An excerpt from a recent piece I wrote for LAN Airlines award-winning in-flight magazine, IN, the June Edition is all about South American wine. Here, I orient readers with a sampling of Chile's varied terroir close to Santiago (only four valleys out of a dozen!),...
Puerto Varas may very well be the “Portland” of Chile. It’s lush. It rains a lot. The town is steeped in Chile’s Germanic history yet laid back and modern. It has a stunning natural setting on the shores of the azure Llanquihue Lake with vistas of the conical...
When you sit down to any table, anywhere in the 2,600 miles of national territory stretching from the border of Peru to the tip of South America, three things will immediately appear: bread (many times homemade), butter, and pebre. Pebre, Chilean “salsa”, is the...
Take an informal poll among Chileans of what food they crave when they are in country, out-of-country, any time of the day, and in many cases, would call the “unofficial” national dish of Chile, and they will tell you: El Lomito. This towering, mammoth pork...
Bread junkies. Carbaholics. Chileans are not scared of white flour, or lard for that matter. Maybe that’s why the bread here tastes so damn good. And in fact, to throw out some statistics, they have an annual per capita consumption of 100kg, or 220 pounds,...
Two years ago in Chicago, a couple hip colleagues invited me to a little wine bar on Milwaukee named Juicy Wine Co. We gnoshed on slinky Serrano ham and some nutty Manchego while sipping away a Sicilian wine, Tenuta delle Terre Nere, an unbelievably fresh yet earthy...
Freshly arrived in the Patagonian outpost town of Puerto Natales, after a full day’s schlep from Santiago (4 hours flying, 3 hours driving from Punta Arenas), we are famished. Desperately seeking lunch, our hotel, Indigo , recommends a tasty new place up the...
Can a whole dinner revolve around a single wine? Most definitely. I love working in reverse. On Friday, the whole pretext of the dinner was to crack open my friend Melissa’s ’97 bottle of Beaulieu Tapestry . She sent me the Cellar Tracker ) notes for planning. It...
This coming Saturday, May 2, the tiny little coastal appellation of San Antonio will be getting on its first wine festival from 11am-6pm. San Antonio is about an hour west of Santiago over the steep coastal mountains. In my opinion, San Antonio is hands down...
Living on Parque Forestal on the edge of downtown Santiago, I love a Saturday morning (culinary) shopping excursion. It’s a beautiful morning. I head out on my usual route by the the Art Museum and walking towards the centro on Merced. I pop in to Chinese Mark...
Don Pedro is frantic. The bodega alarm won’t stop shreking. It is shrill enough to hurt our ear drums a little. He greets us shrugging his shoulders and laughing in surrender. Suddenly there is silence. Meet Don Pedro Rossell--Argentina’s primo maestro in...
Sunday night we came back from what I can only qualify as a mind-blowing four days in Patagonia. We headed down to cover a new gastronomic program called Tasting Chile with the “extreme” fly-fishing/ecotourism cruise called Nomads of the Seas. The objective?...
Entertaining at our place has been on hiatus for the past couple months as work, life, and trips enveloped us and left me wanting to order out, not cook in for a crowd. This past long weekend over Easter in Santiago was very quiet. A small exodus to the beaches had...
You know, it’s really Amazing how close Mendoza is to Santiago. Normally, I just jump on the LAN shuttle and bam, 45 minutes later over the Andes, I am there. However, this time, Francisco and I decided to take the scenic route and drive, something we hadn’t...
For years, I dreamed about owning a Kitchen Aid Mixer. A bright cherry red one. It was my ultimate baking toy. I thought of all the amazing Christmas cookies I would whip up, the creamiest mashed potatoes I would make. Then I realized that my love for the mixer...
In a year's time, we receive a lot of people with our Culinary & Wine Tours business (www.lizcaskey.com) that are very savvy wine drinkers. They come to Chile and Argentina to experience the wines in their place of origin, taste the local terroir, and inevitably,...
I wanted to give a heads up though about a great show airing in the US on PBS: The Diary of a Foodie. The Chile episode, called Chile Mestizo, is presently broadcasting across the US. It’s an episode rather dear to my heart since I was brought in to collaborate...
For many years, Sauvignon Blanc in Chile has been synonymous with the Casablanca Valley–that foggy valley off of Route 68 on the road to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar. Mostly dairy farms until 1982, winemaker Pablo Morandé was the first to pioneer and plant wines here,...
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