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Full Belly Files

Full Belly Files: Goodbye to Antonio Gardella

A critical figure in the development of Santa Barbara’s wine scene died on June 3; plus, stories you may have missed

Full Belly Files: Goodbye to Antonio Gardella

Sign up to get Matt Kettmann’s Full Belly Files, which serves up multiple courses of food & drink coverage every Friday, going off-menu from our regularly published content to deliver tasty nuggets of restaurant, recipe, and refreshment wisdom to your inbox

(I skipped last week’s Full Belly Files because I was working for 11 days in the Languedoc region of France. More on that later — this week’s newsletter remembrance below felt more important — but you can see my Instagram photos here and here .)

I’d long admired the notion of people rising to the lifestyle status of bon vivant or gourmand, though I’m not sure I’d really met a proper version of either until Antonio Gardella came into my life about 20 years ago.