It’s a joy to drive through the Italian wine region in Italy’s Northeast, known as the Piedmont. Especially in early summer, when the landscape looks like an Impressionist painting – the poppy fields dotting the hillsides are an explosion of delicate, bright-red flowers, interspersed with the many vineyards that are just starting to show what will become a green-leaf canopy sheltering the amazing, mostly deep purple grapes.  

While the calendar says that spring officially begins in April, I’ve always looked to May as the heart of the season. Trees, bushes and flowers are in riotous bloom, the sun goes down later and later, and warm days are becoming the norm not the exception. We’re starting to think lighter, feel lighter (after shedding tights, winter coats, sweaters – and maybe a few pounds) and many of us are eating lighter.

Standing outside of the original white stucco and dark wood Bodegas Farina winery in the Toro region of Spain one early April day, Manuel Farina was preparing to make one of his many tours of the 742 acres of vines that have been in his family nearly 75 years.

One could not have a more knowledgeable guide to the Ten Crus, the distinct growing areas of southern Burgundy’s Beaujolais region, than the native son of a farmer and descendant of four centuries of wine producers – Georges Duboeuf.  

It may be a bit of a cliché to say this, but there’s no better way to spark romance at Valentine’s Day (or any other time) than with some bubbly. Since nearly every wine-producing country in the world makes sparkling wine (traditional or otherwise), what is not the same old, same old are the many languages in which you can fill your flutes to toast everything from a budding romance to a lifelong love story.

My mother always announced the official start of the Christmas season while watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV. “Look,” she would shout with childlike glee, “there’s Santa...it’s officially Christmas-time!”

Mom would have been right at home in Mexico, where the largely Catholic country starts celebrating the holidays in earnest with the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the Virgin Mary) on December 12 – and doesn’t stop until January 6, or the Feast of the Three Kings.