Put your drinking caps on: Little Italy class delves into organic Italian wines

Little Italy Food Hall pizzeria Ambrogio15 will highlight eight artisan Italian wines and pair them with traditional Venetian small bites, or ‘cicchetti’

San Diego Union-Tribune

Sept. 8, 2019 6 AM PT

Now here’s a back-to-school special we can get behind: the Little Italy Food Hall pizzeria Ambrogio15 will host a class on small-production, organic and biodynamic wines from Italy, complete with Venetian-style tapas/snacks called cicchetti.

Sommeliers from DOCG Imports — the acronym is a nod to Italy’s highest designation of quality — will pour eight artisan wines, three from the Veneto region, five from Sardinia.

There will also be a discussion of the wines’ flavor profiles and the natural production process in which they’re made. Ambrogio15, which in the fall will open the fast-casual pasta shop Semola in the food hall, will pair the wines with cicchetti. Wines varieties include prosecco, bardolino, amarone, vermentino, rosé of cannonau (grenache) and carignano.

Choose from two, two-hour sessions, held back-to-back on the patio in the piazza. Like every class should be.

Wine and Cicchetti at Ambrogio15

5-7 p.m. or 7-9 p.m. Tuesday. 550 W. Date St., Little Italy. $49. (619) 269-7187. littleitalyfoodhall.com/event/a15wine

Michele Parente

Michele Parente is the Dining, Wine + Lifestyle reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her areas of expertise include the Valle de Guadalupe wine region, fashion, television, women’s issues and coverage of aging, such as the impact of Alzheimer’s and dementia and family caregiving. Michele is the former Sunday and features editor, where she oversaw profiles, special projects, such as the Legacy of WWII and in-depth reports on a variety of topics. She joined the U-T in 2003, supervising coverage areas that have included features, fashion, TV, Food, Consumer Health and Arts & Entertainment. Previously, Michele was the assistant features editor at The Oregonian, in Portland, as well as the Portland City Hall reporter. She spent 10 years at New York Newsday as a reporter on the crime, education, state legislature and New York City Hall beats. She was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting. A native New Yorker, Michele received her B.A. in political science and Italian Literature at UC Berkeley. In 1980, she studied at L’Università di Urbino, in Italy. One of her life’s goals is to make her way through each of the world’s great wine regions.