Read from Chapter 1, "The Fewest Idiots", in Barolo by Matthew Gavin Frank:

"My heart jumps like a toad in a potato sack when the arriving passengers pour into the gate. My neck rockets backward, and the airport ceiling shadows fly like Raffaella’s hair. The loudspeaker crackles—Italian first, then English—to placate the delayed. The crew will clean the plane, and then we will board. I watch the yawning arrivals shuffle past my chair, decide which are Italian and which are American by the way they hold their mouths. Some mouths simply look as if they’ve been exposed to better tastes than others.

I throw my arm around my backpack, resist the temptation to whisper sweet nothings to its zippers, and lean forward. In my lean, between my shoes, I see Barolo, Italy, and Il Gioco dell’Oca, Raffaella’s farmhouse bed-and-breakfast. I see Pongo the Great Pyrenees sprinting over Il Gioco’s driveway stones; Michele, Raffaella’s father, pointing at me, roaring, “Chicago! Chicago!”; Adriana, her mother, shaking tomato-wet hands over her head at the outdoor grill; Raffaella touching my shoulders; her son, Niccolo, throwing a rock at the dog.

My chest swells right here in O’Hare as I remember Raffaella’s words when, during my first trip to Barolo, I departed the region via a Satti bus after a mere four days. Though I certainly didn’t earn the designation, I felt like a member of the family, and, kicking my backpack against the bus stop sign, Raffaella had said to me, “If you ever want to come back and work the wine harvest, I will talk to some people for you.”

These words stained my brain like iodine. I went back to Chicago, then moved to Alaska. Three years passed like a hiccup while I scrambled eggs and fried sausages at Juneau’s Channel Bowl Café. It was when Al, a seventy-seven-year-old ex-goldpanner, after a yolkful of over-mediums, espoused his philosophy—In a world full of idiots, you have to go to the place with the fewest idiots—that Raffaella’s offer rang itself over my frontal lobe. Then Al looked up, took a sip of his coffee, ran a hand down the length of his gray beard, scowled, and spit his drink back into his “Alaska Ship Chandlers” mug.

“Terrible!” he bellowed. “No taste!”

That night, from a pay phone on the wharf, I called Raffaella. When she picked up with her classic “Pronto,” I nearly lost my lines: my pleading (but not too pleading) speech about staying with her indefinitely—maybe the entire six months spanning Barolo’s fall and winter, more reverently known as truffle season and the grape harvest. I’m hesitant to admit it, but I think I even said something about cleansing the soul."