Robert V. Camuto's Blog
October 8, 2025
Conversations with Kermit
October 8, 2025
Conversations with Kermit
At home in Provence with America’s sage importer
This summer I had the pleasure of checking in with my comrade in words, Kermit Lynch, the California wine importer-cum-musician and writer who now lives full-time near Bandol.
The occasion was the release of Kermit’s first novel, but the conversation veered from Kermit’s fascinating history of starting a Berkeley wine shop during the economic crisis of the 1970s to today’s wine crisis. As usual Kermit was full of opinions about overtechnical enologists, the wine and food scene, the America he left behind and the (not great) state of French restaurants.
Read part 1 of the interview here. And look for Part 2 this week at winespectator.com.
Kermit Lynch at home. Photo @ Robert Camuto
August 27, 2025
Wine’s house is on fire
August 27, 2025
Wine’s house is on fire
Time to change the way (again) we think about vino
This is the summer when the global “wine crisis” became official.
The media landscape of Italy and France is brimming with gloom: The “golden age” of wine is over, young people prefer cocktails, farming costs are up, bottle prices are down, and cellars are full of unsold wine. The wine world is, in a word, screwed. (Hand gesture optional.)
I was recently interviewed on the doom by my adopted hometown newspaper L’Arena in Verona, and it got me thinking. Is the crisis another cycle in wine’s long history? Or is there a problem in how we think about wine?
Wine is often viewed as an industrial commodity: bottles, acres, hectoliters, sales growth, costs, etc. But to me wine should be approached for what it is at base: a cultural product to be shared at table with food.
Good wine goes with good food.
In other words, if you want to sell Tuscan wine, promote excellence in Tuscan food and in your home terroirs. Promote it to visitors, locals and even school children. The same is true of all the rest of Italy, and France. Put your best dishes forward with your best wines.
Sadly, especially since COVID, more restaurants have had a tough time maintaining people and quality. Others are just going for the quick Euro.
What if we changed the way we taxed restaurants. Instead of taxing sales and profits, tax could be inversely set to the quality of the food. The fresher, more local and better tasting the food, the lower the tax bill.
Fast food chains on the other hand could be taxed like cigarettes. Spaces in public palazzos are often rented to the high bidder, which sounds responsible but is anything but.
There’s lots of discussion about climate change and its effects on wine, but little discussion on how much humans have changed.
Of course, young people don’t drink wine. Wine is about sharing, and they’ve been reared in the bubble of their personal devices. Naturally they go for the perfect individual liquid: cocktails.
My recent interview on the “crisi” in L’Arena
The culture of excellence in food and wine extends to the community and way beyond. Consider the doctor factor. Every year Italy loses about 3,000 young medical docs who leave the country to seek higher salaries elsewhere.
Doctors are among some of the greatest wine collectors and aficionados of culture I’ve known. So Italy exports docs to Europe and the US and imports young doctors from Cuba. Cuba! And you wonder why young Italians favor mojitos over vino?
Get your wine culture and more thoughts on the state of wine, food and all the rest, in some of my recent columns at Robert Camuto Meets… including:
An Italian retail mogul going long on vino,
Italy’s up-country Abbey of Wine,
Down to Earth in Châteauneuf-du-Pape
Read more on Winespectator.com
June 26, 2025
Let’s blow up the spritz!
June 26, 2025
Let’s blow up the spritz!
Time to reinvent this aperitivo with real wine
It’s another hot summer and the world doesn’t seem very interested in doing much to combat climate change. But at least we can change what’s in our glass.
With higher temperatures coupled with higher degrees of alcohol in wine, we are in our rights to cool off at aperitivo time with a cold wine cocktail.
Mainly I am talking about the spritz. Not the ubiquitous sticky sweet Aperol spritz and other Prosecco based versions, but those that approximate the original 19th-century conception.
Making the brand new "Verona spritz" at Verona's Caffè Monte Baldo
The history of the spritz began with occupying Austrians in northern Italy who found Italian wines too strong, and so would Italian bartenders in German for a “spritzer” of H2O to thin them down.
This “spritz bianco” still exists in northern Italy — the modern version is Pinot Grigio, soda water and slice of lime.
This version is proof that the spritz doesn’t have to be cloying or made with industrial grade Prosecco.
I’ve found some other examples of producers and osterias that are blowing up the spritz to make inventive cocktails with real wine — serving the needs to attract younger drinkers and provide the rest of us with an alternative at apero hour.
Campania winemaker Angelo Silano making his refreshing Fiano lime wine cocktail
Read about it and all the other news that’s fit to sip at the latest Robert Camuto Meets… at winespector.com.
May 14, 2025
Love and Wine in Sicily
May 14, 2025
Love and Wine in Sicily
He was born on a Sicilian Farm. She had a couple of restaurants in downtown NYC…
Feudo Montoni is one of those middle-of-nowhere Sicilian places that quietly takes your breath away.
It sits at 1,600 feet above sea level amid rolling hills that have served as an Italian breadbasket and sheep grazing area for millenia.
Once part of a sharecropping lands that belonged to the Church, the farm and its baglio came into the hands of Fabio Sireci’s enterprising grandfather in the late 19th century.
Melissa Muller and Fabio Sireci in a wheat field at Feudo Montoni
There was, of course, wine. But it didn’t excel until this century after Sireci took over. And the wines didn’t really reach their peak until Fabio met Melissa Muller, a New York downtown Italian restaurateur (with Sicilian roots) who came to Montoni 11 years ago whilst doing cookbook research for her book Sicily: Recipes Rooted in Tradition.
Now a married couple with two young sons, the pair have carved out a life in the deepest of Sicily: working organically, growing wheat, olives and grapes and rare varieties of tomatoes and peppers, and experimenting with recipes with wild plants and local products.
It’s a story of love, wine and nature that’s an antidote to our times and the White-lotusing of everything. Even Sicily.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the latest Robert Camuto Meets…
April 2, 2025
Wine and Tariffs Shmariffs!
April 1, 2025
Wine and Tariffs Shmariffs!
How to DODGE them Italian style
Tariffs — especially wine tariffs — are not funny.
Nobody is walking around telling jokes that start: “Two tariffs walk into a wine bar.”
Nevertheless, the US Oval Office looks prepared to put tariffs on lots of stuff from around the world Wednesday after threatening European wine and alcohol with tariffs up to 200%.
It would probably destroy many beloved producers not to mention legions of US wine importers, distributors and restaurants.
Will they really happen? Whether they do or don’t just now — winelovers and Euro wine producers need to start working on ways around them. For a start look no further than Italy — land of creativity and the clever solution when given impossible obstacles.
To indulge in some devious tariff dodges, see my latest Robert Camuto Meets… at winespectator.com.
March 31, 2025
Pssst! Wanna hear a secret?
March 29, 2025
Pssst! Wanna hear a secret?
Why you’ve never heard of Mt. Etna’s real jewel
View of Castello Solicchiata with surrounding vineyards
One of the most historic and magnificent wineries on Mount Etna and in all of Sicily is older than Italy itself.
Launched in the mid 19th century by the Baron Felice Spitaleri (whose family settled here after the Crusades), the Castello Solicchiata was modeled after the grand chateaux of Bordeaux with French grapes and winemaking methods. The baron even built a champagnerie and a distillery to make “Etna Champagne” and “Etna Cognac” that won medals along with the wines in Belle Epoque wine fairs.
So. Why have you never heard of it?
After the phylloxera blight ravaged the vineyards, the Spitaleri left the property to abandon in 1907 for exactly 100 years until the Baron Arnaldo Spitaleri meticulously restored the Arabo-Norman style winery and vineyards.
Baron Arnaldo Spitaleri
The baron explains Castello Solicchiata's meticulous handworked vineyards
The Castello Solicchiata was built as a winery in the 19th century from Etna lavastone
Spitaleri is a very private man. I met him more than five years ago at Vinitaly in Verona and have been asking to visit the Castello ever since.
That would be impossible, the baron replied. He was not set up for journalists and visitors, and there were a million more reasons.
Marketing, in other words, is not his thing.
Baron Arnaldo Spitaleri (left) with Alessio Planeta inside the Castello Solicchiata's bottle aging cellar
Finally, last month the baron relented, allowing me to visit his ultra-cared-for beyond-organic vineyards and giving me a glimpse inside the winery, which is one of the most architecturally stunning I’ve ever seen.
The wines themselves are antique feeling with flavors from another time.
My latest Robert Camuto Meets… is essential reading for fans of Etna, Sicily and Italian wine. Read it at winespectator.com
March 6, 2025
There you are!
March 6, 2025
There you are!
Forget all the brands, bells and whistles, great wine is about one thing
With all the “crisis” talk in the wine world right now, there is too much noise and little consensus about what is wine.
The wine world needs to get back to basics and talk about the one factor that makes it all make sense: the place the vines are grown.
Read my latest Robert Camuto Meets...(free) at winespectator.com
Mareuil-le-port in the Champagne appellation of France. Photo @ Robert Camuto
February 24, 2025
Rediscovering analog and wine-ing about it
February 24, 2025
Rediscovering analog and wine-ing about it
Savoring the good in a maddening world
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Mainly because I’ve been thinking, writing, listening to winter and sort of pulling away from an online world that seems to be shouting at a funhouse mirror. I don’t want to sound like a luddite or a reactionary, but I think we’ve lost something.
Every human age has an idea or philosophy. I grew up in the America of the “free world” dominated by opportunity and expanding rights and an effort at objective “truths.” Now in our digital age, who cares? What seems to matter is purely grabbing attention — mostly with outrage, fearmongering and emotionally charged fairy tales. Not that there’s anything wrong with fairy tales, but they lose something when there are so many produced on an hourly basis.
I’ve been sort of pulling away from an online world that seems to be shouting at a funhouse mirror.
What to do? I’ve been backing away from the screaming screens and going a bit more analog. I’ve put down my kindle and started buying paper books — preferably from bookstores when I can. I take an espresso in a bar with a local newspaper (Verona Arena), and I support the things I value. I look around and listen.
Robert in Venice before the start of the annual winter Carnevale
And I’m still here writing and reporting and opining on the people and places I think are important and interesting and meaningful in a very narrow sliver of the world.
Wine, at least for now, is still produced from grapes grown in soils and fermented in wineries. It hasn’t been supplanted by an app that hooks up to our cerebral cortex.
It is one of the products in our analog world that can produce beyond-delicious sublime sensations from sun, fruit and the subterranean world. I think of wine as a subculture of agriculture. And it’s been my culture for going on 20 years.
I document that culture in my books and in my principal journalistic outlet of my twice-monthly Robert Camuto Meets… column at winespectator.com.
Check out the most recent column “Carmenère on the Rocks” on the pioneering Venetian winemaker Stefano Inama who is bringing Bordeaux’s lost grape Carmènere back to the fore near verona.
Other columns from Champagne to Bruenllo Cucinelli can be found here (all free) at winespectator.com.
January 12, 2025
Something has got to change
January 11, 2025
Something has got to change
Facing a critical moment for wine
The world and the ways of thinking about it are changing fast. It seems the era of shapeshifting: What was up is down and what was good is bad — to at least big swaths of the world it seems.
What’s the new normal is anybody’s guess.
The little corner of the world that is wine is facing a potential tidal wave of change as well. It’s not unwelcome.
In the Old World, every generation drinks less wine than the previous one. And wine has been battered by inflation, cocktails and a new wave of abstention.
Wine has always changed. The upward curve of the wine quality revolution and accompanying prices is relatively young, having begun in earnest in the 1990s.
Now wine is ready for another serious upheaval.
Read about my thoughts and proposals in the latest Robert Camuto Meets... (free) at winespectator.com.
December 18, 2024
For love of Champagne
December 18, 2024
For love of Champagne
In the hands of great producers it’s like no other bubbles
Look, fizzy wine from all over has been booming in recent years. But there’s something special about Champagne: Particularly, the depth of flavor that comes from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier worked by grower-producers who know their terroirs.
This December at Robert Camuto Meets… (at winespectator.com) I’m dedicating space to a couple of must-drink small producers of Champagne’s great Chardonnay dominated Côte des Blancs.
This week, read about one of my favorite light-my-fire Champagnes – Larmandier-Bernier in the charming little town of Vertus.
For Pierre Larmandier of Larmandier-Bernier the work of creating a great champagne starts with care in the vineyards
Pierre Larmandier, whose family traces their winemaking routes back to the French Revolution, is no stuffed shirt. He and his sons work their vineyards carefully, where he has been a pioneer in making terroir driven Champagnes and Biodynamics. A few years ago Larmandier-Bernier reawoke me to Champagne’s potential and made me fall in love with the stuff all over again.
Next week check the same space for a column on one of his great neighbors, Champagne Doyard, emblematic of the 21st-century wave of boutique producers combining modern, precise winemaking with once-waning traditions like horse plowing, fermentations in wood cask and long aging.
Sure one can drink other bubbles. But I think right now what’s making Champagne great is not its name, its fizz, or laurels. What’s making it distinctive are people (surprisingly!) getting down to earth more than most anywhere else.
