Bonnie Tempesta is no stranger to making biscotti.

After all, you might recognize her surname from the La Tempesta biscotti company she started in the 1980s, then sold in 1997, but not before it became the largest biscotti bakery in the United States.

You just can’t keep a woman away from biscotti for long, though, especially one with a Tuscan heritage.

Tempesta is back making the twice-baked Italian cookies for her new company, Boncora in Sonoma.

The name is a mashup of “Bonnie” and “ancora,” which means “encore” in Italian.

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The Japanese have a way of making everything more precious and special.

Even sugar for your cup of coffee or tea.

Forget the mere cubes or packets of granulated stuff. Think sugar as mini sculptures in shapes of hearts, pyramids, stars, flowers and angel wings — each individually tinted, too.

Chambre de Sucre of Cypress, Calif. is importing these sweet, tiny gourmet sugars that are handcrafted by a family-0wned business in Japan that’s more than 270 years old. They’ve been making these sugars for tea ceremonies for the royal family since the time of the Shogun.

Lisa Kunizaki, owner of Chambre de Sucre, grew up with these sugars, when she would visit her grandparents in Japan during the summers, where they would entertain with tea, homemade sweets and these sugar marvels.

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To get in the mood for this post, open a bottle of wine, pour yourself a glass, take a well deserved sip, then see if you can answer the following:

A) What are the three grape varietals typically used in the making of Champagne?

B) What common drug store item can help rid your wine glasses and decanters of red-wine stains?

C) Cool climate growing regions produce white wines with a tinge of what specific color?

D) What unusual aroma is often associated with Australian and New Zealand Pinot Noirs?

Over the course of a week, I learned the answers (find them at the bottom of this post) to these questions and so much more as a student in the “Wine Foundation” class at the International Culinary Center in Campbell.

The class, which I was invited to take gratis as a guest of the school, stretched over seven nights for four hours at a time. I figured by the end of it, I’d either be an expert or totally tipsy.

Fortunately, it was bordering more on the former. Although, I’d taken one or two wine classes before, they were more truncated. Getting the opportunity to take such an intensive and comprehensive class really gave me a grasp on wines like never before. Indeed, over seven days, we learned not only how wine is made, but wine-tasting techniques, what goes into wine service at a restaurant, the basics of food and wine pairing (complete with food prepared by culinary students), and an overview of what varietals are found around the world.

It says a lot that the ICC is the first school to ever be approved by the renowned Court of Master Sommeliers. How rigorous is the process for becoming one? Consider that only 3 percent who take the final exam to become a master actually pass — and that’s usually after failing on multiple previous attempts.

Our instructor was a certified Master Sommelier, one of only 197 in the world: Jesse Becker, who began his sommelier career at Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, most recently put together the wine program at AQ restaurant in San Francisco, and runs his own wine importing business, PWMWINE.com.

There were 10 of us in this particular class, only one of whom was a man. Most had high-tech backgrounds of some sort, too. A few were toying with career changes, but more were there just to educate themselves about a topic that’s long fascinated their palate and mind.

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What could be inside this box?

Open sesame….

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I owe my latest carb binge to Chef Adam Mali.

When I was dining recently at his restaurant, Brasserie S&P in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in San Francisco, I’d occasionally come up for air from devouring his dishes only to find myself drawn completely and helplessly to the bread.

Smoky, with a hefty dark crust and a chewy interior full of delightful air holes and developed fermented flavor, I couldn’t stop eating slice after slice.

Of course, I had to ask him where it came from.

When he told me it was baked in wood-fired ovens at Della Fattoria in Petaluma, I knew I had to stop in the next time I was in the vicinity.

So, I did earlier this week.

Bon Appetit magazine has called it one of the Top 10 bread bakeries in America. One taste and you’ll agree.

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