While we’re talking stylish wine ladies, here’s another! Talia Baiocchi is one of my favorite wine writers out there right now. She’s young, she’s funny, she’s way smarter than me, has great taste and a super fresh perspective on all this wine stuff. She is currently the wine columnist at Eater.com and contributes to a whole bunch of other online and print publications like The San Francisco Chronicle, Bon Appetit and Serious Eats.

So, let’s do this here thing!

Name: Talia Baiocchi  Hometown: Laguna Beach, CA  Current location: Brooklyn, NY

Favorite Winter beverage: Sherry. Still have some La Bota #15 Fino that I dig into every now and again. Also loving Lustau’s Manuel Cuevas Jurado Manzanilla Pasada and Colosia’s Sangre y Trabajadero Dry Oloroso for everyday.

Favorite cocktail or spirit:  Rye Manhattan

Favorite place to grab a drink:  For wine: Terroir, Anfora, Balthazar. Cocktails: Maison Premiere, Keens (for the classics), Death & Co.

Favorite toast: I prefer to defer to someone else, because I am pretty sure I’ve never given a toast that wasn’t incredibly awkward for all involved. In other words, I suck at toasts.

Favorite post-dinner quaff: Amaro. Always. Nonino and Varnelli Sibilla are favorites.

Favorite food & beverage pairing:  Champagne + cured pork items.

If you could travel to one region of the world right now for its food and/or drink where would you go? I’d probably go back to Sicily. I was just there in September for the first time and the trip wasn’t long enough. The cuisine is uniquely its own thing and the wines have never been better. Also: pretty beaches.

What’s for sipper? I am writing a story about Sicilian white wine at the moment so I am deep into Carricante and Grillo as of late. So, tonight I’ve got the Grillo Integer from Marco de Bartoli on deck.

And here’s Talia with Kyle MacLachlan drinking his wine. You know, cause that’s the kind of stuff you get to do when you’re Talia.

Anyone else see too many productions of Fiddler on the Roof as a child? No? OK- maybe it’s just me, but whenever I start thinking about how fast time flies, the chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset” creeps into my brain…Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset. Swiftly flow the days.

News alert! There’s been a whole buncha sunrises and sets and it’s about to be 2012! Can you even believe it?

I thought I would summon my inner Tevye and reminisce. Here are just a few of my favorite moments/posts from this year:

Ladies Who Brunch // Americano // Wine Wear Daily IV // Octopus BBQ

Birthday Lanterns // 4th of July in Brooklyn // Ojai Campfire & Whiskey Cocktails // Laureano

Pretty great times were had in ’11. Dang. Next year has a lot to live up to! Let’s make it truly SPECTACULAR, shall we?

Happy New Year errrrbody!

So, I got to attend TWO kick ass Holiday staff parties this year! Hollerrrr.

Max was kind enough to take all of us Terroni sommeliers out to dinner at Mezze. We ate some delicious Middle Eastern inspired food, had a blind tasting of wines from our all-Italian cellar and then exchanged gifts; pretty much everything that constitutes a perfect evening in my book. If you threw in a chocolate fountain and someone giving 90 minute massages my brain would have exploded, but that didn’t happen. Let’s not get carried away.

Each of us got to choose ANY bottle from the Terroni cellar. THREE people ended up bringing Etna Rosso. We sure do love us some Sicily. But, we started off with some bianco from Campania and Piemonte.

We tasted each wine one by one. Made our (usually) completely wrong (and sometimes spot on) guesses and then unveiled the bottle beneath its tin foil cocoon with gusto.

If I could only ever eat one salad for the rest of my life, it would be fattoush. It’s the salad of my people!

Warm, homemade pita glistening with honey and butter. Aaaaand SCENE.

Max brought an extra treat- a bottle of 2002 J. Lasalle Special Club Champagne. ‘Cause he’s THE BEST.

A little Slovenian/Italian Pinot Noir by way of Simcic, shall we? Yes we shall. PS- this wine was damn good with the above pâté.

Francesca unveils the Biondi M.I. she brought.

Max reveals his wine, another Etna, Salvo Foti‘s I Vigneri “Vinupetra”. Embarrassing fact- A lot of us kept thinking these Etna wines were possibly Piemonte nebbiolo. Seriously. We suck.

I thought the color of the Biondi M.I. definitely did not look like a nebbiolo (not rusty enough) and the others didn’t really either, but the lighting in the restaurant was a bit golden and dim as you can tell from the photos. Add in the fact that we were all consuming a lot of WINE and our hypothoses for the identities of the wine started to not be so awesome. Oh well.

But, we sure were having fun. I made a moving GIF of Dave revealing his Tenuta delle Terre Nere. It seemed like the right thing to do.

 

Lamb shoulder over smoked oatmeal. Very interesting combination, but delicious.

Heavenly brussel sprouts. How come I only like brussel sprouts when other people make them?

The wine I brought! 2001 Quintarelli Valpolicella. This one was unmistakable. As soon as we started drinking it, everyone started saying “Veneto”, “corvina”, “passito maybe?”, “high alcohol”. Ding ding ding!

Guiseppe actually reached into his own cellar for our oldest bottle of the night- 2000 Marchesi di Gresy Gaiun Martinega Barbaresco. A small parcel within a single vineyard- our boy Dave guessed that right. Freaky genius wine geek psychic!

We ended the evening with this delightfully warm little sweet bite- kind of like the love child of a churro and a doughnut hole. Dang! So. Good.

What a wonderful night! It’s safe to say I learned quite a bit. And left feeling even more proud to call all of these people my colleagues. Grazie to you Max and Francesca for such a delicious experience, in every sense of the word.

Happy holidays to you all! I hope everyone gets to sit around a table with the ones (and the wines) they love.

Hey. Psssssst. Hey you! Can I be nosy for a second and all up in your business? Pretty please? Yes, you say? Thanks!!

And such is the way I get all these nice people to let us read about what they like to drink and eat. And where they like to do those things in case we want to secretly stalk them. The newest super nice and talented person that let me dig into his brain? The General Manager of the always incredible Osteria Mozza. If you don’t know what Mozza is, I beg you to get out from under the miserable, not delicious rock you’ve been hiding for the past 4 years.

Name: David Rosoff. Hometown: Los Angeles. Current location: Los Angeles

Making their official West Coast debut….drum roll please….the wines of Frank Cornelissen!!! I’ve been waiting a while to get my hands on these and thanks to Amy Atwood us Cali peeps can finally enjoy these Mt. Etna anfora goodies.

Please excuse the cellphone photos, they suck.

When everybody on the block heard that Amy would be by the shop with open bottles of Cornelissen, they hightailed it over to taste. Jesse from Salt’s Cure, Willy from Tasting Table, Jonathan from Hatfield’s and even Anthony Wilson all came ’round.

Cornelissen is a die hard naturalist- NO treatments in the vineyard (organic, biodynamic or other), no sulfur additions in the cellar and only native yeast fermentation, of course. He also has quite the collection of 400 liter terracotta anforas and ferments and ages almost all of his wines in them. If you’re thinking, wait a second- Frank Cornelissen doesn’t sound Italian! You are super freaking smart. He’s Belgian. And was drawn to the incredible volcanic soils of Sicily’s Mt. Etna back in 2001 by way of Burgundy, where he was at one time a wine broker.

So, we tasted the 2010 “Munjebel 7″ (the 7th time he’s made this wine) a blend of carricante, coda di volpe and grecanico that spend 4 months on their skins. I really dug this stuff (pictured above). It has a kind of celery and preserved lemon vibe going on and the texture is such a mouthful of glorious chew, but still has a vibrant freshness. Love. Other fav? The “Munjabel 7″ Rosso (blend of 2009 and 2010 vintages). It’s 100% nerello mascalese and damn sexy. I dubbed this “vampire wine.” As in, if I was a vampire, this is the stuff I would drink when not drinking blood and trying to be civilized. Strawberry seeds, pomegranate, ash, iron, violet flowers and sturdy tannins. Again, Love.

These ain’t super cheap, but definitely worth the dollar bills.

If you missed my Let’s Do class at Domaine LA last week, it was all about Italian wine and pizza pies. We talked regions, grapes and general food and wine pairing tips.

Here are the wines I poured alongside some delicious Mozza pizza. I called them my Ultimate Pizza Wines. But really, only being able to choose 5? SO hard.

I knew I wanted a Lambrusco (or a Gragnano). For SURE. I also wanted a barbera and a sangiovese based wine. Nebbiolo? Definitely. Then I would need a somewhat oddball- so, I picked one of my fav Emilia-Romagna orange wines. It’s a style of white that can handle bolder flavors.

If I could have gone on, the list would’ve also included an aglianico, nero d’avola, montepulciano and some aromatic lighter reds like frappato or rossese.

My main criteria for pairing wine with pizza: good acidity and some semblance of structure and tannin. Anything nice and cold is also pretty dope. Red bubbly? Perfect. It’s like the wine version of beer or Coca Cola (which is apparently what Italians really like to drink with their pizza.) Main things I avoid and that sound super icky: jammy, oaky or incredibly full bodied flabby wines. Actually, I usually avoid those qualities in wine regardless of whether or not there is a pizza in front of me. Point is- there are more things in the world of Italian wines that work with pizza than don’t. So it ain’t rocket science.

Thought: Could one become solely a pizza sommelier? That would be an off the charts amazing as hell job.

Question: If you could attend any wine class or tasting what would you want the topic to be? I would love to know. And if you live in LA, maybe I can make it happen!

I’m teaching another class with Let’s Do! This time it’s all Italian wines and pizza pies.

The hips and the haps: Thursday, Nov. 17th. 7:00 – 8:30 pm at Domaine LA. $35 gets you your own pizza, tastes of 5 Italian wines and a bunch of edumacation.

If you missed the first class, it was a ROARING success. OK- fine. It was but a tiny drop of wine in the wine puddle of life, but at least Joelle had fun! PS- cute necklace twins!

So. Mozza pizza and Italian wine. Who’s coming?? Buy tix here.

Episode 13. Let’s do this!

We’re chatting about weed wine, Gewurtztraminer that doesn’t suck, Lambrusco/how Pavarotti drank his, donkey meat, how to clean our wine stained teeth and why I was screaming at the top of my lungs in Griffith park the other night.

We also announce our Never Drink Alone wine that we’ll (hopefully) all drink together during next week’s podcast. It is…

2010 Lapierre “Raisins Gaulois” Gamay. Get some and drink along with me and Christina. I’ll be drinking it at 9AM when we record. Like a champ.

In Los Angeles available at Domaine LA and Lincoln Fine Wines.

So, remember back like a year and a half ago when I was down in San Diego at Jayne’s Gastropub? Yeah- probably not. Well, I was there. And I got to witness my first Movia Puro disgorgement. It was exciting! Read that post to get a little background info on the wine if you aren’t already aware.

Yesterday, I attended a tasting here in Los Angeles and the winemaker for Movia, Ales Kristancic, was there. In the flesh! Guess what he did? He showed us fools how to open the Puro all legit like. I know there are several videos floating around the interwebs of Ales and others opening bottles of Puro, but one more can’t hurt. Lesson learned: I need to get me one of those handy shoehorn looking contraptions Ales had made for this particular task.

Tip: Keep the bottle of Puro upside down (perhaps in an ice bucket) for several minutes before opening to help aid in getting most of the sediment down to the neck.

Fun fact (or fiction?): I heard from John Yelenosky that Ales told Jeremy Parzen he cooks his pasta in the leftover water from the disgorging. Yum? I actually think it could be!

Best quotes of the day from Ales: “Who is winemaker? The moon. She is.” Also- “God gave us gift of water. But we must share it with plants, animals…Wine? That is just for us!”

I first met Jon last year at the Barbera Meeting in Asti, Italy. My first thought: that is one handsome, seriously stylish dude. Second thought: Is he married? Kidding. Sort of. The answer to that question is YES. To a woman, whom is every bit as (or more) beautiful/stylish/talented, named Jayne Battle. And together they own Jayne’s Gastropub in San Diego. The food is ridiculous, the design is spot on and I can think of no other place I’d wanna hang while in San Diego.

Let’s get to know Jon, shall we?

Name: Jon Erickson Hometown: Westport, CT  Location: San Diego, CA

Favorite seasonal beverage: The Pimm’s Cup works all summer long, especially here in San Diego where it never ends.

Favorite cocktail or spirit: The Corpse Reviver #2 is an incredible cocktail.  Equal parts gin, Lillet, fresh lemon and Cointreau with an absinthe rinse, shaken with ice into a chilled glass with a single Luxardo maraschino cherry.

Favorite place to grab a drink: The Turf Club in the Golden hills neighborhood is a great place to drink.  You grill your own $7 steaks and get stiff drinks in a dark, un-renovated 1950′s bar.  There are better cocktails to be found in SD, but the faux prohibition suspenders and $14 drinks grow tiresome.

Favorite toast: Jayne’s favorite toast is one from her hometown of Liverpool: “Get it down yer neck.” {ed. note: I LOVE this. I’m stealing it.}

Favorite post-dinner quaff: Something sparkling, preferably Bollinger Brut Rosé Champagne

Favorite food & beverage pairing: Pizza pairs well with traditionally made high acid, tannic Nebbiolo.  Try the entry level Langhe Nebbiolo from Produttori del Barbaresco.

If you could travel to one region of the world right now for its food and/or drink where would you go? I would head straight to Cal Pep restaurant in Barcelona for some Pan Con Tomate and their cast iron skillet, made to order Tortilla Espanola washed down with a glass of Spanish beer with lemon.

What’s for sipper? I will be drinking a glass of Kabaj Rebula from Slovenia.

That’s a photo I took last year of Jon’s car. Yeah…

And if you want to see a photo of Jon disgorging a bottle of Movia Puro, check out this Do Bianchi post and also mine (with appearance by Anthony Wilson!) The man knows his way around some Puro.