A week of enjoying the food and wine of Lyon and the Jura awaits

If you’re one of the many folks I know who’s thinking about heading out for some significant overseas travel to try to make up for the last few years, this Zingerman’s Food Tour to France might just be the ticket. Not only is it an amazing culinary destination, the tour next year happens at pretty much the perfect time of year to go to France—the final days of May and the first few of June, when the weather is nice, but not too hot, and before the height of the tourist season begins!

Of all the tours on our docket, this is the one that Kristie Brablec, Managing Partner of Zingerman’s Food Tours, is currently most excited about. Why?

Lyon is the heart of gastronomy in France, started by the mothers of Lyon (this is a story we could tell in itself); many people don’t know that the gastronomy movement in Lyon was born from women. From Françoise Fillioux to Eugénie Brazier, the history is deep with women leading the kitchen. Paul Bocuse is the most well-known, of course, but still, he was trained by Eugénie Brazier, and sadly this is often overlooked. Eugénie was also the first person ever awarded 6 Michelin stars—three at each of her restaurants, and this dates back to 1933—a true female powerhouse in the culinary world, and it all started in Lyon.

The region is home of Comté, one of the finest cheeses produced in the world. Secondly, it’s home to one of my favorite wine regions worldwide. This region is often missed and very rarely traveled. It’s difficult to gain access to this region for various reasons. Outside of serious wine nerds, tourism is very limited in this area, even to the French. The Jura is the smallest wine region in France. Less than 500 producers spread across 80 kilometers of vineyards, covering four wine Appellations.

Lyon could be to France what Bologna is to Italy—a gastronomic wonderland that’s loaded with luscious cheese, wine, world-class cured meats, lots of good eating, and plenty of additional art and culture to boot. The city has shown up regularly on the New York Times’ list of “52 Places to Go.” The Comté-Jura region is, for me, even more special. I love the mountains and I love mountain cheese, and the Jura has the best of both! Comté cheese has long been one of my favorites, and the little-known Vin Jaune of the region is very much the perfect fortified wine you want to accompany it! Sipping on the latter, nibbling on some well-aged bits of Comté on a beautiful spring evening, and watching the sunset over mountain peaks sure sounds pretty superb.

If you’re ready to spend a week traveling, tasting, and creating lifelong memories, give some thought to signing up for this trip with Kristie. If you’re looking for skillfully guided travel, incredible food, wine, people, history, and culture, this superfine food tour will pay big dividends! You will still be sharing stories from it ten years from now when we are finishing our 2032 vision!

Reserve your spot!

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Only seven seats remain as I write

It’s been over 30 years since I went alone to Ireland for the first time. I knew very little about the country, I had no friends or food producers there to call on, and, back before the world of the web was the norm, I had very little idea what I was getting myself into. That trip changed my life in wonderful ways. Thirty years later, I have many friends there. I’ve swum regularly in the river of its history. I love the music (sad-music lovers—give a listen to the bagpipes on Lankum’s “Young People,” or the harmonium on band member Radie Peat’s somber dramatic performance of “Dark Horse,” live in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol on Easter 2017). The poetry is powerful, the literature lovely, and the landscape unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. I’ve been back to Ireland now probably two dozen times.

In the years since I made that first trip, Irish food has, I believe, become some of Europe’s best. In fact, there is now so much wonderful food and drink that even this intensive eight-day tour will only scratch the surface in the best possible way! If you grab one of these last few seats, I will guarantee you a whole lot of great eating and drinking, combined of course with a wealth of creative connections, wonderful culture, learning, and laughing. And, if you fall in love with Ireland as I did all those years ago, you will likely go back many more times.

People ask me all the time why I’m so drawn to Ireland. In the context of what I wrote a few weeks ago about sadness, I’ve realized one of the big reasons, in a quiet way that I wasn’t conscious of at the time, is that there’s something powerfully evocative in the spirit of the place that resonates for me. Not the stereotyped jovial “Irish humor” that’s often portrayed in movies, but, rather, the extreme but gentle, moving, and really almost magical sadness. The bleak beauty of the landscape is really beyond belief. I’m haunted by all of it, and always hungry for more.

Zingerman’s Food Tours Managing Partner Kristie Brablec has connected with longtime friends of the ZCoB Kate McCabe and Max Sussman from Bog & Thunder, who will serve as co-hosts. You can see all the amazing details of the trip on the Food Tours site. Buy a seat soon before they run out! You’ll experience some amazing eating, a wide range of emotions, and take in some of the most beautiful and moving landscapes you’ll ever visit.

The first tour for Ireland will be September 19-28, 2022. Or, alternatively, you can go with Kristie, Kate, and Max October 3-12. Sign up soon! If you do, I’ll buy you a copy of Manchán Magan’s lovely Thirty-Two Words for Field to help you get ready!

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Sign up for Ari’s Top 5 e-newsletter and look forward to his weekly curated email—a quick roundup of 5 Zing things Ari is excited about this week—stuff you might not have heard of!

We travel to see new places, experience new cultures, meet interesting people and, of course…eat. Since food is what we do best here, we started Zingerman’s Food Tours back in 1997 to share the places we love—near and far—and culinary adventures that even well practiced tourists have never even heard of.

Since then, we’ve really gone places! We’ve fished on the Mediterranean, met Cava makers in Spain, hand rolled couscous in Morocco, and made goulash in Hungary, just to name a few things. Close to home, we’ve devoured the food traditions of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula and Detroit.

There’s always a long afterglow after we return from these trips. We’ll admit that it’s always a bit hard to get back to reality. With dreamy memories of recent tours to Croatia and Tuscany still fresh in our minds, here’s some of what you can expect when you travel with us.

You’ll taste the intricacies of the food regions you visit
Food traditions transcend borders. On our tour to Croatia, we explored culinary intersections, spanning from Austro-Hungarian dishes to those with Italian influences on the coast. “You also have a mix of the two and all this mixing of ingredients, and then you have all this fresh seafood from the Adriatic,” says Amy Emberling, who led the tour. “One of the locals said, ‘This place is full of border stories because the place is very much about borders shifting.'” Our trips are designed to highlight the major differences and the subtle intricacies of food regions.

You’ll see how some of your favorite foods are sourced and made
In Tuscany, we witnessed our favorite Parmagiano-Reggiano cheese being made. The couple who produce the cheese wake up at 3:00 am to produce 10 wheels of parm every day. Our group didn’t get there quite that early, but we did get to witness a large part of the process. A tasting with cheese and yogurt followed. Love truffles? In Croatia, the group visited Buzet, the country’s truffle capital and even participated in a hunt with an expert and her truffle-sniffing dogs. That was followed by a truffle breakfast that even included truffle and olive oil ice cream.

You’ll cook with some amazing chefs and learn from world-class artisans and experts
Cooking is a big part of Zingerman’s Food Tours. We take private lessons at cooking schools, and we visit private kitchens to learn how to prepare local delicacies from baked goods to pasta making and more. We also visit wineries, distilleries, and little butcher shops, like that of the famous Dario Cecchini in Tuscany’s Arno Valley. We’ve enjoyed private wine tastings in Chianti and toured coffeehouses in Trieste, too. With these experts and artisans come fascinating histories and personal stories that you won’t find in a travel magazine or tour book.

You’ll visit “the middle of nowhere”
“The goal of tours is to find places and take people to places that they wouldn’t normally go if you were a tourist—especially if it’s your first time,” says Amy. This means traveling far and wide to the smallest farms or the most remote villages. Building these relationships is something that Food Tours works on for years and years. And sometimes it takes many conversations and some serious convincing because many of the farmers and producers are not used to hosting groups. The Croatia trip included a day at a family-owned goat farm in Krnica that only a handful of visitors have every had the chance to see.

You’ll make strong connections and, maybe, life-long friends
Because we travel in small groups (never more than 15 people when we go international) and because our tours are focused on breaking bread, we connect quickly. “When you spend several hours a day around a table, or in a kitchen, with a group of people, it becomes very intimate and you create bonds pretty quickly,” says Kristie Bralbec, a leader on the Tuscany tour who added that members of the group have been in communication, sharing memories and photos of the Italian food they’ve been making a home in the weeks since returning from Tuscany. Kristie says that she feels like she’s made friends for life.

Intrigued? Visit our Zingerman’s Food Tours website to see our next few trips. Next year’s trip to Morocco has already sold out (it’s a good one!), but we have spots for Hungary, Spain, and Tuscany. Bon voyage! 

Cornman Farms Presents a Very Special Dinner

You won’t want to miss this event. Our friend, Gioacchino Passalaqua, an Italian artisanal food exporter and native Sicilian who co-leads the Sicily Food Tour with Zingerman’s Food Tours is coming to town Friday, January 8th, 7pm, and he’s bringing one of Sicily’s top chefs with him. Claudio Ruta is a Michelin star recipient for his restaurant La Fenice in the Villa Carlotta Hotel in Ragusa, Sicily. The area is renowned for its bounty of amazing foods, and Claudio is bringing many of those signature flavors along with him for a very special dinner at Cornman Farms in Dexter. With the assistance of Gioacchino—an accomplished cook and sommelier in his own right—Claudio will be preparing a menu with wine pairings that showcases the amazing foods of Sicily.

Reserve your seat here

Please join us! 

Travel with us to Michigan’s Beautiful Leelanau Peninsula

Zingerman’s Food Tours invites you to explore amazing artisanal food right here in Zingerman’s own backyard: the foodie paradise that is the Traverse City/Leelanau Peninsula area. We have created a very special 3-day tour, packed full of tasting, eating, drinking, and learning about great food and beverages directly from the artisans who make them. These producers will open their workshops to us and share their passion for what they do.

The local food scene up there is thriving – from farmers and cheesemakers to chefs and winemakers, everyone we talk to in that area is really excited about what’s happening there, and how vibrant, and delicious, their local food web has become. And they are proud to share their knowledge, and the delicious fruits of their labors, with us. This trip is designed for travelers with a passion for great food made the way it was hundreds of years ago.

May 30 – June 1, 2014.

These tours sell out fast, so reserve your spot today!

To reserve your seat, call 888-316-2736, email us, or visit us online.

We’re going to Spain and Tuscany in 2014!

Zingerman’s Food Tours is about connecting with people and places through the food. We take a small group, settle in, and explore a cuisine and culture at a reasonable, balanced pace. We cook, we eat, we talk with locals, and we learn directly from the artisanal food producers about what they do. The relationships with people in the areas we visit, and within each group as we spend time together, are so rewarding and are a key part of what makes each tour special.

Spain
September 8-18 and September 20-30, 2014.
We’ve been longing to create another Zingerman’s Food Tour to Spain, and are excited to be offering this new tour! The area southwest of Madrid, sometimes called the pantry of Spain, has amazing artisanal food and wine, and we will savor it to the fullest. We’ll learn directly from the producers about their fantastic olive oils, cheeses, wines, chocolates, pimenton, and more. And of course, we’ll do full honors to the king of cured pork – jamón Ibérico de bellota, created only in this region from the famed black-footed pigs who dine on the acorns (bellota) that fall from the plentiful Spanish oak trees. We’ll enjoy the beauty of the region and taste our way through some of the best food Spain has to offer.
More info about the Spain tour, or contact us.

Tuscany
October 4-13, 2014 (We’ve added an additional day to the 2014 tour!)
Come visit Tuscany and Emilia Romagna the Zingerman’s way. We’ll go behind the scenes and visit traditional small producers of some of the region’s finest foods – from the massive wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano, to the beautiful, small bottles of real balsamic vinegar, from Chianti Classico wines and artisanal olive oil to the melt-in-your-mouth prosciutto crudo. And we’ll roll up our sleeves and enjoy Tuscan cooking lessons in a 15th century villa in the rolling hills outside of Florence. Together with Peggy Markel, long-time fellow culinary adventurer and food guide, we will experience the wonderful food, culture, and landscape of Tuscany.
More information about the Tuscany tour, or contact us.

See you on tour!