Friends are like good wine
And I’ve had the best…

So drink up.

Man, what a great night last night at Rossoblu where I presented a packed Abruzzo consortium dinner!

I have to give a shout out to my friends Chef Steve Samson (above, center) and his wife and business partner Dina Samson (above, left).

For seven years, I wrote the wine list at their epic southern Italian restaurant Sotto. It’s one of the chapters of my career that I’m most proud of.

Chef Steve and I met on our junior year abroad in Italy when we were both 19 years old. We became fast friends and it didn’t take long before I was heading down to Bologna with him to play a ton of music and hang with his group of childhood friends. His mom was from Bologna and he spent his summers there as a kid. I was so lucky to connect with him fresh off the boat! And I’m still very close to our Bologna crew.

After college, I headed to grad school and chef began working with the legendary Los Angeles restaurateur Piero Selvaggio.

One of Piero’s best friends was Charles Speroni, one of the major benefactors of the Italian department at UCLA where I did my doctorate. And through that connection, Steve and I were reunited again.

Somehow we both managed to move to New York at the same time. And again, our paths connected over great food and wine and a long history together. In New York, Steve would introduce me to another musician with whom I would play countless shows on the Lower East Side scene.

It just seemed to be destiny that one day we would work together. That moment came in 2009 when he and Dina opened Sotto. Chef’s cooking was praised glowingly by Jonathan Gold in the Weekly and Irene Virbila in the Times. She loved our origin story and retold it multiple times in her column. Los Angeles magazine called our list one of the best programs in the city.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been presenting wine dinners at their downtown restaurant Rossoblu. And they’re going to be seeing a lot more of me in LA as we launch a couple of exciting new projects. Stay tuned.

Thank you, Steve and Dina! Friends are like good wine and I’ve had the best!

Photo by Jeffrey Chan.