Bill Klapp

The new Saveur recounts the coming of Alice Waters to the Castello di Verduno...

A no-brainer: 1974 Heitz Martha's. Only had it once, and I think it cost me $350 for that bottle. I can count on one hand the $100+ bottles of wine I have had that I really thought, deep-down, were worth it. This would be the only American wine on my "worth-it" list.

Thanks, Evan. But just as I feared-milk-fed, restricted-movement veal is considered politically incorrect by many, and thus shunned. It is also flavorless, and among the worst on earth in my opinion. and yet, you no doubt correctly observe that no change is likely, because that is the style of veal Americans have been conditioned to believe is best. We probably don't deserve Lobel's, Evan-Cryovac beef is probably plenty good for us!

And let us not forget the dreadfully low quality of most American veal amidst all this talk of beef. It took me a while to realize that, for all of its tenderness, the high-end white veal in this country has no discernible taste. In the late 1990s, I ate carne cruda, essentially a veal tartare of a sort from the Piemonte area of Italy, and was transported. I also learned that white veal does not exist in Italy. Evan, what is the future of veal in these United States?

Be still, my heart! However, I just checked the weather forcast, and it looks like there could be a week of gully-washing, beginning the afternoon of September 22. A race against the clock?

In a word, "disaster". And if you expect disaster, Alsatian pinot noir rarely fails to meet expectations!

Not only the light acidity, but not really much flavor, period. Gundlach-Bundschu and Martinelli are two wineries that have been experimenting with it.

Benvenuto, Il Signor Nebbiolo Pazza! If you persist in this, it is better to do as I do: do not view carne cruda as meat. Refer to it as "insalata". Brasato (braised beef) is meat. Veal and rabbit do not count.

Loris, in answer to your question, in the U.S., we like to regulate the NAMES of wines and to make sure that every bottle says useful things like "contains sulfites" and "may be harmful to pregnant women". We have no interest whatsoever in the quality or composition of what goes into the bottle!

Until 27 October.

I am not sure when the opening was (or will be), just that Slow Food is throwing a dinner there for the people attending the cheese thing in Bra this month. I am heading over in early October, and will make a point of eating there.

At the risk of being hissed off of my own board, I have to say that Signora Giacosa cooks for us too often, and for no charge! (We reciprocate as best we can, but our best pales by comparison to her worst day in the kitchen.) She also supplies us with her justly famous apricot preserves, as well as fresh eggs and plenty of other fruits and vegetables from the estate. Actually, she cooks almost every day for her family. I am not sure that she is doing dinners for guests much anymore, but it would be worth begging. One thing about the old wines there, though: they don't drink them! Instead, they, like our other Piemontese friends who make wine, drink their own, which is lighter and more food-friendly than the store-bought stuff (yes, that is actually possible!). La Meridiana produces Dolcetto, Barbera and Nebbiolo, alone and blended. Early on in our relationship, I used to give them really great bottles as gifts, only to discover them sitting on a shelf in the dining room years later. You need to go back, Russ!

Craig, go out in the rain and sniff around a little. See if you can detect even the faintest hint of tartufi bianchi! We never did settle on the other thread whether or not the rain is coming too late to save the truffles. I could settle for a taste or two of too-small, too-expensive and below-average, but the idea of being shut out altogether is repugnant to me!

Carema, I read the Behr article, but came away unconvinced. I drink both styles, and probably in equal quantities, so I tend to believe that this is a war without casualties and without a loser (at least, yet!). As I recall, Behr concluded that the modern wines give greater pleasure early on, but become somewhat muddled and nondescript over time, while traditional wines, despite greater oxidation at birth, deliver greater complexity and even purer, more intense flavors and aromas later on. I am not sure that the modern-style wines have been around long enough to give this a fair test, and until the best 1989s or 1990s in the modern style are fully mature (not just drinkable, mind you, but fully mature), I do not believe that one can draw meaningful conclusions. In addition, I have had some old Giacosas that are delicious, but also muddled, in that they do not deliver a range of distinct flavors and aromas, but rather, only a very pleasant, albeit delicious, tannin-free Nebbiolo wine. (I am a huge Giacosa fan, so I do not find that to be true of his best wines from the best vintages, which give you all that you could ask for.) I make the point only to say that I do not buy the "muddled modern" theory in Behr's article. I have done my own testing, using the 1985 Sandrone Cannubi as the modernist baseline, against 1985 Giacosas and Conternos. I find that most American friends overwhelmingly favor the Sandrone, which is invariably more approachable, while I favor the traditional wines from that vintage, which are tighter but still wonderful. I will say that the 1985 Sandrone has a lot of life left ahead of it, so I am skeptical of the oft-heard generalization that modern-style wines are not ageworthy. (There are some, however, that might support that argument, such as Manzone's wines, which often fade within a decade.) For me, the real question will not be longevity, but rather, what complexity, nuance and sense of place each style delivers when fully mature.

Vittoria and Gener Neuv are my top two choices to the north. I do not find that the trattoria/osteria-level places are as good around Asti. Re: truffles, unless it rained a lot in Croatia, it looks like we are in for a tough year.

Russ: One post at the gate says Villa La Meridiana, the other Cascina Reine! The Giacosas call it La Meridiana, but the e-mail address is "cascinareine". I suspect that part of the problem is that the owners' personal dwelling is in fact a true villa, while the guest quarters are part of a very large cascina (farmhouse) attached to it. And you're right, Matt Kramer has often stayed there. They made it into Michelin last year (the only Alba B&B so honored), so they must be doing something right. The prices do not hurt, to be sure.

My pizza oven, but being manned by a friend (a French baker), rather than me, on this occasion. You can see the wood beneath the oven, where my ashes will reside some day! That's the town of Neive in the left background (some may recall it from the cover of Matt Kramer's Passion for Piedmont cookbook).

Strong work, Craig. I disagree only in one particular: I often drink old Barolo for breakfast! You were right to highlight the continuum nature of this "debate". For me, Giacosa has become something of a stealth modernist (selling what used to be his riservas a year earlier now, secretively updating his maceration and other cellar techniques), while Gaja, considered by some to be one of the founding fathers of the modernist school, is a closet traditionalist. Other than his Costa Russi, none of his wines give the early pleasure characteristic of the modernist wines. Indeed, his San Lorenzo and Sori Tildin (excepting maybe the extremely fruit-forward 1997 vintage) are huge wines that evolve at a glacial pace, slower than Giacosa's Barbarescos and slower than most Barolos. I have all the major vintages of both from 1967 on, and in my opinion, only the 1967 and 1971 San Lorenzo and the 1970 and 1971 Tildin are fully mature. The 1978s are still babies, and while the later wines are theoretical beneficiaries of the "modern" techniques, I'm not drinking mine anytime soon. A good test of the degrees of "modernism" would be to pop a 1996 Sperss and a 1996 Sandrone Cannubi at the same time.

I'll fess up. I recommended Latini. However, it is not a place for reservations and expectations of normal restaurant protocol, and if I suggested otherwise, I apologize. Instead, the fun of Latini is lining up when the doors open and piling in with everybody else. It is too much food, some great, some indifferent (passing on the pasta is always a good strategy, as I believe that Tuscan pasta dishes in general are heavy-handed when compared with the rest of Italy), but the communal tables and the zany antics of the staff and management is usually the best part.

Joe, I take it that you saw the Alba Restaurants thread a bit further down...

Easy! La Meridiana, which is an estate perched on a hill above Alba. The owners, the Giacosa family, are close friends who helped us find our home there. E-mail: cascinareine@libero.it. Phone/fax: 011-39-0173-440112. They do book up in the fall, however, so I would jump on it. If you book at La Meridiana, feel free to mention me. Another thread also mentions the best B&B in Monforte d' Alba (name escapes me), which I have seen but not stayed in. It is very nice, but I believe more expensive. Also, Monforte is considerably less central than Alba (but drop-dead beautiful, to be sure). I think I updated local restaurants on that thread as well. Lastly, there are a number of B&Bs in the Neive area-one called Sura, a couple in the town of Neive and also La Contea, a well-known ristorante which also has rooms. Avoid the hotels in Alba at all costs.

I remain in the "splash decant" and "swirl" camps when warranted, but I agree that "shake" goes too far in all cases (except, of course, Bond's "shaken, not stirred" martini). Peynaud's advice is over-generalized foolishness. I assume that he never consumed a young Northern Rhone or Cabernet-based wine.

The cities are admittedly tough, but in some cases (not Roma, to be sure), no nastier than many American cities. I LOVE driving in the countryside, and particularly on the Autostrada. On secondary roads, you will notice that the Italians do have a tendency to pass (a tendency you will soon develop if you get caught behind a tractor or a slow-moving truck one time too often), sometimes under what you will view as less than safe conditions. Do not worry-all Italian drivers EXPECT to see a car coming at them head-on, and I find they are very good at giving sufficient ground to avoid accidents. On the Autostrada, you must stay in the right lane except to pass. That, of course, is the law in the U.S., never observed. For some reason, most Americans think that their most important freedom is the freedom to get in the left lane on an Interstate highway and travel at 40 miles an hour, while eating a Big Mac, swigging a beer or gabbing on a cellphone. On the Autostrada, the left lane is reserved for cars (usually Mercedes, BMWs or other high-end motor-driven phallic symbols) travelling in excess of 100 miles an hour who do NOT expect to find anything in their way. Most high-speed drivers drive with their lights on, and flash them repeatedly as they approach you. Do not fail to heed the warning! Also, you will find that you begin to look fore, aft and side to side in sequence when driving on the Autostrada, which is, after all, how you should have been taught to drive in the first place. Driving is a 360-degree experience in Italy, and the highways are the better for it. Since there is little hard alcohol consumed and beer is used to wash down food rather than consumed by the keg, drunk driving is far less of a problem. I see far fewer accidents in Italy than in the U.S., although, admittedly, when they do occur on the Autostrada, they can be doozies.

I am probably with Bux on this one, in that I regularly drink and enjoy wines from both countries. I do not think that we have yet seen the best wines that Spain will produce. I suppose that I believe that there are very few, if any, Spanish wines prepared to go toe to toe with the best that Bordeaux, Burgundy, Barolo and Barbaresco have to offer, notwithstanding the likes of Vega Sicilia, Pingus, L'Ermita and a few others. At the high end of the market, there is the risk that we will see more "internationally styled" wines using indigenous grapes. Not necessarily a bad thing from a marketing perspective, but destined to produce wines for the same bin as the California cult Cabs, Australia's top-end Shirazes and most Supertuscans: delicious, but too expensive for what they are, and not certain to age well. However, one cannot and should not overlook the rather dramatic developments in Spain in the past decade. I am far more impressed with the lower-priced garnacha-based wines which often give Chateauneuf-du-Pape a run for its money. Spain has emerged as a quality/price ratio leader in recent years, and I think it has done an admirable marketing job. Italy has just as many excellent quality everyday wines, to be sure, but I do not believe that the best are marketed all that well outside of Italy, as the focus seems always to be on Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello, the Supertuscans and the cult wines of Umbria. By the same token, like those in Spain, Italian winemakers are aggressively adopting new techniques, which will continue to pay dividends in the future. Both countries are on similar tracks as far as "waking up" goes, and to my mind, both well ahead of the French in that regard. For me, France makes both the best and the worst wines on earth, and I do not have the same degree of confidence that that the coming generations of French standardbearers will get the job done right.

Not sure when Easter falls next year, but it is a truly magical time ANYWHERE in Italia. Lots of foods not seen any other time of year. Despite the fact that it can be cool in the north then, many Italian and other European tourists travel within and to Italy for Easter. Worth checking out. Let me add Torino (Turin) and Genova to the places that you might want to consider. Santa Margherita/Portofino on the Ligurian coast are really romantic, and not overrun by tourists then. They are also within close driving distance of the Piemonte, where you could sample the best food and wine in Italia! Finally, think about Lake Orta for a night or two. About 40 minutes northwest of Milano, many people think that it is Italy's most beautiful lake. There is a wonderful hotel, Villa Crespi, and one of my favorite restaurants, Al Sorriso, is nearby.