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Drinking Italian wine anywhere — even in Italy — can be fraught with complications. Is that wine from the area in Piedmont known as the Langhe? Better not say so on the label, unless you have express permission to do so, or risk a fine. Labelling was one of the few topics I didn’t cover in an extensive conversation with Marco Lori, a sommelier who kindly agreed to be grilled. I’m somewhat in awe of people who seem really to know their wines, and so I took the opportunity to ask Marco to try and lift the veil. That he did, with great good humour. There is so much I don’t understand. Like, what exactly do wine people mean when they talk about the smell of green peppers in a wine? Try as I might, I just don’t get that. And the resurgence of natural wines. And I had no idea that careful winemakers go through the harvest bunch by bunch, selecting this one for their top-notch wine, that one for a slightly lesser version. So much to learn. So little time.
Notes
- Jeremy Parzen touched on the latest labelling madness on his website. Absolutely sweet winemakers, quoting Bob Dylan: “to live outside the law, you must be honest”.
- Marco Lori’s website is Off the Vine. Say I sent you; it might do us both some good.
- This is that wine I mentioned. I haven’t managed to find it for sale locally. Yet.
- Intro music by Cerys Matthews. I hope she doesn’t mind. I mean, I don’t mind her website playing music to me unbidden.
Allotments seem to be a peculiarly British phenomenon. Small parcels of land, divided into smaller still plots, furnished often with a shed and make-shift cold frames, greenhouses and what have you, where, in time-honoured tradition, old men in baggy corduroys and cardigans go to smoke a pipe and gaze out on serried ranks of cabbages, leeks and potatoes. But they are also places where young families are growing their own food, where immigrants are introducing new kinds of fruit and veg, and where people can find a respite from the city.
is available from Amazon and elsewhere. She also has a 
is the book Jane Perrone credited with introducing people to new things to grow on their allotments.
A couple of weeks ago I was at the 2nd annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, and a very interesting meeting it was too. The topic was Food, Hunger and Conflict, a reminder that food and control of the food supply can be both a weapon in human conflicts and a natural source of conflict. Talks ranged widely, from the politics of starvation under the Nazis to hunger in colonial Indonesia to the part food riots in the past played in winning food security. Some of it was – and I’m avoiding obvious wordplay – very hard to listen to. All of it was enlightening.
One of the things I find most frustrating in agricultural research is that, despite the subject matter, it often bears little relationship to the fundamental facts of life. Too often, we hear all sorts of extravagant claims being made that a bit of more analytical thought would show were somewhat less than likely to work out. No names, no pack drill; let’s just say that natural selection has had an awful long time to try things out, and if something hasn’t arisen (yet) there may well be a good reason why it isn’t that great an idea. There are some people, however, bucking that trend, and Ford Denison is one of them. His book, 
came out in 2012, and I devoured it.