The Best American Travel Writing 2014 Read Free Page A

from a corner of the garage. He grabbed a wide white bowl and splashed the purple wine into it as the wine formed a pink foam. “My customers insist on white bowls for the red,” Antonio said, “to bring out the color and aromas.”
    I closed my eyes and took a sniff, then took a sip. Sharp, fresh, tangy, earthy. Wow! The aromas and flavors were like a time machine. I was again 19, dressed in a Grateful Dead T-shirt and Birkenstocks, experiencing wine for the first time. Holding the huge wide bowl to my face nearly brought me to tears in the dark garage. “Ah, Lambrusco,” I said, with a satisfied smile.
    Antonio laughed. “Lambrusco? No, no, no. This is Gutturnio!”
    â€œGutturnio?” I said. What the hell was Gutturnio? I must have said something wrong. Maybe I was having trouble understanding the dialect. “Is that the local name for Lambrusco?” I asked.
    He laughed again. “No! It’s Gutturnio. It’s a blend of Barbera and Bonarda.”
    Um . . . what? For 20 years, I’d been telling myself that my seminal wine experience had been Lambrusco. Now I find out that it was a wine called Gutturnio? And how had I never even heard of this wine? It’s not like it’s new. I later learned that the Romans drank it from a round jug called a
gutturnium,
from which the wine’s name is taken. Julius Caesar’s father-in-law was famous for producing this wine.
    We sat at Antonio’s table and ate cheese and meat with the wine, and Anna and Antonio reminisced about the old days. Antonio said that he now sold about 4,000 bottles per year, about half what he had about 20 years ago. “Ah,” he said, “a lot of my customers, they’re dying.” Meanwhile, the younger generation just isn’t as interested in local wines like his anymore. “Nowadays, people want different tastes. There are a lot of other tastes that people seek.” Antonio shrugged. “There is an end for everything. Everything ends.”
    Suddenly, this humble, fizzy, purple Gutturnio that I swirled around in a white bowl—which connected me to my own past, to ancient Rome, and yet at the same time was totally fresh knowledge—seemed more important than even the greatest Barolo. The strange experience I was having in a farmhouse in the Piacenza hills seemed to me to be the very essence of wine, the reason people spend their lives obsessed with it, an example of how wine becomes part of our lives.
    As I thought about all this—about wine and Italy and youth and family and revisiting scenes of unadulterated happiness—it occurred to me that this wasn’t so different from how one falls in love with travel in the first place. They might even go hand in hand. And telling this kind of story isn’t so different from telling any other story that one might call travel writing.
    Camus and others may have a point—that travel is about fear and suffering and travail. That has become an accepted truth of travel writing. But this truth is only partially correct. Travel is also very much about love and memory. I’m hoping that this anthology shows you that love—as well as fear and suffering and travail.
    Â 
    The stories included here were, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications—from mainstream and specialty magazines to Sunday newspaper travel sections to literary journals to travel websites. I’ve done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2013 were forwarded to guest editor Paul Theroux, who made our final selections.
    This is the second time I’ve worked with Paul on this anthology (the first was way back in 2001), and it was just as much of an honor today to work with a travel writing hero of mine and a master of the genre. The world has changed a great deal since 2001, but I think you’ll find that the key characteristics of