in – of all things – pension actuaries! He was the founder of an actuarial firm, which he sold in 1991 when it had become the largest individually owned firm of its type in the country. 

In 2010, Gerry and his wife Karen moved to New Haven, CT, so that he could enroll as a full-time student in the Yale Divinity School. Three years later, Gerry graduated with a Masters Degree in Religion. (There must have been a run on altar wine in that three-year period, although there is no clipping in the book to support this hypothesis...)

The Drinkers Guide to Healthy Living is $14.95.

To purchase a copy, go to drinkersguidetohealthyliving.com

Barolo - the town, the wine... and now the book

 

Barolo. It’s a town in Piedmont, Italy, population 646.

It’s a wine from the same region, made from the Nebbiolo grape.

And now it’s the name of a wonderful book, which is as memorable as the region and the wine. One swig of this book, and you’re hooked.

I was sent a review copy of Matthew Gavin Frank’s book, Barolo, and thought that I would motor through it in a day and give it brief exposure on this site, having fallen in love with the town on a visit last fall.

But once I started Barolo, which is a summary of Matthew’s six-month visit to the region, where among other things, he worked illegally at Luciano Sandrone’s winery, I put on the brakes and started to read it s-l-o-w-l-y, to make the pleasure last.

Matthew’s paragraphs are sweet and sticky like torrone, Piedmont’s hazelnut nougat. They’re like torrone in another way too: once you have a torrone bar, or a bag of wrapped pieces, you parse them out slowly, enjoying them one by one, over days, to make the mouthwatering experience last. The same goes for Matthew’s prose. His writing is rich and perfumed with similes. I found that I did not want to zip through passages, but, instead, preferred to slow down to enjoy every noun, thought nugget, and impression.

 Matthew at Sandrone’s winery

Matthew’s story about heading to Piedmont to work at Luciano Sandrone’s winery is compelling and rhythmic. There are hints of genius in the prose, reminding me of early Michael Ondaatje, whose marvelous book Coming Through Slaughter, the story of Buddy Bolden, may be Ondaatje’s single greatest, original work, written 34 years ago.

(In fact, I was so compelled to connect with Ondaatje, having read his book upon publication in 1976, that I secured the first interview he ever gave on CBC Radio, specifically to discuss the originality of the book.)

Author Matthew Gavin Frank in Piedmont’s vineyards

I feel somewhat the same about Matthew’s colorful, personal, highly detailed visit to Barolo. It is original, humorful, sensuous, and always thought-provoking.

Here’s how Matthew describes conigli arrosti, roasted rabbits, which he finds at a market stall:

“… roasting skinned rabbits, heads still on, teeth charred, eye sockets going black. Porcelain dolls trapped in a housefire.”

What a metaphor! Porcelain dolls trapped in a housefire!

Or his description of one of the region’s specialty cheeses, Toma:

“… [it] is a heavy cheese made of goat’s and cow’s milk that the locals claim has three main properties: ‘It satisfies hunger, quenches thirst, and cleans the teeth.’ I proceed to test the theory numerous times. Gamey. Viscous. Bechamel filtered through a gym sock. And I mean that in the best possible way.”

Matthew walks among the Nebbiolo vines in the Langhe

Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence, 1989) and Frances Mayes (A Year Under the Tuscan Sun, 1996), introduced us to a style of food and wine travelogue that has now become mainstream.

And while there are hints of mainstream life, Mathew weaving a tale, which includes hints of earlier jobs, such as chefing in Alaska, his focus here is to regale us with discoveries in Piedmont. Of which he does a remarkable job. The people he meets, dines with, and works with, jump off the page. His references to food and wine make me hungry, and no less thirsty.

 The Langhe, home of Barolo, shot by napaman last fall

Having spent several weeks in this very region last fall, I am aware of Matthew’s sharp eye for detail. As well, he has a professional writer’s grasp of cadence, and flirts with color, texture, aroma and taste with the best of our poet/writers.

In many respects, I sense that the 33-year-old writer owes less to Mayle and Mayes for style and more to Kerouac or William S. Burroughs. In my mind, Mathew is not so much a travelogue writer as he is quite simply a travel-rogue.

This young writer has talent, style, and let’s hope staying power. The world needs more Matthew Gavin Frank.

Another elevation of Piedmont, shot by napaman, fall of 2009

Matthew’s background: Born and raised in Chicago, he left home at 17, embracing a vagabond lifestyle around the stove. He ran a tiny breakfast café in Juneau, Alaska, sautéed fresh fish on a cooking line in Key West, FLA, served as sommelier at two restaurants in Chicago, and assisted Charlie Trotter with his Green Kitchen cooking demonstration at a Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco, in 2008. And in his spare time, honed his writing and poetry skills. Barolo is a brilliant synthesis of all this food, wine and writing experience.

About the book

One personal request if/when Barolo is released in paperback: how about a short “About the Author” profile at the back of the book, so we all know more about this young writer.

As well, let’s have a proper index. A good work of non-fiction like this, filled with so many references to places, wineries, and restaurants, which the average reader may one day hope to personally visit, is made far more useful with an index. This would enable a visitor to carry the book to the region, using it to look up the name of a restaurant, which Mathew may have loved in Alba, or hunt down the name of a local beverage, which he made sound so deliriously tasty (rosolio, on page 68).

 

Barolo, by Matthew Gavin Frank, published by The University of Nebraska Press. $24/95. Or go to amazon.com and find it for $16.47.

Love Wine? Read this Book!

Love a good whodunit? Read this book.

Love a great piece of investigative journalism? This book’s for you.

The Billionaire’s Vinegar, by magazine writer Benjamin Wallace, is going to this summer’s hot, go-to beach book. At least for wine lovers.

Filled with a cast of larger-than-life braggarts, connivers, narcissists, and some of wine’s most colorful characters – Christie’s Wine Guy, Michael Broadbent, for one – The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the tale of some questionably authentic, questionably old wines, including bottles that may, in fact, have come from a cache belonging to Thomas Jefferson.

If you have followed some of the headlines over the last 25 years, you know that German bon vivant, Hardy Rodenstock, claims to have uncovered several cellarsful of old wines – one lot from Caracas, Venezuela, and a more important haul from a vault in Paris where he claims to have found bottles of 1787 Lafite, bearing the imprint of Thomas Jefferson.

The author, Benjamin Wallace, has written for GQ and Food and Wine magazines. In The Billionaire’s Vinegar he earns his stripes as a serious gum-shoe. The detail in the book is astounding, yet it never bogs down… reads like a real thriller.

Whether these wines are real, and belonged to Thomas Jefferson, or whether they are counterfeit, is the subject of this book, written in a wonderful gum-shoe tradition; you just never know what the Truth of the claims, allegations, and counter-claims is until the end of the book.

In my career, I have met several of the larger-than-life wine writers and wine aficionados mentioned in this book and can attest to Wallace’s descriptions of them as being accurate. So it’s not a stretch to presume that everyone else he mentions is also properly painted.

And the accuracy of wine detail is staggering. I would hate to have been Wallace’s fact-checker because just about every vintage of the great growths of Bordeaux is mentioned multiple times, there are wine tastings in which hundreds of bottles were opened and Wallace has taster’s recollections of many of the opened bottles.

While there is a fabulously annotated bibliography at the end of this book, the one thing missing, for me anyway, is a proper index, which would permit the reader to return to certain passages about a particular wine without having to thumb through the volume back to front and front to back for half-an-hour. Maybe they’ll incorporate an index when the book is published in paperback?

The Billionaire’s Vinegar is already Number 73 on amazon.com’s bestseller list but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it on top of the non-fiction list by summer’s end – it’s that good, that compelling, that much fun.

The Billionaire’s Vinegar, by Benjamin Wallace, Crown Publishers, $24.95.

My Take on Wine Books

To learn about wine, nothing beats buying and opening lots of different bottles. Tasting lots of wine… and the attendant hangovers… are the best teachers of what you like… and what likes you.

There’s another way to learn about wine: through books. Over the years, I have read many about wine and am often asked for my favorites. Some are variety-specific, some are geography-centric, some are anthologies, some are encyclopedic, some are light, some are heavy, some are well written, many are not.

Probably my favorite “best written” wine book was penned by wine retailer Kermit Lynch, (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley) in 1988.

Adventures on the Wine Route tells of Kermit’s discovery of the very winemakers whose wines he imports today. His stories, profiles and myth debunking are superb. Kermit was one of the first retailers to rail against the numeric rating system of critics. What he said in 1988 sounds as though it were printed in a wine magazine today:

“This all reminds me of an acquaintance who always seemed to have a new girlfriend. His girlfriends all had two things in common: huge breasts. His choices might be pretty or not, intelligent or not, interesting or not. Nothing seemed to matter to him as long as the breasts were enormous. It was such an impractical way to assess the quality of a woman that it began to seem almost perverse. And I have an identical reaction to those who go gaga over an inky, oaky monster wine…. I cannot begin to communicate how profoundly the critics’ embrace of such freak wines depresses me.”

“Why ask that a wine be jarring to the senses, a criterion that we do not apply to other arts like music or painting in which delicacy is valued, where shading, nuance, even silence or empty space can be considered remarkable. But keep an eye on the wine critics’ ratings. If a wine is black, packs an alcoholic, tannic wallop, and smells like a lumberyard, it receives high points.”

Amen, Kermit. You set the stage for others to follow. Your book is filled with revelations like this and like many of the wines you sell, your tome ages beautifully… and is still showing quite young!

One of the encyclopedic books that I have often gone back to, time and again, is out-of-print but available used from third-party sellers on Amazon – The New Frank Schoonmaker Encyclopedia of Wine, last updated in 1988, the same year Kermit published his book.

Read the buyer’s comments about this out-of-print book on Amazon and you will see that wine lovers are still reading it, using it, learning from it. Sure, we have new terms, and new processes that did not exist in Schoonmaker’s day – spinning cones that modify alcohol… and cold stabilization – but the book has the goods on all the classic stuff you need to know about wine.

For sheer detail, authority of subject matter and infinite tasting notes, one of my most prized books is Wines of the Rhone Valley, written by Robert Parker Jr., who is billed in Business Week as “the world’s most influential wine critic.” Which he most certainly is.

My copy is very special to me; it was given to me by Parker himself after we met at Mustards Grill, discussing the pros and cons and age-ability of (then) contemporary vintages of Gigondas and Chateauneuf-du-Pape wines. A few weeks after our talk, Parker sent the book, inscribed, “To Jim White, a guy who really knows how to Rock and Rhone!” It was signed and then he added a PS: “Mustards Grill Rules!”

I have thumbed through my copy for years, always finding something new among the 685 pages. Today, Parker’s notes are available – and updated – on his website, erobertparker.com, but this column is about My Favorite Wine Books, and this one rates near the top for me as I am so passionate about the wines of the Rhone Valley.

Times change and so do people’s tastes. Zoom ahead 19 years from Kermit’s and Schoonmaker’s day to today – and we see a growing backlash to over-oaked wines; we see consumers experimenting with cheeses and wines they would never before have considered serving together; we see wineries that made their reputation fermenting in stainless steel reverse their M.O. by 180 degrees and pledge their (new) undying love for wood-fermented wines. What goes around comes around. What was trendy became untrendy… has become trendy once more.

Commentary about the contemporary taste of wine has been distilled through the palate of a bright, young San Francisco sommelier named Courtney Cochran in her just-published book, Hip Tastes, The Fresh Guide to Wine.

Courtney holds Hip Tasting sessions in San Francisco to introduce 20-somethings (actually, let’s hope they’re legal 21-somethings!) to the world of wine. Which is what her book also attempts to do. The book is a bit like Chic Lit; it is airy, fun to read and not overly pedantic, which for a subject as sensual as wine is probably the right path to follow.

The narrow paperback will fit into your back pocket, or cargo pants pocket, like a mickey of Jagermeister, and probably will keep you out of a lot more trouble. Courtney shares her passions, gives lightweight lessons in how to taste wine, buy wine, store the stuff and, what I like best, is a guide on how to pronounce the stuff.

For some reason, many Americans are linguistically challenged and it’s rare to find anyone who can say “pinot noir,” as a Frenchman might say it, rhyming “noir” with “armoire,” and rolling that last ‘r.’ Instead, Yanks come up with something that sounds like “pee-no-nwah.”

I like the fact that Courtney advises readers to pronounce “Gigondas” (wonderful wines from a village of the same name in the southern Rhone) as “jhee-gohn-doss,” which is how the locals there say it. Somewhere, in cold northern American climes, someone once started pronouncing it “jig-an-dah,” dropping the final ‘s,’ which no respecting Frenchman would do.

If you want to find out more about Courtney’s book, go to Amazon. If you want to find out more about her Hip Tastes sessions in “the City,” (as locals in Napa Valley refer to San Francisco), then drop her a line: [email protected].

Summary of Books

Adventures on the Wine Route, Kermit Lynch, published in paperback by North Point Press. $11.56 on Amazon.

The New Frank Schoonmaker Encyclopedia of Wine (Hardcover)
by Alex Bespaloff, from third-party sellers on Amazon, from $12.82

Wines of the Rhone Valley, by Robert Parker Jr., expanded and revised in 1997 from an earlier edition, published by Simon & Schuster in hardback, $18.75 from third-party sellers on Amazon.

Hip Tastes: The Fresh Guide to Wine, by Courtney Cochran, in paperback from Viking Studio, $12.89 on Amazon.