Just over a year ago, in February 2016, the director and deputy director of the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce of Texas called me to their Houston offices to discuss how we could make their Taste of Italy trade show bigger, better, and brighter.

We needed to get the greater Texas food and wine community involved, I told them, and we needed to reach out to local media to help us raise awareness of this unique festival.

I also suggested that we invite food and wine experts from beyond Texas to give the event the world-class credentials that it deserved.

And, of course, I told them that we needed to start a blog.

On Monday of last week, not only did I lead five tastings for the more than 300 Taste of Italy attendees and more than 60 exhibitors, but I also watched the Texas restaurant and food professionals community coalesce around this spectacular enogastronomic happening — the biggest in the U.S. devoted exclusively to Italy and Italian food and wine products.

One of the biggest thrills was seeing this preview of our Carbonara seminar and panel in the Houston Chronicle by my friend Chris Reid, one of the Texas food writers I admire most (I believe the content is still free to non-subscribers).

I loved how this iconic dish, which today is equally popular on both sides of the Atlantic, united both Italians and Americans in an expression of cultural culinary identity. In case you missed the seminar, Chris gave an excellent talk on how Texans and Italians are very much alike in their proud and often fierce connection to dishes that reflect their gastronomic ethos. Whether it’s a question of beans in Texas chili or guanciale versus pancetta in carbonara, Chris touched on the way that what and how we eat increasingly defines who were are and what we believe in.

Chris and Houston chefs Paul Petronella and William Wright, who each cooked a carbonara — one with pecorino and the other with Parmigiano Reggiano — for the seminar (above, from left), are just two of the countless people I need to thank for being part of the fair.

I also need to share my heartfelt thanks with my colleague Christina Truong from Food and Vine Time Productions here in Houston. Working in a stressful situation (like any major food event) really brings people together and I can’t think of a more talented and even-keeled person to call colleague and friend.

But most importantly, I need to thank the chamber’s director and deputy director, Alessia Paolicchi and Maurizio Gamberucci, for believing in my crazy ideas and trusting in my intuition and experience. Over the last twelve months, they’ve both become my friends as well. And my life in Texas is all the richer for the camaraderie and solidarity they have shared with me.

We all look forward to welcoming you next year to Taste of Italy 2018!

Click here for notes and numbers from this year’s gathering.

Earlier this week, I was a presenter at the Taste of Italy trade fair and festival in Houston.

The marquee event of the festival was a seminar on carbonara, including a talk on the origins of the history of the dish by me and my colleague Chris Reid, a food writer for the Houston Chronicle and the author of numerous articles on the dish, its recipe, and its history. I, too, have authored a number of posts where I have published my research on carbonara.

When it came time to take questions and comments from the audience, an Italian woman raised her hand and I gave her the microphone.

“I have a doctorate in Italian literature,” she said, addressing my colleague Chris and me. “And everything you have said about carbonara is false.”

She then proceeded to give us a lecture on how the true origins of the dish lie not in post-Second World War Rome and the era of Italy’s reconstruction, when products like dried pasta first became readily available to Italians. Instead, she said as she admonished us, the dish was invented and favored by the Carbonari, the secretive Italian revolutionaries from the 1800s (see the Wikipedia entry here).

After they would engage in acts of insurrection in the cities, she said, they would return to their hiding places in the hills and mountains where they would prepare spaghetti alla carbonara. And that, she told us confidently, is the true origin of the dish.

Never mind that the earliest mentions of any dish named carbonara appear only in the 1950s (the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, the Italian Oxford English Dictionary, dates the first mention of a dish known as carbonara as 1951 and my colleague Chris has discovered a mention in La Stampa in 1950).

Never mind that none of the landmark cookery books of the 19th century mention carbonara. In fact, there is no mention in Artusi or Cavalcanti, both of whom first published their first books after the era of the Carbonari (1800-1830).

Never mind that Italian diets outside of Campania didn’t incorporate long noodle or die-cut pasta before the second post-war era: anyone familiar with the work of Italian food historian Massimo Montanari can attest to this.

No siree. Despite the fact that she had just attended a lecture by two established food writers and food historians, she felt compelled to let us know what idiots we were.

It’s time for this travesty of culinary ignorance to come to end once and for all.

Thanks for reading.

This post is a preview of one of the topics I’ll be covering later this year in my seminar on food writing for the Master’s in Food Culture at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont, Italy.

Words simply don’t suffice in thanking Houston wine professional Jaime de Leon for putting together such a superb group of sommeliers yesterday at the Taste of Italy festival.

I couldn’t have been prouder to co-present a Vinitaly tasting of top wines from Valpolicella (one of the five tastings I presented yesterday) with my good friend Elise Vandenberg and Vinitaly International managing director Stevie Kim.

And Jaime and his team delivered the top-notch wine service that this excellent flight of wines deserved. And they showed not only what a talented group of wine professionals we have here in my adoptive city and state, but also what a warm and close-knit wine community that has flourished here in recent years.

Thank you, Jaime, and thanks to your team. What a great day for Italian wine in Houston!

The only downside to being a presenter at this type of event is that it’s hard to get good photos.

That’s a snap, above, from the “New Wave White Wine” tasting that David Lynch (center), Jaime (foreground), and another good friend of mine, Thomas Moësse (another one of our city’s leading wine pros), and I presented yesterday morning.

Thank you, David, for coming out to check out our wine scene here. And thank you, Thomas, for being part of the panel.

And of course, it was wonderful to see Stevie in Texas and work with her team.

Warm thanks also go out to Maya Wakita, my counterpart on the Vinitaly team. It was really fun working with you.

To everyone who helped to make yesterday such a seamless event (Alessia, Maurizio, Carlo, Elena, Federica, Alessandra, Christina, Nathan, Sean, and so many more) and to everyone from Houston who came out to taste with us, thank you, as well: it was one of those days that reminded me how lucky I am to do what I do for a living and how blessed I am to be part of the Texas wine community.

See you next year at Taste of Italy Houston!

When I started wine blogging back in July of 2006, my site was an html-driven journal of my tasting notes and some crude photos (shot on floppy disk!) of memorable dishes and wines. A tour that summer in France with my band Nous Non Plus and the meals that came with it were just the thing to get it all going. And my life as an aspiring food and wine writer in New York provided plenty of materia prima.

Then something remarkable happened: someone Googled me and found my blog. And it just so happened that person who had typed my name into the Google was a writer for the New York Times. The next thing I knew, my name appeared in the paper along with a quote about Lambrusco. It was then that I realized that I had inadvertently joined a vibrant and growing virtual community of food, wine, and spirits bloggers.

Since that time, the blog — which I continue to update 4-5 times a week — has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, both personally and professionally.

It’s thanks to the blog that I met Tracie P (we met online by commenting on each other’s blogs). It’s thanks to the blog that I’ve developed a network of friends and colleagues across the U.S., Europe, Australia, and even Asia. But most importantly to me, it’s thanks to the blog that I have kept a detailed diary of my life, my thoughts, my feelings, my fears and hopes, my joys and disappointments, for more than 10 years now.

Over the years, I’ve watched (with envy, I’ll admit) as many of my peers and blogging colleagues have won countless awards and prizes for their writing. But even after more than a decade, I’ve never won anything (I was once nominated for a Wine Blogger badge but that was about as far as I got).

But maybe, just maybe, my luck is about to change: it was with great pride (I won’t deny) that I learned that my blog has been nominated for a Corriere della Sera Cucina Blog Award. If you’re not familiar with the Corriere, it’s one of Italy’s leading national dailies and its food and wine blog is one of Italy’s most popular.

I couldn’t be more thrilled to join such high-profile company: the excellent blogs Punch and Two for the Bar are also nominated in the category.

I’ll be following the selection process closely, as you can imagine. But even if I don’t win, this nomination means the world to me. Beyond documenting my own life in wine, food, and love, my blog’s mission has always been that of giving an English-language voice to the Italian farmers, food producers, winemakers, and food and wine writers whom I follow. The nomination leads me to believe that someone, somewhere out there, is listening to that voice.

Please keep your fingers crossed for me and check out the other nominees here.

All the odds are in my favor
Something’s bound to begin,
It’s got to happen, happen sometime
Maybe this time,
Maybe this time, I’ll win.

For years, I have argued — here on my blog and in the Houston Press — that the Texas ban on out-of-state wine sales runs counter to Republican and red-state values and ideals.

No one needs me to tell them how Texan Republicans stand for fewer regulations, less government interference, and more liberal free trade policies that make the state a great home for businesses — small and large.

Yet when it comes to how wine is imported, distributed, sold, and shipped in the state of Texas, my state’s government has imposed some of the most restrictive laws in the nation.

When I read last week about a new bill that would lift the out-of-state ban on industry advocate Tom Wark’s blog last week, I immediately called the office of Texas state representative Matt Rinaldi (above), the author of the bill, and requested an appointment to interview him for my wine column for the Houston Press.

I met with him yesterday in his office in the state capitol: here’s the link to my article this morning for the paper.

It’s still hard for me to wrap my mind around the incongruity between the Texans’ love of freedom and the way wine, beer, and spirits are sold in our state. The bottom line is that the Texas wholesalers lobby has historically shaped shipping and sales regulations to suit their love of profit. Texan wine lovers are among the victims of their greed and their unscrupulous methods in driving out competition. And more importantly, their unbridled love of money continues to stifle wine culture in this state.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered leading wine professionals — not to mention aspiring wine professionals — who simply don’t have access to some of the world’s most iconic wines because they are unavailable in Texas. I remember meeting two Master Sommelier candidates at the airport in Austin as they were traveling to San Francisco to taste in a liberal wine market (liberal in terms of regulation) where they would have a much wider range of wines available to them. It’s enough to make a Texan eat her hat.

Texans, said Rinaldi when we met yesterday in Austin, “should be given the freedom to do what makes them happy as long as it doesn’t interfere with the rights of anyone else.”

To borrow Wark’s phrase, HALLELUJAH! Click here to read the interview in the Houston Press.