Reading Papero Giallo to keep up on Italian food news

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One of the RSS feeds I read regularly is Papero Giallo from Gambero Rosso founder and longtime former director Stefano Bonilli. (Gambero Rosso is a respected Italian restaurant guide.) Bonilli’s 6-year-old blog is in Italian, but with the help of an Italian dictionary, it’s not that difficult to get the gist of his entries.

For me, that’s much of the point. I want to stretch my vocabulary and at the same time keep up with what’s happening in Italy’s restaurant world. I met Bonilli in London earlier this year and after decades of following the food world, he’s still full of the curiosity and passion evident in his blog. He also gets around -- to New York, to Australia, Spain and elsewhere. Check out the links on his site.

This week he reports that the Roberto Anselmi winery in the Soave region has been flooded. All the boxes ready for shipment, ruined. The server with all the winery’s accounts and data, ruined. The bottling line, too. Fortunately, the casks on the upper floor are OK.

What a shame. Anselmi is one of the most innovative producers in the Veneto, known for his fresh white wines and passito-style dessert wines. In fact, I think I still have a bottle of his luscious sweet wine ‘I Capitelli’ in my cellar. I’m going to open it tonight.

-- S. Irene Virbila