Stories about food, wine, memory, and place—and the things worth keeping.
What you’ll find here
I’m interested in where things come from.
The recipe someone almost threw away. The vineyard underneath a subdivision. The immigrant who brought a grape with him. The dish nobody wrote down because everyone assumed someone would remember. The bottle that opens a much larger story about land, history, or the people who made it.
Sometimes there’s a recipe.
Sometimes there’s a glass of wine.
Usually there’s a story I went looking for and something I didn’t expect to find.
Where to start
If you’d like to understand what I’m doing here, start with The Keepers and 257 Years.
The Keepers began with family recipe boxes — handwritten cards, fading memories, and dishes that might have disappeared if nobody stopped to ask about them.
“But her real curriculum was the kitchen. Clara was a wonderful cook, and she made wedding cakes for other people’s most important days. Stories tall, my mother says.”
257 Years follows another kind of inheritance: California wine history, particularly the Southern California story that has been paved over, pulled out, forgotten, or simply overshadowed by what came later.
“Los Angeles was once the wine capital of California. There were eighty wineries in Cucamonga alone. At one point, more vineyard acreage grew here than in Sonoma and Napa combined.”
A little about me
I grew up in Southern California, near the ocean, in a family where gathering around food was simply part of life.
I spent about three decades in advertising and creative work, moved around a bit, lived overseas, and eventually found my way into wine and writing. I hold WSET Level 3 with Merit, although what interests me most about wine isn’t identifying what’s in the glass. It’s everything that got it there: the land, the people, the history, and the culture.
I live in the California desert with Archie, a German Shepherd who has opinions about everything and absolutely no concept of personal space.
What’s coming
I publish a couple of thoughtful pieces each month rather than trying to fill your inbox for the sake of a schedule.
Expect heritage recipes and the people behind them, Southern California wine history, food and agricultural traditions, stories from farther afield, and whatever else sends me down a rabbit hole worth bringing back.
How it works
New stories and standalone recipes are free to read
If you’d like to support the research, reporting, and writing behind Writing from the Table, paid subscribers also receive access to The Larder, a growing collection of projects and downloadable editions, beginning with a wine history collection later this year.
There’s also a Founding tier, The Hearth, for readers who want to support the work at a higher level.
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