MARIANI’S
Virtual
Gourmet
Marcello Mastroianni in
"Divorce Italian Style" (1961)
❖❖❖ IN THIS ISSUE TOURIST RESTAURANTS AND TOURIST TRAPS By John Mariani NEW YORK CORNER LOVE AND PIZZA CHAPTER TWELVE By John Mariani NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR AN INTERVIEW WITH FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, Part Two By John Mariani ❖❖❖ To
hear an interview with yours truly by Tom Farley
on his show "What Matters Most" about the
future of restaurant after the pandemic ends,
click the picture to the left.
❖❖❖ TOURIST RESTAURANTS AND TOURIST TRAPS By John Mariani It is a constant
and annoying balk by people who have never eaten
at a well-known restaurant that the reason they
avoid it is because “it’s full of tourists.”
NEW
YORK CORNER
By
John Mariani By John Mariani LOVE AND PIZZA Since, for the time being, I am unable to write about or review New York City restaurants, I have decided instead to print a serialized version of my (unpublished) novel Love and Pizza, which takes place in New York and Italy and involves a young, beautiful Bronx woman named Nicola Santini from an Italian family impassioned about food. As the story goes on, Nicola, who is a student at Columbia University, struggles to maintain her roots while seeing a future that could lead her far from them—a future that involves a career and a love affair that would change her life forever. So, while New York’s restaurants remain closed, I will run a chapter of the Love and Pizza each week until the crisis is over. Afterwards I shall be offering the entire book digitally. I hope you like the idea and even more that you will love Nicola, her family and her friends. I’d love to know what you think. Contact me at loveandpizza123@gmail.com —John Mariani To read previous chapters go to archive (beginning with March 29, 2020, issue. LOVE AND PIZZA Cover Art By Galina Dargery CHAPTER
TWELVE
“I got passes!” Catherine screamed, bursting
into her dorm room, where Nicola was napping
one early spring afternoon.
© John Mariani, 2020
❖❖❖
NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
AN INTERVIEW WITH
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, Part Two By John Mariani (To read Part One, click)
Was
there a time when the running of the winery
took precedence over your activity in
filmmaking? Well, a big
part of filmmaking is the writing, and later
the editorial phases, which are performed
alone, so in the natural rhythm of the work
it was possible to do both. On your movie sets
did you ever have the kind of lunch breaks
that the “spaghetti westerns” director Sergio
Leone was famous for—the full Italian meal
with wine? Yes, we did turn to
the European tradition of serving wine during
lunch of our film crews. Eli Wallach, Sergio
Leone, Clint Eastwood and Lee van Cleef dining
at Al Moro in Rome during the filming of The
Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966). Since the winery was funded by profits from The Godfather movies, did the winery become a major profit maker for you and help fund the next films? When I was young, I
was very poor and realized that if I wanted the
independence to make the moves I dreamt of, I’d
need to be able to finance them myself. However,
everything I did to try to make money,
investments and such, tended to lose money, so
at one point I just decided not to worry so much
about it and just do the things I loved. It
turned out those were storytelling, writing and
publishing, adventure and travel, and so quite
naturally I found myself in the magazine
business, film business, hotel and resort
business and food and wine business. All areas
where the most important criteria are
authenticity, quality and pleasure; those three
ideals guide us in everything we make today. Why do you make such
a wide array of wines rather than concentrate,
as do Italian wine producers like Angelo Gaja
and Piero Antinori? It has to do with the
way my company evolved, and unlike Gaja and
Antinori, who are part of great historical wine
families, I just kept following my instincts and
they led me to make certain decisions, which
later, when I revised or incorporated, blossomed
into new variations on the theme. Marchesi Piero
Antinori (right)
famously says, “My family has been making wine
for 500 years.” However, in answer, I say, “The
Coppola family has been drinking wine for 1,000
years!” Do you think your wines are closer to Italian models and traditions than to California models? I think the goal of
Italian models was set more with their eye on
the great wines (and prices) of the Bordeaux and
Burgundy models. That’s where the idea of the
so-called “Super Tuscan” wines was born. I’d say
that for our wines with characteristics similar
to Tuscany the answer would be “yes,” and in
other great Italian regions such as Salento or
Sicily or Veneto our wines would be more similar
to those. California is a huge agricultural area
and has many areas similar to different regions
of the world. And the wines tend to follow the
terroir. In winemaking, everything follows the
quality and characteristics of the grapes. How did the resort businesses
come about? As an adjunct of the wine
business? Film directors tend to
fall in love with the locales they shoot in.
David Lean found it difficult to leave the
desert after filming Lawrence of
Arabia, and I felt the same about the
jungle after making Apocalypse
Now (left).
That led me to rush to Belize in the year it was
founded as an independent nation. I was
nostalgic about those fascinating jungle
locations and searched for something similar. I
found such a place, totally remote, and bought
it, thinking I’d found a place to write in. But
once I had fixed it up and made it comfortable,
of course I needed someone to watch and care for
it, and one thing led to another with me saying
“yes,” as I do more often than I should. And if
you say “yes” a lot, you’ll find yourself in the
hotel business. In springtime grapes don’t need
that much tending, but, if this pandemic
continues, who will pick them in the fall? We qualify as essential activity
and our very valued vineyard workers work
throughout the year. Grapes are like people; you
want to have different phases: new babies,
mature, elderly. There’s constant tending and
re-planting. Francis Coppola Wines have had
long-term contracts with the growers and
families over the years. There’s always been in
California a mutual respect, and the state is
blessed with great nations on either side. It
would be inconceivable not to take care of
people and antagonize Canada and Mexico. Coppola's
resort Palazzo Margherita, Bernalda, Italy You seem to have deliberately
kept your prices on the moderate side. There are a couple of
new wine releases in the Gia line (below)—a
Sangria and an orange wine. Of the seven or
eight companies larger than us, Kendall-Jackson
underprices us somewhat. But there have been so many changes in the business and
distribution has become very regulated by the
government. The distributors and retailers grow
larger and larger, so profits get squeezed. How do you think the buying and selling of wine will change in the future. Wine sales seem to be going off the charts, but wineries are struggling. We live in a house up a mountain
and I’m bringing only my fine wines up there.
Everybody in the country must be doing
that—buying expensive wines and storing them
away, or drinking them at home. The normal drill
of going out to dinner at
restaurants is temporarily suspended, so that a
glass of wonderful premium wine is a treat and
something you can do at home, so the whole
country is moving to higher premium wines. I
think that will continue into the future as wine
with meals becomes a more wonderful experience.
There is so much to know about wine and the
regions of the world and the best owners won’t
compromise on the excellence of their wines. So have you retired from the
motion picture business? I’m sort of retired. I feel blessed to be with my family. Everyone wants to go home, so we have to take care of our home. Every day I sit and look at this beauty in the valley and imagine what a film it might be. Remember, Bacchus was the god of both wine and drama to the Romans. [Vittorio] De Sica’s 1951] Miracle in Milan is a good movie to watch right now during the pandemic, about oppressed and poor people in Milan victimized by the rich and the police for their land but miraculously fly away on broomsticks. So, here we sit, have dinner together, watch movies and prize the stars in the sky.
❖❖❖ Sponsored by ❖❖❖
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FEATURED
LINKS: I am happy to report
that the Virtual
Gourmet is linked to four excellent
travel sites: Everett Potter's Travel Report: I consider this the best and
savviest blog of its kind on the web. Potter is a
columnist for USA
Weekend, Diversion, Laptop and Luxury Spa Finder,
a contributing editor for Ski and a frequent contributor
to National
Geographic Traveler, ForbesTraveler.com
and Elle Decor.
"I’ve designed this site is for people who take
their travel seriously," says Potter. "For
travelers who want to learn about special places
but don’t necessarily want to pay through the nose for
the privilege of staying there. Because at the end
of the day, it’s not so much about five-star
places as five-star experiences." THIS WEEK:
Eating Las Vegas
JOHN CURTAS has been covering the Las Vegas
food and restaurant scene since 1995. He is
the co-author of EATING LAS VEGAS – The 50
Essential Restaurants (as well as
the author of the Eating Las Vegas web site: www.eatinglasvegas.
He can also be seen every Friday morning as
the “resident foodie” for Wake Up With the
Wagners on KSNV TV (NBC) Channel 3 in
Las Vegas.
MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET
NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Publisher: John Mariani. Editor: Walter Bagley. Contributing Writers: Christopher Mariani,
Robert Mariani, Misha Mariani, John A. Curtas, Gerry Dawes, Geoff Kalish,
and Brian Freedman. Contributing
Photographer: Galina Dargery. Technical
Advisor: Gerry
McLoughlin. If you wish to subscribe to this
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