Rosina Tinari Wilson has been professionally involved with food and wine ever since winning the Grand Prize in the 1982 Gilroy Garlic Festival recipe contest. (Her winning recipe, “Artichokes alla Rosina,” featured garlic on top of garlic: whole heads braised along with fresh artichokes, teamed with an uber-garlicky basil aioli dipping sauce.) We are now delighted to welcome her to our family table to share in our celebration of all things food- and wine-related (especially given her shared love of truffles, discovered by Jennifer during their trip to Piemonte last year).
Rosina began writing articles about food for several San Francisco Bay Area newspapers and magazines, and after submitting a piece on sausage called “Best of the Wurst” and one on upscale condiments called “Shelf Indulgence,” she became food and wine editor of San Francisco Focus.
For several years, she helped produce the Berkeley Garlic Festival, a midsummer dine-around featuring restaurants such as Chez Panisse. (Alice Waters’ garlic dinners, and the garlic wine that accompanied them, remain local legends.)
Meanwhile, Rosina continued showcasing her writing in publications such as Bon Appetit, Cook’s Magazine, Wine Spectator, The Wine News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She developed a specialty in food and wine pairing, and wrote frequent beverage-pairing sidebars for Fine Cooking, as well as a monthly cheese-with-wine column (plus many feature articles) for Wine Country International.
For ten years Rosina taught the "Wine and Food Affinities" course to chefs-in-training at the California Culinary Academy. She introduced her students to the flavors, the science (Rosina was a biochem major, but found early on that her lab projects weren’t edible!), and most of all, the magic of a beverage that can make a chef's (or anyone's!) best culinary efforts taste even better.
Her five-part pairing strategy enables anyone to start with virtually any food and find great wine matches for it, and vice versa. (More on that in upcoming “Welcome to Wine Country” blogs and podcasts.)
One of Rosina’s greatest joys is to meet up with former students in their new careers as restaurateurs, food writers, and even winemakers and winery chefs. (You’ll soon be hearing her recent conversation with Christopher Greenwald, executive chef at Iron Horse.)
In 1997, Rosina teamed with publisher Darryl Roberts to launch Wine X Magazine, which targets the Generation X (and now younger) demographic with “wine, food and an intelligent slice of vice.” Her feature-article topics for Wine X range from olive oil to food and wine pairing to travels in Turkey, Spain and Piemonte. Wine X has now grown to a readership of over two million.
A certified wine judge, Rosina serves frequently at such events as the San Francisco International Wine Competition, the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, the California State Fair Wine Competition Grand Harvest Awards, and the first-ever Sake Shootout, held in New York. Rosina also heads a culinary consulting service and is a member of the Chefs Council at the Center for Culinary Development in San Francisco.
Rosina has continued developing recipes, and her cookbook, Seafood, Pasta and Noodles – The New Classics (Ten Speed Press), features her updates on international favorites as well as her own inventive combinations. Naturally, Rosina includes wine-pairing notes for each recipe.
When she’s not in the midst of a wine adventure, Rosina enjoys photography, strumming (and writing songs for) her ukulele (make that plural: she actually has a few dozen), growing herbs and flowers, making jewelry and mosaics, and indulging in various ocean’s edge delights such as snorkeling (on tropical trips), beachcombing, and hunting/gathering tasty shellfish such as abalone, sea urchins and mussels.
With great pleasure, Rosina has joined the Culinary Podcast Network as our West Coast Wine Correspondent. Her podcast and blog, Welcome to Wine Country, explore the world of wine from an insider’s perspective with everything from advice on the wine itself to access to some of the world's most exciting wine events. Cheers!
Photo: Christina Gerber
