The best deal in town on Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. Homemade Italian sausage. A muffaletta sandwich that will last for four lunches. Fans crowd into Jimmy’s Market, a 50-year-old neighborhood institution in East Dallas, at lunchtime and on Saturday mornings. It’s diminutive and funky, shelves crammed with delicacies from Italy and New Jersey and arguably the best all-Italian wine selection in the city. What many may not know is that the winemakers who craft the juice come all the way from Italy to centerpiece wine dinners, in a barely labeled ‘Wine Room’ in the back of the store.  

On one wall are photos of the hundred winemakers who’ve made the pilgrimage to Jimmy’s to keynote a wine dinner. Among them: Allegra Antinori, whose family’s wine heritage goes back 632 years, Giorgio Rivetti, whose winery, La Spinetta, with an Albrecht Durer rhinoceros on the label, is one of the most recognized in Italy, and Luca Currado, whose century-old winery Vietti is a teenager by Italian standards, which makes some of the best wines in the Piedmont region of northern Italy.