I moved to Bra, a small town in the Piedmont region of Italy, when I was 21 to get a master’s degree in food culture and communications from the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Back then, my relatively limited knowledge of food came from binge-watching Ina Garten and collecting a mountainous pile of cookbooks that threatened to take over my bedroom.
Wine, in particular, was a mystery to me. Before Italy, my drinking experiences were limited to whatever my friends and I could sneak from our parents’ liquor cabinets, preferably something sickly sweet like peach schnapps and vanilla vodka drowned in Diet Coke. I’d never enjoyed wine, and I certainly couldn’t discern the nuance of one varietal from another.
