Perry Porricelli

Our Soulful Leader

For the last two weeks, we have been training the new members of our Wine Portfolio Management team, and yesterday they had an opportunity to listen to Perry Porricelli, IWM’s President. Perry hails from the Bronx, which may account for his very genuine quality that permeates everything he does. He is street smart, very savvy and fiercely passionate about the business he has helped to create, and he also champions our esoteric portfolio.

Perry often speaks in short, choppy sentences. He is to the point and direct. However, as he began to speak about IWM, his manner entirely changes. His sentences become longer, more elegant. His tone becomes warmer and softer. His passion swells as he describes the wines we represent, and in yesterday’s meeting, by the time he has talked about the nature of his relationships with his clients there was reverence in his voice. He—and the room—glowed with energy.

Perry explained to the team that we have not only taken the road less travelled, but we have blazed our own path. And yes, that has made all the difference.

“The economic strife in 2009 posed considerable challenges to all industries, especially ours,” he said, “Our partners decided to stay true to our core values. Where others were swimming to the bottom, we would swim to the top.” Perry talked about the choices IWM had made in the past year: we hired more experienced Senior Wine Portfolio Managers, and we brought in Christy Canterbury, a Master of Wine candidate, to head our acquisition team. With unfettered pride Perry shared that we had endured the challenges of our industry; we had bucked popular trends; and the business had thrived because of the dedication of our team.

Perry concluded the discussion by talking about his favorite moments. He said, “There are times I have recommended a wine that the client absolutely did not understand. Five years later they said, ‘I drank that bottle and it had become everything you said it would be. It was spectacular.’” Perry smiled. It was the look of joy from knowing he had perfectly served his client.

And that look embodies why IWM is a very special place to work.

Diving into Passion, Part 4

The perplexing Prince and his haunting wines

This blog post is the fourth and final entry in my blogging of Passion on the Vine, the memoir of IWM founder Sergio Esposito. You can find the first three parts here: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

After an entertaining tour of Italian wine producers, Sergio continues his adventure of the Italian countryside and brings us to Chianciano Terme, a mineral water oasis where Italians go to relax and rejuvenate. He shares with us secret days with his son Sal—chasing frogs, hunting for wild berries and stumbling across tiny self-sustaining farms and vineyards, as well as sharing Easter Monday fish feasts on the seashore filled with boisterous family and conversation. Sergio never fails to enchant his readers and make them salivate with lengthy, descriptive paragraphs of his everyday cuisine. But the most inspiring and unusual experience he shares with us is his encounter with the madman, the myth and the legend: the winemaking Prince.

Sergio was enjoying his last free week in Italy on the Amalfi Coast, in Positano to be exact. All ready to take it easy and enjoy his free time, Sergio gets a call from his friend Andrea Carelli. Andrea tells him that the legendary Luigi “Gino” Veronelli requests his presence at a very important lunch in Umbria where they would taste vintage Malvasia made by an eccentric, introverted Italian prince. Umbria, being a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Positano, was certainly out of the question, Sergio objects, yet he lets Carelli’s argument prevail. Sergio agrees to take the day to visit and taste the wines (which he was almost 100% sure would taste like overly sour white-wine vinegar).

Prince Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, Prince of Venosa, was a descendant of a 1000 year old line of Italian royalty, same bloodline as Popes Gregory XIII and Gregory XV. He inherited his family estate, Fiorano, as a young man. He was introverted when it came to his political duties as prince, but he was quite interested in his land and agriculture. He would help harvest wheat and vegetables, and he made simple country wine that he would sell to his locals.

In time, he became quite the wine connoisseur and began collecting and amassing a plethora of vintage wines. The one wine that changed the course of his life was a 1946 Biondi Santi Brunello di Montalcino. He became great friends with Tancredi of Biondi Santi, due to his interest and sheer enthusiasm for his brilliant wines. Tancredi became a colleague and ally, helping the Prince plant French varietals and guiding him during the beginning of his wine journey. In years to come, they continued to collaborate and schooled each other in very intricate and complex wine-making techniques. For his own enjoyment, the Prince ultimately produced a red Bordeaux blend, a Semillion, and wines made from Malvasia di Candia, which was indigenous to his land.

By chance many years before, renowned wine critic Luigi Veronelli was perusing the countryside of Lazio and literally stumbled across the Fiorano estate. He bonded with the Prince, and as he was facing his own mortality, Prince Ludovisi gave Veronelli the grand task of finding his precious wines a home with people who would fully appreciate them. The Prince very rarely sold his wines and was very protective of them—protective to the point that most of his bottled wines had rarely been touched. When Veronelli explored Prince Ludovisi’s stone cellar, he found not a couple hundred bottles as expected, but over 10,000 bottles, all covered in a thick, white mold. Before his death, Prince Ludovisi destroyed his vineyards so that no one else could produce wines from his noble plantings. These 11,000 bottles were all that remained of the Prince’s passion. Veronelli took seriously the Prince’s trust of his wines, and he hunted down Sergio knowing that he was one of the few people on the planet who would grasp the strange beauty of the Prince’s unusual white wines.

Sergio expresses his first taste of the Prince’s Malvasia: “I inhaled and felt it: a twitch in my arm, a tightness in my throat. The wine was alive. Everything faded from the room—the background noise, the glasses clinking, the tones of conversation, all color and movement.” The rest of the Prince’s wines continued with the Malvasia, and each wine made a very distinct impression on Sergio that day. Like Fiorano’s whites that strangely get brighter in color as they age, so too does this anecdote gleam in brightness; it almost puts the rest of the book in high relief, as if all of Sergio’s experiences built to this one moment when he discovered something new, something strange and something gorgeous.

Sergio purchased 11,000 bottles of Fiorano, which are currently on sale here at IWM, purchasable by anyone truly interested and can appreciate the essence of these magnificent wines.

And with this story, I have reached the end of both the book and the writing about it! As someone who is intensely intrigued by the subject of wine, I’ve found that learning about all these producers has been an exceptional one. Many people talk of the fact that traditional wines might someday fall out of interest due to the wine-market being so much geared for immediate consumption, but after reading this book and realizing how intimate and artistic the practice of winemaking can really be, I realize that nothing can replace a wine made by a master of his trade. Everything has its place, whether it’s mainstream industrial winemaking that churns out reliable and consistent product or true artisans who express themselves through their lives’ work. There is so much more to think of now when looking at a bottle of wine because I realize how much time and effort go into bottling this wonderful, ineffable thing that is alive and continues to grow over time.

I urge you to pick up your copy of Passion on the Vine and enjoy your own encounters with these fascinating characters and the unique happenings of a man devoted to life, love and wine, pretty much in that order.

The Power of Context

Context makes for enjoyable wine experiences

Last night, I took the advice of Inside IWM Editor, Janice Cable, and spent my evening with a gin gimlet and the endless information available on Alltop. While perusing Donald Greg’s account of refinishing his wood floors and his enjoying a glass of Chardonnay, I started to think about the notion of context. Not context like what you expect to read where, but what you should drink when, and this is an idea that I’ve found myself preoccupied with of late.

Traditional rules suggest that it makes sense to drink Italian wine when you eat Italian food, white wine with fish, beer with chicken wings and pizza. Similarly, common knowledge holds that refreshing whites and rosés are most appropriate during the summer, and hearty, warming reds better for winter. While I certainly crave a perfectly chilled glass of Vermentino with seafood in mid-July, my mood is just as easily lifted by that same glass mid-January while I watch the snow amassing outside my window. Almost always, I find that it’s not always about what is in your glass and on your plate, but who you’re sitting with and what’s going on around you. A handful of my most enjoyable wine experiences this past year have earned that recognition as a result of context.

Let me offer up some examples.

To commemorate my on-and-off eight-year stint at his restaurant in Lenox, MA, at the end of summer 2009, my boss gave me a bottle of white and a bottle of red from the 2001 vintage (also the year I started there). I took these bottles with me when I moved to New York, and I knew the perfect time to drink them would be with my four siblings, who suffered through sweltering summer days at the restaurant, peeling pounds of garlic in the kitchen, welcoming the same customers day after day, and scouring up anything we could for post-shift dinners at midnight. Although the two wines had been gifted to me, I accepted them on behalf of my siblings, and I knew that we would enjoy them as compensation for every stressful (and fruitful) hour we spent working in that restaurant. In mid-October, when the five of us were all miraculously gathered in New York, we drank the Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Muscat. Even my brother, who never drinks white wine, loved it, if only to make up for nearly slicing his finger off while prepping for the salade nicoise one summer.

My mother’s godmother, and a close friend of the family, loves Querciabella Camartina. At the end of our visit to her home in Easthampton this summer, she sent us each home with a bottle from the 2000 vintage. Only three of the five kids made it home for Thanksgiving this past year. We opened a bottle of Camartina 2000 with dinner, and our palates took us back to Easthampton, away from the cold and biting wind, to the first time we tasted Camartina. My two absent sisters were there with us in spirit, although they didn’t get to enjoy the stuffing or the wine.

One of my first weeks on the job here at IWM, I took home a bottle of Massolino 2003 Langhe Nebbiolo. I was making tacos for dinner – not a dish that typically calls for a bottle of Nebbiolo, but that’s what I was craving. I sipped a glass with the tail-end of Jeopardy, and it showed itself to be lively and balanced alongside the tacos.

Some of the greatest wine I have consumed has been lost in an unmemorable experience, or chasm of environment and meal. These three wines have all been ingrained in my memory through balance – of components and structure, of people and place and serve as a reminder of the power of context.

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