After a few days on Etna, I flew north to see my mother in Florence, there with her garden club from Atlanta (it was a long day, with planes, trains, and automobiles in between after I missed the one direct flight from Catania to Florence that day). I arrived hot and sweaty at the Croce di Malta hotel right off the piazza Santa Maria Novella, showered, and hurried to meet mom and her friends at Buca Lapi on the nearby via del Trebbio.
I spent my first few days in Italy down on Mt. Etna, observing the harvest at Passopisciaro. Andrea Franchetti, its owner, showed me how the color of the leaves and slope of the hills could allow him to predict what would be ready first – the vines with yellowed leaves were already bare, the sugars directed to the grapes on the areas where the soil wasn’t as rich (the deeper the green, the later the ripening goes his approach); and where there were depressions in the vineyard, however slight, those grapes too were still left to ripen, while the edges of the rows on higher ground were already plucked. We tasted from plant after plant, and for the first time I could really understand how much a single vine could vary from its neighbor. Some were just on the cusp of ripeness, with sweet juices bursting in my mouth and the seeds easily falling apart, where as others still maintained a tart, green edge.
A few months ago, I took an amazing two-week trip through Sicily with my mother. We traveled from Rome to Agrigento, through Enna and Piazza Armerina, up to Mt. Etna, down to Ragusa, Modica and Donnalucata, and over to Noto and Siracusa. Driving through the island, we were amazed by the sheer diversity of this Maine-sized plot of land in the middle of the Middle Sea – from red sandstone temples high on the hillside of Agrigento to the southwest, to the white limestone walls lining the countryside of dusty Ragusa’s farmlands, to the Baroque gems of Noto and Siracusa in the southeast, and finally to the black lavic stone of the Catania region, with Mt. Etna looming above us.
This has been a strange summer, with its waves of 70-degree days and chilly nights. Not that I am complaining – I hate the stickiness of New York summers almost more than its winters – but it has made it a little less enticing to dip into the racy whites I stocked up on at the start of the season. However, with the last days of August up in the 80s and 90s, I plan on breaking into a few of my favorites over the holiday weekend. Continue reading
It had been a long day in the car – my mother driving, me navigating, and my long-legged brother in the back seat trying not to get car sick – as we drove up from Agrigento in the southwest, through Enna and Piazza Armerina, home to the lovely and well-preserved Roman mosaics at the Villa Romana del Casale. With Mt. Etna’s peak long looming in the distance, we were happy to finally have arrive on the lower slopes of the volcano. Just past the tight, black stone-cobbled streets of Santa Venerina, we stumbled upon the road sign leading the way to our destination, the hotel Monaci delle Terre Nere. 
Winding through the streets of Trastevere in Rome, you hardly expect a door to open into a minimalist, open space, but clean and modern is exactly what you get when you arrive at the end of Vicolo Dè Cinque and enter Glass Hostaria. The design of the space puts raw materials to beautiful use, from the crumpled screens on the ceiling to windows in the floor peering onto bottles artfully laid across stones.
Scallops were never something I’d thought much about: I recognized their white, cylindrical forms and enjoyed their smooth, rich texture and caramelized bits at restaurants. But growing up nowhere near the sea, I had no idea what the shell of a scallop looked like or really how it ended up on my plate. So when I found myself signing up for a cooking class that focused on preparing scallops two ways, I didn’t really know what to expect. And since it took place at the école de cuisine Alain Ducasse in Paris, I prayed that my long-dormant French would come back to life well enough to follow the teacher’s instructions.
I arrived in Paris to join my grandmother for a few days while she was visiting the city. Completely unfamiliar with the 1er arrondisement, where we were staying instead of our usual Left Bank stomping grounds, we looked for places to eat that were not too far afield. Our hotel gave us a few recommendations, and my ears perked when I heard that the chef of a little bistro around the corner was formerly of the world-renowned Tour d’Argent. After meeting a friend for a brief apéro, we dropped by to see if they could squeeze us in. We were in luck; as it was toward the end of dinner service, they had a table that had just left, which they quickly cleared for us.
At the end of a long day at Mendoza’s Nieto Senetiner, my friends and I toasted a beautiful evening and the long-term partnership between viticulturalist Tomas Hughes and winemaker Roberto Gonzalez, who have been making wine together for over twenty years. We’d tasted many of their “children” — beautiful malbecs and a vertical of the best bonarda I’ve ever had — and finished the night with a lovely rosé sparkling wine, a pinot noir with a touch of malbec, topped with a bit of grappa in the bottle. Salud!
