“Wealth is determined not by how much money you have but by how you manage your time… One of my goals is to offer my clients traditional wines at reasonable prices.” This was how young winemaker Nicola Ferrari, founder and owner of Monte Santoccio in Valpolicella, described the ethos of his wines and his approach […]
Where do we go from here? When my friend and client Tony Vallone opened last Thursday’s dinner (at Tony’s in Houston) with 1998 Bartolo Mascarello Barolo, I wondered how the subsequent wines could possibly compete with such a stellar entry. Tony paired this extraordinary bottle with a porcini mushroom risotto, made with Acquerello rice and […]
Stranger things have happened: last week Forbes contacted me asking if they could use a photo (above) from the blog for the magazine. Here’s the link to the piece. The image comes from my of the “most memorable meals” of 2011, a dinner in the restaurant of my friend and client Tony Vallone. Here’s the […]
There was one sine qua non pillar of Americana that Giovanni had not yet experienced on his “Easy Rider USA Tour 2012”: fried chicken, the way its done in the South. And so on his last day in Texas, we decided to take a ride to the south side of Austin to Lucy’s Fried Chicken, […]
I never had the fortune to meet Bartolo Mascarello before he passed. But over the years, I’ve become friends with Maria Teresa Mascarello, his daughter (above). We’ve visited at the winery and I taste with her every chance I get (and a few years ago I was thrilled to buy a single-edition collection of Arabic […]
Except for the cover of Hemingway’s novel below, all the images here were captured when we tasted at the winery in January 2011. In 1949, as he lay dying (or convinced that he was about to die as the result of hunting accident) in Venice, Ernest Hemingway famously drank Valpolicella. His brush with death and […]
If you’ve landed here, please see today’s post on Quintarelli with remembrances by his student Luca Fedrigo. Italy’s top wine blogger Franco Ziliani has just posted the news that the great master of Valpolicella — one of the greatest winemakers of our lifetime — Giuseppe Quintarelli has died (photo via Wineries Wine). I never had […]
Curating Tony’s website and serving as his media director has its perks. This dinner, in August, was one of them. It’s a tough job but someone has to do it! From the department of “dreams do come true”… When we sat down for dinner last week, Tony Vallone looked across the table at me and […]
From the department of “dreams do come true”… When we sat down for dinner last week, Tony Vallone looked across the table at me and matter-of-factly said, “I have some special wines picked out for you tonight. I know you’re going to like them.” He wasn’t kidding. I’ve been curating his blog since October 2010 […]
Last week, when I attended the John Mariani dinner at Tony’s in Houston (where John spoke about and signed copies of his new book How Italian Food Conquered the World), I had the great fortune to taste one of Quintarelli’s rarest wines, his 1990 Amabile del Cerè “Bandito” (thanks to a guest at Tony and […]
Do Bianchi 