Dolcetto: "Really cute but not that smart."

We began a second intense week of wine studies with Steve Eliot. He taught us Wine One, not the normal state of affairs, and he claims we'll have a big advantage (more wine, and more wine) over classes taught by mere mortals -- I mean, by other instructors. We did a slam-bang review of labeling conventions (name of place, name of grape, generic, or proprietary) and of the French system of vineyard grading, which is copied extensively throughout Europe.

According to Steve, only France and Germany have had fine wine traditions of any duration. Even though Italy, for example, has been growing grapes for thousands of years, it's been more of an agricultural commodity and a source of sustenance than an artistic endeavor. The success of California winemakers in the 1970s proved hugely inspirational to a new generation of Italians, many of whom came to study at UC Davis and have subsequently adopted many new techniques and methodologies. Steve said, "Oldtimers may tell you how horrible Italian wine is. The fact of the matter is, thirty years ago, they were right. But they learned fast."

Today, we began in the north of Italy. We started in Piedmonte, one of Italy's great wine growing regions, where the influence from France is most significant and the tradition of growing excellent wines is long, by Italian standards. Steve talks about wines that will be significant to us from a culinary standpoint: not necessarily good (though we get those) or affordable (and we get those also), but wines we're likely to read about, see on a high-end wine list, or be offered by our wine vendors, always with the assumption that we will be People In The Food Industry, once we're done with school.

We had a scheduled fire drill mid-morning, which required walking down and then up five flights of stairs. Then we began drinking.

Our first wine was a sparkling wine ("spumante, metodo classico") from Franciacorta in Lombardy, a Bellavista Brut that Steve said would probably fool him in a blind tasting, where he would swear it was vintage Champagne. "If you told me ten years ago that Italians would make sparkling wine like this, I would have laughed."

We followed that with a Tiefenbrunner Pinot Grigio, an "archtypical" white Italian wine. (Italian white wine comes in one style: "light, fresh, dry, white". You can arrange the words into any order.) "White wine as cocktail," Steve said.

The Dolcetto is a light red, "fruit forward," like "beaujolais with an attitude." An afternoon barbecue wine.
One sip of this Barbera and I was immediately reaching for a fork, with food on it. It's fairly high in acid and definitely gets your juices flowing -- not a cocktail wine, by any stretch. But it works with tomatoes because of that acidity. Tomatoes have to be off the menu for this Barolo, a chewy wine with big shoulders and tongue-coating tannin. A plate of grilled lamb would do just fine, thank you. We ended the morning with a juicy sweet moscato -- step one on the slippery slope to alcoholism, because you could drink this all day long. "Even people who don't like wine, like this one," Steve said, and, at least our classroom, that proved true.