Burton Anderson has a new independently published anthology/memoir, Vino II. It is available on Amazon, and if you love Italian wine, you should get it, read it, and prepare for the exam: It will certainly be on any test I administer.
Sorry: that’s just the old teacher in me asserting himself.
.
Vino II is a time trip back to what I more and more think of as the heroic age of Italian winemaking, when the sleeping giant finally awakened and shrugged off the rust and dust of centuries. Back in the 1960s, names like Sassicaia and Tignanello were scarcely known in Italy outside of Tuscany, and you could search for days in the best wine shops to find a Barolo or Barbaresco with a vineyard name on the label. All such stuff was in the future, and that future is what Anderson’s book is all about.
Anderson was not only an eyewitness but also, if you will, a catalytic figure, who by his interactions with winemakers and by his publications helped shape that future. The original Vino, published in 1980, was brilliant, nearly prophetic, in its selection of makers and wines and regions to present and explain. For most readers, it opened a whole new view of an Italian wine world that stretched far beyond Chianti in a straw flask and Verdicchio in a fish-shaped bottle.
.
.
Vino II chronicles the great renaissance of Italian wine that followed. Anderson and I are just about the same age, but there is no question that, for English-speaking persons who love Italian wine, he is the father of us all.
How to talk about Vino II? It’s in part an anthology of articles that Anderson has written over the decades, all of them timely at the moment of writing and almost all of them just as relevant and telling today. These are woven into a chronological account of the revival of Italian wine and Anderson’s engagement with and too-often unrequited love for it. No: scratch that. Italian wine rarely let Anderson down; it was the commercial world of wine publishing that often did.
Anderson as a young man took tremendous financial risks to follow his love of the wines and the people who make them. You would think the importance of his work – the original Vino was and is a landmark book is the history of Italian wine – would have assured him a comfortable income from which to carry on, but that was never the case. Even the “raters” – the 100-point-score wine writers whom he despises — probably are better known today than he is; and he – who writes only in English – is probably better known in Italy than in either the US or the UK. Anderson is mordantly aware of the ironies here. Nevertheless, though he may have made some unfortunate financial decisions, he has also made some brilliant life choices, and we are the beneficiaries of those.
His stories, in Vino II, of conversations and dinners with the likes of Giacomo Bologna and Costantino Rozzi, with almost mythical winemakers like Giorgio Grai, owners and winemakers like Sergio Manetti, Angelo Gaja, and many, many more, all read like excerpts from the journals of Rabelais in Italy. Moreover, they illustrate very clearly how wide-open and wild-westish the world of Italian wine had become in the sixties and seventies of what is now the last century. Everything lay in the future: The present was all flux and change, with no surety about what would happen next. There were giants in those day, and Anderson ate and drank with them.
This book was a major nostalgia trip for me, but I know that for many people it will serve as an excellent – and vivid – introduction to the story of how Italian wine achieved the prestige it now has, and even more importantly how and why it has become so complex. The most amateur of wine drinkers knows to expect complexity from Burgundy and knows that there is a long tradition behind the most seemingly arcane of distinctions in French wine, but most wine lovers – and I include here the great majority of wine “professionals” – remain basically clueless about the great diversity of Italy’s noble varieties and the incredibly diverse geography and geology of the country that created and preserved them. As was true of Vino in 1980, Vino II is a great place to start pleasurably learning about them. Not to mention savoring the tales of the great individualists – and I emphatically include Burton Anderson among them – who created the marvelous cornucopia of fine Italian wine we enjoy today.
Tom's Wine Line 
I met Burton in the summer of 1980 in Cortona where he was then living with wife Nancy and two children. I was there to teach in a seminar being hosted by the University of Florence. Louis Iacucci, then the undisputed authority on Italian wine in New York, introduced me to Burton. On days that there were no classes Burton and I often visited Chianti estates. I recall a day-long wine and food marathon we had at Castell in Villa, the property of Principessa Pignatelli. Splendid days. Vino was published later that year, as I recall, and of course I’ve ordered Vino II.
I am still baffled by the fact that Italy, with such enormous variety of splendid native grapes, resorted to plant French varietals during the dark ages of Robert Parker. Correct me if am wrong, Tom, but I understand that Biondi-Santi had to disuade Brunello producers from replanting ancient Sangiovese vineyards with Cabernet and Merlot in Montalcino to please his taste for oaked syrup. That is why I have never had any interest in most Marema producers.
Way back then, Italian producers — a good many of them, not all — were struggling against the widespread idea that Italy only made plonk (you will find a lot of Brits still think so), and they saw the French varieties, then booming via California, as a way to signal how up-to-date and quality-conscious they were. This was, of course, a terrible mistake, but you can see why some of them could think it the right road at that time. As far as Franco Biondi-Santi is concerned, I only know that he dissuaded the Consorzio from allowing any admixture of other grapes: in other words, he defended Brunello as a 100% Sangiovese wine.
Thanks for the heads up, Tom. Ordered! Anyone else who wants the link, here it is: https://amzn.to/34lL9dX
Thanks for reminding me about the link, Alfonso. I will add it to my post.