R ecently I watched an absorbing and compelling documentary about the musician, Ron Carter. A giant in the jazz world, Ron is now 86 and sti...

from the archives ... I t started last night while I was looking for a bottle of wine to go with the lasagne. I wanted something a bit ru...

from the archives .. Ed. note: Prescient this post was, in 2014. For when I next went to Sicily in 2016, I indeed was in a pretty awful c...

I t’s not every day one can expound about an American success story. Sure, there are scores of them - this country exists for attainment, at...

  As some of you have noticed and emailed me, I no longer entertain a comment section. About four months ago, I tried an experiment to tur...

J uly was an amazing month for On the Wine Trail in Italy . The readership is tremendous and the response has been marvelous for a category ...

T his week, I was re-organizing my wine collection. There were several cases of white and rosé wine that had stacked up in the utility room,...

R ecently, I stopped in to see an old friend and erstwhile client, an Italian restaurateur. We had a glass of Gavi together and caught up. H...

  I n memory of Luigi Pira and Dino Illuminati I was in the room next to my wine closet when I thought I heard the murmur of low voices. Th...

The Italy that Americans forget L ately I’ve taken to reading excerpts from people’s trips to Italy. Wine country, the cities, the fashionab...

I was taking a coffee break recently with a friend, catching up, and he remarked about some crappy restaurant service he’d recently gotten. ...

from the archives ... F orget anything you know about Basilicata and Southern Italy. Disregard anyone telling you this is the poorest reg...

T he other day, I listened in on an NPR TED Hour podcast about what the “ future you ” looks like. Who will you be in 5 years? In 20 years? ...

O k, here goes. I’ve been in a quandary lately. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe the state of the country. Or the world. In any ev...

H ere’s the thing: Life, at any age, can be as rich or as impoverished as one can stand it to be. There, so much for my philosophy of late. ...