Books, Arts & Manners: The Other Italy

There is a movement afoot in the United States to make Italian food and wine as prestigious here as French food and wine. How much success it is having I do not know, because although the trendy (often funky) new restaurants in New York City are Italian, that says nothing about what the rest of the country will do. But here in New York, besides the “in” restaurants, there are any number of promotional activities—including food symposiums, the flying over of chefs from Italy, wine tastings, and such—going on for the purpose of showing that Italian is classy. The trouble with the majority of these events is that they are controlled by public-relations people, who, after all, are paid to make their clients sound important.

The wine industry has been quite successful at this, making Italian wine the biggest wine import into the United States, thanks to a slightly fizzy and somewhat sweet plonk called Lambrusco, the alcoholic kissing-cousin of the carbonated soft drinks we love so much. Lambrusco as drunk in Italy, by the way—the echt or ur Lambrusco—is a perfectly good, somewhat simple red table wine, senza pretese— without pretensions—as we say in Italy, which goes well with the simple, robust country food of its native province, Emilia-Romagna. But the American market is the great hope of all European wine-makers, who increasingly tailor their product (at least, their wines under $10 a bottle) to the American palate; this makes for a very boring similarity in the taste of the wines, whatever their grape or national origin.

NH

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Nika Hazelton

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There is a movement afoot in the United States to make Italian food and wine as prestigious here as French food and wine. How much success it is having I do not know, because although the trendy (often funky) new restaurants in New York City are Italian, that says nothing about what the rest of the country will do. But here in New York, besides the “in” restaurants, there are any number of promotional activities—including food symposiums, the flying over of chefs from Italy, wine tastings, and such—going on for the purpose of showing that Italian is classy. The trouble with the majority of these events is that they are controlled by public-relations people, who, after all, are paid to make their clients sound important.

The wine industry has been quite successful at this, making Italian wine the biggest wine import into the United States, thanks to a slightly fizzy and somewhat sweet plonk called Lambrusco, the alcoholic kissing-cousin of the carbonated soft drinks we love so much. Lambrusco as drunk in Italy, by the way—the echt or ur Lambrusco—is a perfectly good, somewhat simple red table wine, senza pretese— without pretensions—as we say in Italy, which goes well with the simple, robust country food of its native province, Emilia-Romagna. But the American market is the great hope of all European wine-makers, who increasingly tailor their product (at least, their wines under $10 a bottle) to the American palate; this makes for a very boring similarity in the taste of the wines, whatever their grape or national origin.