Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy
As a young child in Naples, Italy, Sergio Esposito sat at his kitchen table observing the daily ritual of his large, loud family bonding over fresh local dishes and simple country wines. While devouring the rich bufala mozzarella, still sopping with milk and salt, and the platters of fresh prosciutto, sliced so thin he could see through it, he absorbed the profound relationship of food, wine, and family in Italian culture.
Growing up in Albany, New York, after emigrating there with his family, he always sat next to his uncle Aldo and sipped from his wineglass during their customary hours-long extended family feasts. Thus, from a very early age, Esposito came to associate wine with the warmth of family, the tastes of his mother’s cooking—and, above all, memories of his former life in Italy. When he was in his twenties, he headed for New York and undertook a career in wine, beginning a journey that would culminate in his founding of Italian Wine Merchants, now the leading Italian wine source in America. His career offered him the opportunity to make frequent trips back to Italy to find wine for his clients, to learn the traditions of Italian winemaking, and, in so doing, to rediscover the Italian way of life he’d left behind.
Passion on the Vine is Esposito’s intimate and evocative memoir of his colorful family life in Italy, his abrupt transition to life in America, and of his travels into the heart of Italy—its wine country—and the lives of those who inhabit it. The result is a remarkably engaging and entertaining wine/travel narrative replete with vivid portraits of seductive places—the world-famous cellars of Piedmont, the sweeping estates of Tuscany, the lush fields of Campania, the chilly hills of Friuli, the windy beaches of Le Marche; and of memorable people, diverse and vibrant wine artisans—from a disco-dancing vintner who bases his farming on the rhythm of the moon to an obsessive prince who destroys his vineyards before his death so that his grapes will never be used incorrectly.
Esposito’s luscious accounts of the wonderful food and wine that are so much a part of Italian life, and his poignant and often hilarious stories of his relationships with his family and Italian friends, make Passion on the Vine an utterly unique and enchanting work about Italy and its eternally seductive lifestyle.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
At a young age, Esposito and his family move from Naples, Italy, to Albany, N.Y., where he first falls in love with wine in the basement dining room of his uncle's house. Even as he reflects on the poor quality of those first sips, he understands he was consuming the sense of family and the spirit of his crazy yet adored uncle. After opening a store in Albany, he moves to Manhattan to work as a sommelier in the early 1990s. There he partakes of haute cuisine and affluent wine collections, while learning the hierarchy of international wines. While French wines are considered the pinnacle of the industry and Californian wines are gaining interest, there are very few Italian wines of note. With a fiery passion, he determines to bring appreciation of the wines of his homeland to America and opens Italian Merchant Wines, where he continues today to import highly selected Italian wines. His writing is exuberant, and his wine descriptions evocative. A bottle of Ribolla reminds him of staring at a cracked painting of a beautiful woman from long ago. For lovers of wine, this is a full-bodied read about one man's passion and the many delectable moments along his journeys. (Apr.)
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Review
“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.”
—Bill Buford
“Passion on the Vine is a spellbinding memoir; a vivid, funny, and, yes, passionate tale of family, food, and wine. The tour de force chapter on his childhood in Naples will make your wish you were Italian. Sergio Esposito is not only a great epicurean—he’s also a great storyteller. If he ever gets tired of selling wine he’s got a bright future as a writer.”
—Jay McInerney
“Esposito’s glass is always half-full, when not filled to the brim, and always with something beautifully red and swirling and passionate, as are his words in this wine-adventure, story-memoir. His words are like the vines he so ardently writes about—earthy, deep-rooted; and the wines—perfect on the tongue, with a long finish.”
—Frances Mayes
“Do not read this book on an empty stomach….A charming tribute to food, drink, and homeland.”
—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
SERGIO ESPOSITO is the owner of Italian Wine Merchants in New York City. He speaks at and hosts wine dinners throughout the country, has a much-visited Web site, and writes a popular e-mail newsletter about his discoveries and travels in Italy. He lives with his wife and two children in New York City.
Customer Reviews
Sorry, I found it lame....
I could not get through this book. After a while, it was just repetitive and frankly I missed the point.
The recollection of his childhood in Southern Italy as well as the trials of moving to Albany, was for me, the most engaging part. Once Sergio gets into traveling for wine in Italy, I found it pedantic and somewhat incredulous. As if Daniel Thomases was unaware that wine producers would open special bottles for him at Vinitaly. While Sergio at one point eschews all modern producers, the next moment, we visit with Scavino, one of the original modernists in Piedmont.
Sorry, this book did nothing for me...
A moving eloquent, and personal expression of Love
PASSION ON THE VINE is a deeply moving, eloquent and personal expression of his love for the essence of Italian wine and its inextricable, sensual and sacred relationship with the land, its people, its culture and of course it's food. As an accomplished cook, my most surprising discovery on my first trip to Italy (Tuscany) was not the quality of the food - I've had comparable quality in LA - but how the experience of food was imbued with wine and the company of friends at table. Nothing was "segmented", nothing was rushed or regarded as "food as fuel" as in the US. It that moment, my understanding of Italian food at a soul level incarnated. And that was my experience reading Sergio's book: this is a very challenging, profound and intimate concept to communicate and he did it masterfully.
Don't stop him, he's rolling...
Although I don't have even a single corpuscle of Italian blood in me, my wife is 100%. Her grandparents on both sides were immigrants who came to Newark from the town of Avellino, which is about 45 minutes east of Naples, and if known at all in America, it's probably as the alleged hometown of Tony Soprano. Naples, of course, is far more famous for crime, but it's also the ancestral home of Sergio Esposito, author of Passion on the Vine, and it provides the springboard for his worldview and life's work.
So I know a little about life in a Southern Italian family, at least through osmosis. It would also probably constitute full disclosure to add that I have an amateur's abiding interest in Italian wine, as evidenced by a number of Amazon reviews I've written on books that deal with this specific subject.
Throw in the fact that I've been to Esposito's Italian Wine Merchant store in Manhattan a number of times, and you'll probably understand why I had certain preconceptions about this book before I ever opened it. In hindsight, I probably would have been better served if I had read it blind (pardon the atrocious mixed metaphor), and like a blind wine tasting, known nothing about it before I tried it. I was kind of hoping for a book that celebrated the true and the beautiful in Italian wine, but also the accessible, in the sense that you shouldn't need to take out a home equity loan before you buy, as would be the case if you were chasing '05 first growth Bordeaux. You certainly can find good, authentic QPR (quality/price ratio) wines in Esposito's store. Unfortunately, you won't find them in the book, but I'll return to this theme later.
Passion on the Vine really isn't a traditional wine expert's memoir (here I lump together the works of intrepid importers like Kermit Lynch and writer/educators like Gerald Asher), because the story of Esposito's Neapolitan family is deeply woven into the narrative. It's a relatively engaging immigrants' tale, and the personalities of his parents, uncles and aunts especially come to life and remind me sharply of my wife's many relatives who still live in Avellino. But if your goal in reading this book is full immersion in the contemporary Italian wine scene, you may be disappointed by the family details that spill across the pages at the expense of more stories about wine. Or maybe you'll love them. You'll also probably find more details about the food he's eaten than the wines he's consumed, but that goes with the territorio.
Accordingly, I'm not going to recount the "portrait of the wine merchant as a young man" story since that's not of real interest to me. For me, the first half of the book seemed to drag on and occasionally frustrated me. There are a few strange things I noted, like how his transplanted family appears to have suddenly gone from near abject poverty in Albany to relative affluence in Scottsdale without explanation, and occasional incomprehensible statements, like when he describes one of his early mentors as a true "scientist," since no one can reproduce his experiments. I also can't for the life of me figure out why he would effectively call the initial investors in The Italian Wine Merchant a bunch of clueless Wall Street boobs who couldn't understand how a store could only sell Italian wines, but then gave him the money anyway. At times the book reminded me of the scene in Animal House when Bluto says "...was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" Otter whispers to Boon, "Germans?" And Boon replies, "Don't stop him, he's rolling."
Esposito seems to believe he alone invented the idea that a store dedicated to Italian wine could succeed in the US, although he didn't get around to opening the store until 1998. I recall shopping in a wonderful Italian food and wine store in Chicago in the early `80's called Convito Italiano, at a time when Esposito was still in knickers. The profiled producers (see next paragraph) were mostly all well established when Victor Hazan wrote his wonderful guide simply called Italian Wine, published in 1982.
When we finally get to Italy on business, the chapters are mostly arranged around visits to iconic, world-renowned properties (Bartolo Mascarello, Biondi Santi, Soldera, Josko Gravner), each singled out I presume for their respect for the land and what I might term modern traditionalism, where the best of the past is effectively preserved and enhanced by application of non-interventionist technical advances. Like I said before, these are fiendishly expensive wines that all sell for $100 a bottle or more, so don't come looking for bargains here. But Esposito has a real gift for letting the winemakers tell their own stories. The chapter on biodynamics, for example, unfolds as a Socratic dialog between a Serbian winemaker and the author's wife. It is unquestionably the best and most entertaining introduction to the how's and why's of biodynamics I've encountered, and should be required reading for anyone who wants a primer on biodynamic theory and practice. The wines you read about here are mostly true vini di meditazione, so much so in fact that when visiting legendary Barolo producer Bartolo Mascarello, the winemaker sits mute for an hour smelling the wine and smiling to himself. Except for the fact that's he's confined to a wheelchair, all that's missing is the lotus position.
Esposito isn't afraid to reveal his personal foibles to the reader. He's impatient, petulant, self-absorbed, and even downright mean at times, particularly when he openly baits the effeminate son of one of his wine producers with a string of female names like Coco Chanel and Ursula Andress. Is he a homophobe? Well, that's passion of a different kind.
I recognize this review is getting a little off topic, not unlike the way my initial expectations wandered from where they started. Read this book as a cultural history based on Italian family, food and wine in that order and you'll probably love it. Despite my grape gripes, I enjoyed a lot of it, and I don't think anyone could have summed it up better than Gianfranco Soldera, quoted after another prodigious Italian meal recounted by the author: "La storia, la famiglia, il cibo, il vino. Questa e la vita dell'uomo. History, family, food, wine. This is the life of man." A bottle of the wine they drank that afternoon, the '99 Casse Basse Soldera Brunello, isn't available at the Italian Wine Merchant, but you can get the '01 on pre-arrival for a little less than three hundred smackers a bottle if you inquire now.
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