Customer Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful book about Italian food, wine and life
Comment: Sergio Esposito, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich started Italian Wine Merchants in 1999, a retail
shop that sells fine Italian wines. There are many interesting wines on offer, the staff is
knowledgeable and helpful, and the weekly and monthly emails provide a wonderful education on
Italian wines and wine in general.
The emails are written by Esposito, and this
wonderful book is a perfect example of Esposito's warm and educational style of writing. He starts
his memoir with a description of an idyllic childhood in the slums of Naples: he remembers that
"women lowered baskets from their balconies to buy the fish straight from the sea and grapes
straight from the vine."
When he was a child, his family moved from Naples to Albany,
New York. Esposito writes movingly about the transition: The pasta they ate in Italy had been laid
in the middle of the street, "so that the unique combination of Mediterranean and mountain winds
would dry it in just the right way, to produce the perfect texture when it was boiled." His first
pasta in Albany was "mushy ...like glue in my throat."
Esposito describes his travels
as a student and as a wine merchant with great enthusiasm. Wine geeks will love passages like these,
this one about Friulian winemaker Josko Gravner:
"Gravner is a proponent in the use of
open-top wood vats, extended maceration on the grape skins, no added yeasts, no sulphur dioxide, and
no temperature control--purely natural winemaking. This is Josko's current position, and he employs
both amphorae and large oak barrels to make his three wines; Collio Breg, Ribolla Gialla, and Rosso
Gravner. The grapes for these wines come from his 18 hectares of vineyards in Gorizia (Oslavia) that
straddle the Italian-Slovenian border. It is here that he exercises his current approach to wine: 'I
am convinced that wine is a product of Nature, not of Man, whose role therefore is to accompany its
maturation process while avoiding any artificial intervention.'"
Any reader with the
least interest in Italy will love his descriptions of the food and vintages he consumes on his
adventures. For example, in one Roman restaurant, a white wine "smelled of apricots, white flowers,
dried honey, nuts ... [I] got the sensation that I was being seduced in a Pompeii brothel before the
volcano erupted."
Bill Buford is glowing in his praise: "Without qualification, the
best book about Italian wine today, if only because Sergio Esposito understands that its mysterious
greatness is in its poetry--the earth, its diurnal magic, the ghosts of great-grandfathers. A
beautiful, boldly sentimental memoir."
As a long time reader of Esposito's prose, I
couldn't agree more. Wine, of course, food, family, travel, more -- an absolute delight.
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Robert C. Ross 2008
Customer Rating: Summary: Pop the cork and read this book
Comment: If you have any interest in wine, food, travel, culture, history, family, and people as I do, then I
recommend you read this book - I enjoyed all of it. Basically, it's a memoir of the author's move
from Italy to the U.S. as a boy, and how his interest and love of wine and food inspired him to
learn more about wine, open an Italian wine store in New York, and through his travels, continue his
wine education.
He describes his travels throughout Italy in quest of the finest
wines produced in that country (and the world) and understanding what motivates and inspires the
people who make them. Along the way the reader gets taken for the ride through the beautiful wine
making regions of Italy, and introduced to some of the iconic figures (some a bit eccentric) of
Italian wine making. The author describes in detail his meetings, conversations, and tastings with
these producers, and we get an inside perspective of how some of these icons have passionately and
steadfastly respected history, terroir, and nature in crafting memorable wines they believe in.
You'll visit their wineries, meet their families and partake in meals the author shared with the
wine makers. Together they discuss the importance of food and wine pairing, and how, when done
well, enhance each other and represent one of the essential aspects of an enjoyable and elevated
quality of life.
I imagined myself as a secret participant of the winery cantina
visits and mealtime conversations he describes in the book. As a person who appreciates good wine
and food, they were absolutely riveting for me as it enabled me to learn more by getting a peek
inside the minds of these great wine makers.
When you open this book and begin to read,
it is much like a bottle of fine wine that develops and evolves over time. It has varying layers of
characteristics that enhance your enjoyment, promote thinking, and will stay with you even past the
last drop, or the last page.
