A door closes. More open.

Beyond my last column for Wine Spectator

Fabrizio Plessi’s installation “The Soul of Amarone” at Masi’s Montelone 21

The feeling is bittersweet: This week, my very last “Robert Camuto Meets….” column posted at winespectator.com.

The bitter part is the column’s budget-cut bailing from the hull of the U.S.S. Journalism—a ship that’s been sinking for the last 30 years.

The sweet parts are that my column lasted twelve years—running twice a month through wine crises, COVID and my move 10 years ago from France to Italy. In that time, I’ve been extremely grateful to be able to write about what I wanted to write about with little or no constraints.

Still, twelve years is a long time for anything, and now I feel marvelously liberated—to work on book projects, to write this “Robert Camuto -- Italy Matters” newsletter and to contribute the occasional feature to WS and other outlets.

Meanwhile, Robert Camuto Meets…lives on in a free, searchable just completed archive of 12-years of columns on my website robertcamuto.com, containing more than 300 entries from the wine (and food) worlds of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, the U.K. New York and California.

I think the column has added something to the coverage and discourse on wine. I always saw it as a continuation of the personal style journalism of my books-- bringing the same focus on wine as an expression of place and people. I’ve never cared for wine as a marketing opportunity, snobbery, investment, status symbol, or merit badge.

The journalist in me led me to places few others have gone, partly because the wine press is somewhat stacked with people who got here through the trade and hospitality. Nothing wrong with that. But personally, I’ve never wanted to be a professional taster because I understand the subjectivity of experiencing wine. (For the one bottle of D.R.C. – La Tache I’ve been served at someone’s house in France—the hosts were in the middle of a marital dispute, which dried up the saliva in my mouth and made the wine taste like something you’d find in a sale bin. Almost.)

So, I’ve “followed the story.” In recent years I’ve broken stories about the flow of Italian wine to wartime Russia despite sanctions, about the Timorasso grape finding winegrowers in Sonoma and Ukraine, and I was the first journalist to enter the hidden noble world of Mount Etna’s oldest wine “chateau” Castello Solicchiata (“Etna’s Great Secret”).

More than a decade ago in France, I wrote after the 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris about the murders of three of the world’s most outrageous label designers in “Charlie’s Labels.” And I’ve been fairly alone in deconstructing the Provence rosé industry and its obsession with pale pink color swatches over taste.

I think I’ve also maintained a sense of humor -- and irony.

There’s been a lot said about irony being dead. I’m not buying that. Especially now in our Orwellian age, without irony we’d be at a dead end drinking what exactly?

How could I not have a sense of humor about wine and myself. Some years ago as a home natural-ish winemaker, I discovered that making red wine in small quantities was easy – if you had perfect grapes. As a farmer, of course, I failed miserably.

What I’ve loved most about 40-plus years in journalism is that its allowed my natural curiosity to rove – to parachute across a range of social milieu and meet so many people who tick in different ways.

Back in my first column (Then called “Letter from Europe”) I began:

There are lots of reasons to love wine, but for me the most important reason is people.

Wine is, after all, a story of humans working within the dynamics of nature, culture and history. When you put those forces together, you are bound to have tales of operatic proportions.

These are the stories I love telling.

In the archives there’s a range of wines and storytelling here you won’t find anywhere else.

I’ve tasted and enjoyed all kinds of wines in all sorts of company and with all levels of food. When the wine and food and people come together, I felt l lived in a lifetime in a meal. I’ve written lots about food—including about the Spanish chef who got me to eat my napkin.

Writing Robert Camuto Meets… my favorite stories were the ones that surprised me in some way.

From “Making John Malkovich Wine” in Provence with Malkovich in the shadow of the Marquis de Sade’s castle, to the “Risky Business” of vine growing in the Venice Lagoon where altitude is counted in centimeters, to a Russian Mogul “Exiled on Wine Street” in London, where he built the world’s wildest wine shop.

I love stomping through dramatic vineyards. Sicily’s Mount Etna has been a particular focus for the last 18 years since I began research for my book Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey (2010). Since then, I’ve been in the vines for a helicopter harvest of Nebbiolo in Negri’s Inferno in Valtellina and witnessed the tree hugging vineyards of “Italy’s Great Little Pizza Wine.”

Craft and vision fascinate me: From Rinaldi to Gravner to Selosse to Romanée-Conti and many more.

Of course I (heart) love stories from “A Match Made at Montoni” in Sicily to “Love, Loss and Vermentino” in Liguria to “For Love and Vino” in Umbria and “A Mother and her Nest” at Potazzine.

Some of my favorite stories involved wine and prisons and prisoners. Despite one tone-deaf editor’s criticism (“I don’t see the story there!”) I wrote about Frescobaldi’s project making white wines off Tuscany on what happens to be Europe’s last prison island, and I wrote about a trendy Milan restaurant actually inside the gates of a penitentiary in “Wine and Punishment”.

I think I’ve provided some lived perspective in my commentaries of wine as a product to bring people together with food at table. (“How Wine Saves Us”)

And after catching pre-vaccine COVID I described my loss of smell and monthslong battle to retrieve it.

This is only a quick superficial skims. I hope you find the archive interesting and useful. Please feel free to suggest ways to improve it.

My last column was one that rung both sides of my chimes, It was an about a winery that on its surface is full of contradictions. Masi is an industrial scale winery that’s publicly traded, yet it is doing interesting things for Valpolicella and wine culture under Sandro Boscaini, who is still creatively restless at 88.

So, one column ends and this newsletter begins. Italians have an expression: “A door closes and a gateway opens.”

Here we are on the other side of the gate.