“What happened in Montalcino earlier this month was horrendous, but as bad as it was, it paled in comparison to what has been going on in...

O dd, that on the 7th birthday of this blog I would be writing about death. What started out as a simple little blog has almost taken over ...

I don’t know why folks hate fruitcake so much. Guess they never had one made with love. My mom turned 98 in May and this year she sent me...

From the "chefs can't count" dept. W hen Christmas rolls into town, inevitably, among Italian-Americans, there is talk o...

I t all started when I was tasting wine with a friend, Damon Ornowski, who is a master sommelier. We were taking apart some wine and I menti...

T hese wines can be found fairly easily and usually for under $10 – not usually what I blog about, but knowing there are folks looking for...

An arrest is made in Montalcino - a lone man acting in revenge against Soldera Screen shot from the Daily Beast Soldera saga unfolds ...

Y ou are a young child of three. You hear the phone ring in the night. Your father answers. Your mother screams and then starts to sob. Fo...

Louisiana Gulf Oyster fired up "Chuckwagon Style" L iving in landlocked Dallas, Texas , I've found the evolution of seafoo...

I n the Spring of 1999 we visited a vineyard in the Marche. When I saw this vineyard, I thought to myself, “What a wonderful place this w...

When appalling events trigger knee-jerk drama Caronne Ste Gemme after the attack E arlier this year, after Vinitaly, I went to Bordeau...

I t had been 25 years since I’d last been in Calabria. I was expecting at least 25 years’ worth of change. What I found was far from that. ...

“D on’t play with your food,” our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and nuns used to tell us. That was then. America has a whole new order ...

Dallas circa 1966 (Photos by author) A s a youth living in California I often heard about Dallas. Dallas, the town where my father was b...

A t first glance, it appeared to be just an orchard of ancient olive trees. We arrived on a day when there had been a lot of rain. The soi...