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Petite Wine Traveler, Santa Barbara, FL (2026)

07/29/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, the holiday I founded, and today we arrive where the lemons are a civilization: Amalfi, for the Limoncello Spritz. The sfusato amalfitano, the long, sweet, thick-skinned lemon of this coast, is so treasured it carries its own protected designation, grown on terraces that have stepped down these cliffs for a thousand years, held up by stone walls built entirely by hand.

The limoncello story is a beautiful argument. Amalfi, Sorrento, and Capri each claim the golden liqueur as their own invention, families on all three shores insisting their grandmothers steeped the first peels in alcohol and sugar. What is documented is delicious in its own right: the name limoncello was registered as a trademark only in 1988, by a Capri businessman honoring the recipe his grandmother poured for guests of her small inn in the early 1900s, which means one of Italy’s most iconic drinks went formally on the record within living memory, after a century of grandmothers perfecting it in kitchens above the sea.

On the Amalfi Coast it is served the way hospitality itself is served here, ice cold, in a tiny frosted glass, at the end of every meal, on the house more often than not, because a coastline this generous with beauty is generous by reflex. Lengthened with prosecco and soda, it becomes golden hour you can drink.

The pour: one part limoncello, three parts prosecco, a splash of soda over ice, with a lemon wheel and fresh mint.
One sip and you are on a terrace above Amalfi at dusk, the lemon groves breathing around you, the sea turning silver below. That is wine as a passport.

petitewinetraveler

07/28/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, the holiday I founded, and today we anchor off Ponza, the island Romans have whispered about for two thousand years, for the Biancolella Spritzer, made from a white grape that grows in cliff terraces above the sea. Ponza is the largest of the Pontine islands, a crescent of pastel houses and grottoes in water so blue it looks invented.

Here the story is older than wine records, it is myth. The ancients associated these islands with Circe, the enchantress of the Odyssey who detained Odysseus and his crew, and standing in Ponza’s coves at dusk you understand why sailors believed a sorceress lived here: this is a place that makes you forget you meant to leave. I like to imagine her cup, the one Homer says she offered arriving sailors, tasting something like Biancolella, golden, saline, softened by volcanic soil, persuasive beyond argument. The grape is real and gloriously local, grown in the hand-built terraces of Ponza and its sister islands of the Campanian sea, where everything must be carried up the cliffs and the wine tastes of the effort. Islanders drink it young and cold with seafood pulled from the water below the vineyards, because on Ponza the distance from vine to table to sea is measured in footsteps.

The pour: three parts chilled Biancolella, or Falanghina if the bar prefers, one part soda water, over ice with lemon.

One sip and you are in a cove on Ponza with the cliffs glowing gold, entirely enchanted and in no hurry to break the spell. That is wine as a passport.

petitewinetraveler winetravelwriter enotourism yachting Mediterranean

07/28/2026

* Reposting** as the video got cut off yesterday!

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, and today the passport turns French as we sail beneath the white cliffs of Bonifacio, Corsica, for the Cap Corse Spritz, made with the island’s most beloved aperitif. Bonifacio may be the most dramatic harbor in the Mediterranean, a medieval city balanced on chalk cliffs that seem to hang over the sea, guarding the strait between Corsica and Sardinia.

The story begins in 1872 at the other end of the island, where Louis-Napoléon Mattei, a Corsican with a merchant’s eye and a patriot’s heart, created Cap Corse Mattei, a quinquina aperitif built on Corsican muscat wine, island herbs, cinchona bark, and the cédrat, the great fragrant citron that grows on the Cap Corse peninsula. It became Corsica’s drink so completely that Mattei’s name still stands over his original shop in Bastia a century and a half later, and no Corsican apéro hour is complete without that amber bottle on the table. Corsicans drink it as they do most things, on their own terms, chilled, unhurried, with olives and lonzu and strong opinions, and in recent years the world’s sommeliers have rediscovered what the island never forgot. Crowned with sparkling wine, it becomes the grandest spritz France never brags about.

The pour: two parts Cap Corse Blanc, three parts sparkling wine, a splash of soda over ice with a citrus wheel. If the bar carries no Cap Corse, Lillet Blanc stands in gracefully.
One sip, honeyed and gently bitter, and you are on the marina at Bonifacio looking up at a city that should not be possible, the cliffs glowing white against the blue. That is wine as a passport.

petitewinetraveler

07/27/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, and today the passport turns French as we sail beneath the white cliffs of Bonifacio, Corsica, for the Cap Corse Spritz, made with the island’s most beloved aperitif. Bonifacio may be the most dramatic harbor in the Mediterranean, a medieval city balanced on chalk cliffs that seem to hang over the sea, guarding the strait between Corsica and Sardinia.

The story begins in 1872 at the other end of the island, where Louis-Napoléon Mattei, a Corsican with a merchant’s eye and a patriot’s heart, created Cap Corse Mattei, a quinquina aperitif built on Corsican muscat wine, island herbs, cinchona bark, and the cédrat, the great fragrant citron that grows on the Cap Corse peninsula. It became Corsica’s drink so completely that Mattei’s name still stands over his original shop in Bastia a century and a half later, and no Corsican apéro hour is complete without that amber bottle on the table. Corsicans drink it as they do most things, on their own terms, chilled, unhurried, with olives and lonzu and strong opinions, and in recent years the world’s sommeliers have rediscovered what the island never forgot. Crowned with sparkling wine, it becomes the grandest spritz France never brags about.

The pour: two parts Cap Corse Blanc, three parts sparkling wine, a splash of soda over ice with a citrus wheel. If the bar carries no Cap Corse, Lillet Blanc stands in gracefully.
One sip, honeyed and gently bitter, and you are on the marina at Bonifacio looking up at a city that should not be possible, the cliffs glowing white against the blue. That is wine as a passport.

07/26/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, the holiday I founded, and today we drop anchor at Porto Ercole on Tuscany’s Argentario coast for the Riviera Rosé Spritz, poured in the little harbor town that quietly became one of the most glamorous addresses in the world. Above the rocks just outside town sits Il Pellicano, and its story is the kind you could not invent.

In 1965, a dashing British pilot named Michael Graham and an American beauty, Patricia, built a hideaway on these cliffs and named it for Pelican Point, the spot on the California coast where they had fallen in love, a piece of my home state’s shoreline, translated into Tuscan stone. What they created became legend: the photographer Slim Aarons arrived with his camera and immortalized its poolside in the images that still define la dolce vita, tanned figures diving from the rocks into impossibly blue water, and the world’s most beautiful people have been finding their way here ever since. The drink of this coast’s beach clubs has always been cold rosé, pink as the evening light on the cliffs, and I like to imagine those first golden summers at Il Pellicano ending exactly this way, someone calling for the rosé and a little sparkle as the sun dropped toward Giglio, nobody wearing a watch. Lengthened with soda over ice, it is the jet set’s easiest luxury, then and now.

The pour: three parts chilled dry rosé, one part soda water, over ice with a twist of grapefruit.

One sip, pale pink and cold, and you are on the rocks below Il Pellicano with the Tyrrhenian glittering to the horizon, living briefly inside a Slim Aarons photograph. That is wine as a passport.

07/25/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, the holiday I founded, and today the countdown goes live from the Mediterranean, beginning with the Frascati Spritzer, poured within sight of Rome itself. In the hills southeast of the city, the Castelli Romani, vineyards have refreshed the capital since before the Caesars, and Frascati is their golden heart, the wine of Rome for two thousand years.

The story is woven into the city’s daily life rather than a single invention. Frascati was the wine of the popes’ summer villas and the people’s taverns alike, and Romans built an entire institution around drinking it: the fraschetta, the casual tavern of the Castelli hills, named for the leafy branch, the frasca, that owners hung over the door to announce the new wine was ready. For centuries Romans have escaped the summer heat by riding into these hills to sit at long paper-covered tables with a cold carafe of Frascati and a plate of porchetta, a ritual as Roman as the fountains. The wine is pale gold, almondy, and easygoing, which is exactly the point, Rome has monuments enough, its wine was always meant for pleasure. Lengthened with soda over ice, it becomes the Eternal City’s most effortless golden hour.

The pour: three parts chilled Frascati, one part soda water, over ice with a twist of lemon.

One sip and you are at a fraschetta table in the hills above Rome, the city shimmering on the horizon, the carafe sweating, the afternoon entirely yours. That is wine as a passport, and this week, the passport is live.

Petitewinetraveler

07/24/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, the holiday I founded, and for the last illustrated stop before this countdown goes live from the Mediterranean, wine travel brings us to Seville for the Sangria Spritzer, the most famous wine drink Spain ever gave the world. Beneath the orange trees of Andalusia’s grandest city, where the Giralda has watched over the plazas for eight centuries, the pitcher on the table is a tradition older than the tower.

Sangria’s story runs deeper than most people guess. Long before it had a name, Romans and medieval Spaniards were sweetening and spicing their wine with fruit and botanicals, and the drink’s very name comes from sangre, blood, for its deep red color. Its great modern moment is documented to the day: at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, the Spanish pavilion poured sangria for millions of American visitors, and the United States fell so hard that the pitcher became shorthand for Spain itself. Here is the detail I love most, one that proves how seriously Europe takes this drink: under European Union law, only Spain and Portugal may label a beverage simply “Sangria.” It is protected like a place, because it is one. And the honest insider’s truth, which regular readers of this countdown already know: at home, Spaniards often reach for the simpler tinto de verano on an ordinary afternoon, saving sangria for what it does best, the gathering, the pitcher in the center of the table, the drink built to be shared. Our spritzer honors that spirit with bubbles in the glass.

The pour: red wine with a splash of orange liqueur and a handful of chopped fruit, topped with soda over ice, best made by the pitcher and never alone.

One sip and you are at a table beneath the orange trees in Seville, the tiles cool, the evening long, the pitcher making its rounds. That is wine as a passport. Tomorrow, the countdown sets sail.

07/22/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, and today’s wine travel keeps us stateside for the Frosé Spritzer, the drink that proves America can still invent a summer classic. Our setting is New York City in the heat of June 2016, at Bar Primi on the Bowery, where the espresso machine’s slushy cousin was about to make history.

The story is refreshingly precise for a drink this playful: Bar Primi’s bar director, Justin Sievers, took dry rosé, froze it, and churned it into a blush-pink slush brightened with strawberry, and the frosé was born. What happened next was pure modern folklore. Within weeks it had leapt from one Bowery bar onto every rooftop menu in New York, and by August the national press had crowned 2016 the summer of frosé, one of the fastest journeys from single bar to national phenomenon any drink has ever made.

Americans took to it because it solved a genuinely American problem, how to drink wine at a backyard barbecue in ninety-five degree heat, and it did so with a wink. Purists sniffed, of course, and missed the point entirely: the frosé is not pretending to be serious wine, it is rosé on summer vacation. Our version adds the spritz finish, a splash of bubbles over the slush that lifts it from dessert toward aperitivo.

The pour: blend frozen rosé with a touch of strawberry until slushy, spoon into a chilled glass, top with a splash of soda or sparkling wine, and finish with a lemon twist.

One sip and you are on a rooftop somewhere in high summer, the ice melting exactly as slowly as the afternoon. That is wine as a passport, even when the passport stays home. 🥂✨💗

Petitewinetraveler

07/20/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, and today wine travel brings us to Bordeaux for the Lillet Spritz, the aperitif of golden vineyards and one very famous secret agent.

South of the city, among the vines of the Graves, sits the village of Podensac, where a single house has been making one thing beautifully for a century and a half.

The story begins in 1872, when brothers Paul and Raymond Lillet, merchants of fine wines and spirits, created an aperitif that could only have come from Bordeaux: local white wine, the very soul of the region, married with citrus liqueurs from sweet and bitter orange peels and a whisper of quinine, then aged like the wine it mostly is. Bordeaux took it to heart as its own golden-hour pour, and for generations Lillet remained the region’s elegant open secret, served well chilled with a slice of orange on café terraces from Podensac to the city’s grand boulevards.

Then, in 1953, Ian Fleming handed it immortality: in Casino Royale, James Bond invents his famous Vesper martini and specifies Kina Lillet by name, and a village aperitif from the Graves became a fixture of the most glamorous drink order in literature. In Bordeaux they will tell you the lesson gently, that a wine region’s greatest luxury is patience, and Lillet is patience you can pour. Over ice with bubbles, it becomes the lightest way to drink Bordeaux ever invented.

The pour: two parts Lillet Blanc, three parts sparkling wine, a splash of soda over ice, with an orange slice and a leaf of mint.

One sip and you are on a terrace in the Graves, the château honey-gold in the evening light, the vineyards running to the horizon in perfect rows. That is wine as a passport.

Petitewinetraveler

07/19/2026

A new spritz recipe every day until National Spritz Day on August 1st, and today wine travel carries us to Germany’s storybook river valleys for the Sekt Spritz, poured beneath castles where Riesling has climbed the slate slopes for a thousand years. Along the Rhine and its sister rivers, the vineyards run so steep they must be worked by hand, and the wines they give are bright, precise, and made for bubbles.

The story begins with a young German named Georg Christian Kessler, who traveled to France and rose through the ranks of the great house of V***e Clicquot, learning the craft of sparkling wine in the cellars of Madame Clicquot herself. In 1826 he carried that knowledge home to Esslingen and founded Germany’s first sparkling wine house, which still pours today, nearly two centuries on. Germany took to bubbles with a devotion no one could have predicted: Germans now drink more sparkling wine per person than any nation on earth, accounting for roughly a quarter of all the sparkling wine consumed in the world.

And here is the part I love most, they do not save it. Sekt in Germany is not reserved for midnight on New Year’s Eve; it is opened for Sunday breakfast, for the end of the workweek, for the simple fact of a friend arriving, a culture that treats celebration as a habit rather than an event. Lengthened with soda over ice, it becomes the Rhine’s own golden hour.

The pour: three parts dry German Sekt, one part soda water, over ice with a twist of lemon.

One sip and you are at a riverside table beneath a hillside castle, the vineyards striping the slopes above you, a barge sliding slowly past. That is wine as a passport.

Petitewinetraveler

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