The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (2 page)

In reality, there was no reason my first “wine” had to be MD 20/20 Orange Jubilee. My father was of the generation that, in the late 1970s and 1980s, leapt headlong into an appreciation of Napa and Sonoma Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. There were often bottles of Kendall Jackson, Robert Mondavi, Grgich Hills, or Beringer opened at dinners and parties. I occasionally had a taste, but back then I had little interest in drinking what my parents drank.

So it wouldn't be until the summer after my sophomore year, when I was 19, that I first truly
experienced
wine. I was studying abroad in Italy, living with a family in a village called Pieve San Giacomo, near the Po River in the province of Cremona. Every night, Paolo, the father, sliced a plateful of prosciutto and cut a hunk from a wheel of Grana Padano. Then he uncorked and poured a fizzy red, chilled, from an unlabeled liter bottle he'd fetched from a dark corner of the barn—the same barn I'd wandered into one morning and there saw him butchering a cow. Paolo didn't go for fancy wineglasses, but rather used what we would have called juice glasses back home in Jersey. Beyond retrieving the sliced meat, cheese, and wine, men were otherwise forbidden in his wife's kitchen, so while Anna busily made us dinner and the television blared a soccer game, Paolo and I would sip our cool, fizzy red wine from our juice glasses on those hot evenings.

I had never tasted or witnessed a wine like this. The liquid was bright purple, with a thick pink foam that formed as it was poured. I knew enough to know that the Napa Cabs on my parents' table back home didn't foam. Paolo's wine certainly tasted fruity, though it was more tangy than sweet, and what made it strange to me was the aroma. Whereas my father's wines smelled like identifiable fruits—plums, cherries, berries—this fizzy wine was a little stinky, to be honest, but in a pleasant way. I didn't have the language back then, but in my memory the aroma is earthy, rustic, fertile, alive, almost like the essence of the farm and the dusty streets of the village. Back then, it simply smelled and tasted like the Old World I had hoped to find.

Of course, being young and naive, I never bothered to ask Paolo anything about his wine—the grapes, where it was made, who made it. I kept in touch with the family, but Paolo died a decade ago, and since neither Anna nor his daughter, Daniela, drink wine, I never did learn the fizzy red's provenance. Over the years, though, as my wine knowledge grew, I hypothesized that what I'd been imbibing on those summer evenings long ago had been Lambrusco, mainly since Pieve San Giacomo is just over an hour's drive from Modena, Lambrusco's spiritual home.

As I moved further into drinking and writing about wine, I occasionally told Wine People I met at trade tastings and industry events about enjoying this fizzy red wine as a 19-year-old, and it never failed to draw a chuckle. “Lambrusco!” they'd say. “Riunite!” Cheap, sweet Lambrusco had, of course, had its heyday in the 1970s, just like the leisure suit and swingers and fern bars, and I can remember seeing those cheesy “Riunite on ice. That's nice!” commercials when the babysitter let us stay up late to watch
The Love Boat
and
Fantasy Island
. But as Americans' knowledge increased during the 1980s and 1990s, budding wine connoisseurs didn't want to hear about fizzy red wine anymore.

So even though the stuff I used to drink back in Pieve San Giacomo was neither sweet nor cheap, I just stopped talking about it, or even thinking about it. Like so many other aspirational Wine People my age, I dutifully learned to appreciate Serious Red Wines, which in the early 21st century mainly meant Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir from various pricey bottlings. I studiously pursued an education in Bordeaux and Burgundy and all those big California reds that my father appreciated. Instead of rustic Italian wine, I delved deeply into Barolo and Brunello di Montalcino.

I filed my old “unserious” fizzy red alongside my youthful Orange Jubilee. I was being schooled by wine educators and sommeliers and wine critics that, as a knowledgeable wine drinker, a Wine Person, I should be moving beyond things like fizzy reds. That is, after all, what usually happens next in a traditional wine education. You're told that wine is a ladder, with the student constantly reaching upward, leaving behind so-called lesser wines and climbing toward greatness, toward the profound, toward—inevitably—the expensive.

This is why, two decades after my summer abroad, I found myself in Italy's Langhe region, in Piedmont, visiting a bunch of producers of Barolo, the complex, elegant wine made from Nebbiolo grapes—the epitome of a Serious Wine. I tasted dozens of amazing, and often profound and transcendent, Barolos, which convinced me, once again, that Nebbiolo grapes grown in this corner of northwestern Italy create one of the world's greatest wines.

My visit culminated on a sunny Sunday afternoon with an auction called the Asta del Barolo, inside the famous castle in the town of Barolo. Collectors—some from as far away as China, Singapore, and Dubai—purchased bottles from prized vintages for thousands of dollars. One acquaintance, an Austrian banker living in Hong Kong, paid 3,000 euros (about $4,100) for three magnums dating from the mid-1980s. I sat next to a charming producer, whose family's elegant, silky Barolos annually receive high scores from critics, who call them “genius” and “breathtaking.” During lunch, we tasted about 15 examples of the 2009 vintage. Later, there was talk among the younger winemakers about Jay-Z's recent visit to Barolo, where he supposedly dropped $50,000 on wine and truffles.

I won't lie: it is sexy and exciting to be part of an afternoon crowd like that. And I cannot state clearly enough how much I enjoy Barolo. Perhaps it is geeky to say, but sipping it can be like listening to a beautiful, challenging piece of music or standing before a grand, moving work of art. I love it so much that when people ask what my favorite wine is, I often exclaim, “Barolo!” And they nod and say, “Ah, yes. Barolo, of course.”

But that afternoon at the castle was total fantasyland. When I returned home, would I be drinking very much Barolo? Um, no, not so much. Saying that Barolo is my “favorite” is very much a misrepresentation of my everyday drinking habits. How often do I drink it? Outside of professional tastings, when I'm buying wine to serve at home or when I order it in restaurants, I probably drink Barolo three or four times a year. Maybe five if I'm particularly flush. That's because the price of a decent Barolo at a wine shop starts at around $60 a bottle and quickly climbs to well over $100. Double or triple that price on a restaurant wine list. Even though I love Barolo, it will always be a special-occasion wine.

I was thinking deeply about greatness in wines when I decided to make a quick side trip to visit my old exchange family in Pieve San Giacomo. On a whim, I'd asked Daniela, Paolo's daughter, to do a little research to see where her father used to buy his fizzy red wine, and with some effort we located the winemaker. To my surprise, the winemaker was not based in Modena, but rather a couple of hours in the other direction, in the Colli Piacentini—the Piacenza hills—a region I'd never heard of.

After getting lost, and refereeing an argument between Daniela and Anna, who was almost carsick in the back seat, we were finally welcomed into the garage of the winemaker, 80-year-old Antonio, and his daughter, who was roughly my age. Anna became emotional—the last time she'd visited the winemaker was in the early 1990s with Paolo. “I remember you had a goat, and it used to like eating the grapes!” she said. The goat, of course, was long dead.

From stainless steel tanks, we tasted his crisp Riesling and a strange, straw-yellow wine made from the local Ortrugo grapes. Antonio told me that most of his customers come to buy his wine in demijohns because they prefer to bottle it themselves, as Paolo did.

“What about the frizzante red?” I asked. “Do you still make it?”

He smiled broadly and retrieved a bottle from a corner of the garage. He grabbed a wide white bowl and splashed the purple wine into it as the wine formed a pink foam. “My customers insist on white bowls for the red,” Antonio said, “to bring out the color and aromas.”

I closed my eyes and took a sniff, then took a sip. Sharp, fresh, tangy, earthy. Wow! The aromas and flavors were like a time machine. I was again 19, dressed in a Grateful Dead T-shirt and Birkenstocks, experiencing wine for the first time. Holding the huge wide bowl to my face nearly brought me to tears in the dark garage. “Ah, Lambrusco,” I said, with a satisfied smile.

Antonio laughed. “Lambrusco? No, no, no. This is Gutturnio!”

“Gutturnio?” I said. What the hell was Gutturnio? I must have said something wrong. Maybe I was having trouble understanding the dialect. “Is that the local name for Lambrusco?” I asked.

He laughed again. “No! It's Gutturnio. It's a blend of Barbera and Bonarda.”

Um . . . what? For 20 years, I'd been telling myself that my seminal wine experience had been Lambrusco. Now I find out that it was a wine called Gutturnio? And how had I never even heard of this wine? It's not like it's new. I later learned that the Romans drank it from a round jug called a
gutturnium,
from which the wine's name is taken. Julius Caesar's father-in-law was famous for producing this wine.

We sat at Antonio's table and ate cheese and meat with the wine, and Anna and Antonio reminisced about the old days. Antonio said that he now sold about 4,000 bottles per year, about half what he had about 20 years ago. “Ah,” he said, “a lot of my customers, they're dying.” Meanwhile, the younger generation just isn't as interested in local wines like his anymore. “Nowadays, people want different tastes. There are a lot of other tastes that people seek.” Antonio shrugged. “There is an end for everything. Everything ends.”

Suddenly, this humble, fizzy, purple Gutturnio that I swirled around in a white bowl—which connected me to my own past, to ancient Rome, and yet at the same time was totally fresh knowledge—seemed more important than even the greatest Barolo. The strange experience I was having in a farmhouse in the Piacenza hills seemed to me to be the very essence of wine, the reason people spend their lives obsessed with it, an example of how wine becomes part of our lives.

As I thought about all this—about wine and Italy and youth and family and revisiting scenes of unadulterated happiness—it occurred to me that this wasn't so different from how one falls in love with travel in the first place. They might even go hand in hand. And telling this kind of story isn't so different from telling any other story that one might call travel writing.

Camus and others may have a point—that travel is about fear and suffering and travail. That has become an accepted truth of travel writing. But this truth is only partially correct. Travel is also very much about love and memory. I'm hoping that this anthology shows you that love—as well as fear and suffering and travail.

 

The stories included here were, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications—from mainstream and specialty magazines to Sunday newspaper travel sections to literary journals to travel websites. I've done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2013 were forwarded to guest editor Paul Theroux, who made our final selections.

This is the second time I've worked with Paul on this anthology (the first was way back in 2001), and it was just as much of an honor today to work with a travel writing hero of mine and a master of the genre. The world has changed a great deal since 2001, but I think you'll find that the key characteristics of great travel writing never really change. I'd also like to thank Tim Mudie at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for his help in producing this year's outstanding collection, our 15th. I hope you enjoy it.

I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2014. As I have for years, I am asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing. These submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the 2014 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author's name, date of publication, and publication name, and they must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. All submissions must be received by January 1, 2015, in order to ensure full consideration for the next collection.

Further, publications that want to make certain that their contributions will be considered for the next edition should be sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to Jason Wilson, Best American Travel Writing, 228 Kings Highway, 1st floor, Suite 2, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this year's anthology to one of our contributors, Matthew Power, who died tragically in March of this year while on assignment in Uganda, reporting on an explorer walking the length of the Nile. Matt was 39, which made him a contemporary of mine, and he was a true adventurer and seeker of truth whom I admired tremendously. Those who are loyal readers of
The Best American Travel Writing
know Matt's work well, as it has been included here several times over the past decade. He will be greatly missed.

J
ASON
W
ILSON

T
RAVEL WRITING TODAY
is pretty much what travel writing has always been, a maddeningly hard-to-pin-down form—one traveler boasting of luxury and great meals, another making asinine lists (“Ten Best Waterslides on Cruise Ships”), yet another breathlessly recounting an itinerary of hardships and mishaps, and a fourth (and the most valuable, in my view) holding you like the wedding-guest with a skinny hand and fixing you with a glittering eye and saying, “There was a ship . . .”

If you're looking for a model, the greatest writer-traveler the world has known is the Moroccan Ibn Battutah, who set as his goal to travel the entire Islamic world, including China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, in the mid-14th century. This took him 29 years. He spent a year in the Maldives, that strange scattered archipelago of coral atolls, where he took a number of wives, and then moved on, leaving them behind. Unlike those other long sojourners Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (who might not have existed), Ibn Battutah wrote his book himself. In the words of one of his early Arab admirers: