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Pre-Season Look at Food and Wine Trends in Southwest Florida

Pizza and Wine

High tourist season begins right after the Christmas holidays and that means most of the new restaurants trying to capture that market are open, existing restaurants have updated their menus, and most revisions to local wine lists have been made.

Today on the show we’ll talk with two local food and wine writers about what’s on trend this year in food and drink. Dorothea Hunter Sonne covers food and wine for the Gulfshore Life Magazine.  She’ll be joined by Gina Birch who writes the wine column “Gina Drinks” for the Fort Myers News Press.  She also writes for Grandeur Magazine and is the Birch behind the “Birch Beat” food blog.

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.