“For dedicated gastronomes, northern Italy’s promise of Slow Food, long lunches, and bold red wines is too good to pass up.” – Travel & Leisure Magazine
Author: wcollins
Dolcetto & Barbera & Nebbiolo – Oh My!
“The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth” – Jim Harrison
Ristorante Larossa
“The owner-chef at this restaurant follows his own path, playing with Piemontese traditions to create a mixture of classic favorites and dishes with a more creative twist. Beautifully presented cuisine which is full of flavour.” – MICHELIN guide inspectors
ALBA
The Cathedral of San Lorenzo
“The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you’re hungry again.” – George Miller, Director
The 87th Fiera Internazionale Tartufo Bianco D’Alba
“I love eggs. When it’s the season of truffles, scrambled eggs with truffles, and I’m happy. I’m smiling like that.” – Chef Éric Ripert, Le Bernardin, New York.
A Tale of Two (Wine) Cities
“For the present, I confine myself to the physical want of some good Montepulciano…this being a very favorite wine and habit having rendered the light and high flavored wines of a necessary of life with me. It was most superlatively good.” – President Thomas Jefferson
Trattoria Battibecco
La Grassa
Piazza Santo Stefano, Bologna, Italy
“Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.” – Mario Batali
Merry Christmas!
Christmas Tree at the Chateau de Chenonceau
It was a sweltering hot July afternoon in 1945 when famous jazz vocalist Mel Tormé showed up for a writing session at the Toluca Lake house of his lyric partner Bob Wells. Mel let himself in and walked over to the piano. There, on the music board, was a pad of paper with four lines of a verse:
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Eskimos
When Wells walked in the room, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, Tormé asked him about the little poem.
“It’s so damn hot today, I thought I’d write something to cool myself off,” Wells replied. “All I could think of was Christmas and cold weather.”
And that is “the rest of the story” behind one of America’s most loved contemporary Christmas hits, A Christmas Song. With this intro, I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and all of the best for 2018.
A House in Sablet
(This post was originally published on February 11, 2017)
Our vacation house in Sablet*
“Gourmets are thick on the ground in Provence, and pearls of wisdom have sometimes come from the most unlikely sources. We were getting used to the fact that the French are as passionate about food as other nationalities are about sport and politics, but even so it came as a surprise to hear Monsieur Bagnols, the floor cleaner, handicapping three-star restaurants” ― Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence.
