As a young child in Naples, Italy, Sergio Esposito sat at his kitchen table observing the daily ritual of his large, loud family bonding over fresh local dishes and simple country wines. While devouring the rich bufala mozzarella, still sopping with milk and salt, and the platters of fresh prosciutto, sliced so thin he could see through it, he absorbed the profound relationship of food, wine, and family in Italian culture. Growing up in Albany, New York, after emigrating there with his family, he always sat next to his uncle Aldo and sipped from his wineglass during their customary hours-long extended family feasts. Thus, from a very early age, Esposito came to associate wine with the warmth of family, the tastes of his mother’s cooking—and, above all, memories of his former life in Italy. When he was in his twenties, he headed for New York and undertook a career in wine, beginning a journey that would culminate in his founding of Italian Wine Merchants, now the leading Italian wine source in America. His career offered him the opportunity to make frequent trips back to Italy to find wine for his clients, to learn the traditions of Italian winemaking, and, in so doing, to rediscover the Italian way of life he’d left behind. Passion on the Vine is Esposito’s intimate and evocative memoir of his colorful family life in Italy, his abrupt transition to life in America, and of his travels into the heart of Italy—its wine country—and the lives of those who inhabit it. The result is a remarkably engaging and entertaining wine/travel narrative replete with vivid portraits of seductive places—the world-famous cellars of Piedmont, the sweeping estates of Tuscany, the lush fields of Campania, the chilly hills of Friuli, the windy beaches of Le Marche; and of memorable people, diverse and vibrant wine artisans—from a disco-dancing vintner who bases his farming on the rhythm of the moon to an obsessive prince who destroys his vineyards before his death so that his grapes will never be used incorrectly. Esposito’s luscious accounts of the wonderful food and wine that are so much a part of Italian life, and his poignant and often hilarious stories of his relationships with his family and Italian friends, make Passion on the Vine an utterly unique and enchanting work about Italy and its eternally seductive lifestyle.
What Others Say
Sorry, I found it lame....
I could not get through Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy. After a while, it was just repetitive and frankly I missed the point.
The recollection of his childhood in Southern Italy as well as the trials of moving to Albany, was for me, the most engaging part. Once Sergio gets into traveling for wine in Italy, I found it pedantic and somewhat incredulous. As if Daniel Thomases was unaware that wine producers would open special bottles for him at Vinitaly. While Sergio at one point eschews all modern producers, the next moment, we visit with Scavino, one of the original modernists in Piedmont.
Sorry, Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy did nothing for me...
A moving eloquent, and personal expression of Love
PASSION ON THE VINE is a deeply moving, eloquent and personal expression of his love for the essence of Italian wine and its inextricable, sensual and sacred relationship with the land, its people, its culture and of course it's food. As an accomplished cook, my most surprising discovery on my first trip to Italy (Tuscany) was not the quality of the food - I've had comparable quality in LA - but how the experience of food was imbued with wine and the company of friends at table. Nothing was "segmented", nothing was rushed or regarded as "food as fuel" as in the US. It that moment, my understanding of Italian food at a soul level incarnated. And that was my experience reading Sergio's book: this is a very challenging, profound and intimate concept ... Read More
Don't stop him, he's rolling...
Although I don't have even a single corpuscle of Italian blood in me, my wife is 100%. Her grandparents on both sides were immigrants who came to Newark from the town of Avellino, which is about 45 minutes east of Naples, and if known at all in America, it's probably as the alleged hometown of Tony Soprano. Naples, of course, is far more famous for crime, but it's also the ancestral home of Sergio Esposito, author of Passion on the Vine, and it provides the springboard for his worldview and life's work.
So I know a little about life in a Southern Italian family, at least through osmosis. It would also probably constitute full disclosure to add that I have an amateur's abiding interest in Italian wine, as evidenced by a number of Amazon ... Read More
Love of vino and lotssa confusion
Esposito write with a real zest for wine and the food that accompanies it.He provides the reader with a large amount of historical information about the origin and development of the Italian wine industry. However he gives the reader little insight in how he got to where he is and how he made his business a success - if in fact it is. Finally one has to ask the question - how does he survive so much food and drink in a day only to get up and start all over? Yeah, yeah I am Italian American and I couldn't come close to what he says he does.
A wonderful book about Italian food, wine and life
Sergio Esposito, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich started Italian Wine Merchants in 1999, a retail shop that sells fine Italian wines. There are many interesting wines on offer, the staff is knowledgeable and helpful, and the weekly and monthly emails provide a wonderful education on Italian wines and wine in general.
The emails are written by Esposito, and this wonderful book is a perfect example of Esposito's warm and educational style of writing. He starts his memoir with a description of an idyllic childhood in the slums of Naples: he remembers that "women lowered baskets from their balconies to buy the fish straight from the sea and grapes straight from the vine."
When he was a child, his family moved from Naples to Albany, ... Read More
