Has No Trouble Competing With the Sound of Cannon Fire. In Fact, When the First Broadside Shakes the Restaurant, He Seems Not to Notice.
ANGELO GAJA
As he declaims about global warming, his voice has a similarly thunderous boom, prompting his daughter Gaia, sitting next to him, to suggest that he lower the volume.
“No,” he says. “This is my voice.” Gaia looks at me and shrugs while Lucia, Angelo’s wife of 39 years, also sitting nearby, smiles serenely, apparently only half listening. Gaia, I’ve noticed over the years, is a connoisseur of her father’s mannerisms and eccentricities, of which there are quite a few.
Later, finished with his jeremiad, Angelo explains to me that the air cannons were installed by the mayor of Barbaresco, a hilltop village in Italy’s Piedmont region, where the Gajas live, to be fired at clouds whenever hail threatens the local vineyards. “The neighboring villages get pissed,” he says cheerfully. Whether the cannon fire accomplishes its objective seems to be an open question.
Lunching with the Gaja family at Antica Torre, a trattoria named after a 100-foot-tall medieval tower that looms over Barbaresco, I’m struck by the juxtaposition of the domestic and the cosmic, of local and global perspectives. We’re dining upstairs—where the owner is making tajarin from very orange egg yolks and very white flour—and drinking a delicious, complex, and vibrant 1986 Gaja sauvignon blanc as an aperitif. As always, I’m fascinated by the contradictions exhibited by the patriarch of one of the world’s great wine dynasties.
This story is from the The Big Black Book Spring/Summer 2017 edition of Esquire.
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This story is from the The Big Black Book Spring/Summer 2017 edition of Esquire.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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