Paneling wine + music at VINO2015

I am, as I’ve noted ad nauseam lately, insanely behind on my producer/feature write-ups. That streak continues unabated at the moment, but this time it’s in favor of actually bringing you some vino recommendation (you’re welcome!).

I recently had the great pleasure of being a panelist speaker at the enormous VINO215 Italian wine trade and tasting event in NYC. I’ll get to some highlights from the tastings in a few moments, but first I wanted to tell you with as much humility as I could muster that my panel TOTALLY KILLED IT. I mean, look… we had… THIS:

That’s just Awesome with a capital A, (in the words of Martin Short’s Ed Grimley) “I must say!”

Which is, of course, my humorous attempt to tell you that I thought that my fellow panelists and moderator totally killed it in talking about the intersection of wine and music, and that I was basically just trying to keep up with them.

Of course, VINO2015 was chock-full of enough tasting opportunities to pickle all of your livers several times over, and so here are my takes on a few that turned my wine-geek-critic-type-guy head (with apologies in advance to the VINO2015 organizers, who focused on Southern Italy, while I apparently focused on Northern Italy, as you’ll soon see). Also, for those of you complainy-pants who constantly moan that I never talk about inexpensive wines, this your chance to bite it! (I mean that respectfully… I think…)…

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Lunchtime carnage

I’ve been lax in my wine review coverage throughout the start of 2015 here on 1WD. This is not due to a lack of material (I have late 2014 visits to Red Car and Amici in the coverage pipeline, as well as a tasting of a couple of magnums around the Winter holidays, so the material is stacking up), but I’ve got so much going on on the positive end (professionally) and the negative end (personally) that I haven’t been able to get it together to do those items justice.

Not that I’m starting now, alas.

BUT…

I tasted something recently (courtesy of a business lunch with local Philly wine guy Bob Trimble) that I found intriguing enough to at least temporarily release me from the dreaded lack-of-formal-featured-reviews rut.

As it turns out, the little number that Bob and I drank over lunch has a negative story of its own, and one that, in retrospect, might be undeserved…

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Quick, get ready to freak out; I am about to talk about a wine that was not a sample, but for which I paid using my very own hard-earned cash! The atom might destabilize!!

It’s true. About the wine being purchased, I mean, not about the atom (I think).

The short version of the story is that at 1WD HQ, we tend to do a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving meal, in which we indulge in Mrs. Dudette’s amazing cooking, and focus on healthier versions of the Turkey Day classics, paired up with lots of wines from the sample pool.

Only this time, I found myself in desperate need of more than the usual pick-me-up, and decided to break into a bottle that I’d picked up on my lonesome, and have been not-so-patiently waiting for an excuse to crack open and enjoy.

As you will see from the inset pic and details below, much of what we drank – including that self-procured vino – are slightly different takes on wine world staples…

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