Our Staff
Joy Ramirez, Assistant Director
Joy Ramirez has been interested in food and cooking from a very young age. She comes from a mixed background of Italian and Mexican heritage with a mother who cooked and entertained often and a father in the restaurant business. Her love of travel and cultural exchange took her to Italy as a college student and she has been going back almost yearly ever since. That early trip also sparked an interest in the language, culture and history of Italy that took her to graduate school to pursue a degree in Italian literature. She has a Masters in Italian and a PhD. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and the University of Colorado and has taught Italian language and literature at CU, The Colorado College, and Vanderbilt University.
Her many years in Boulder, Colorado inevitably brought her in contact with Peggy and they share a love of food and bringing people together through cuisine and travel. They now share both a deep friendship and a fun working relationship. Joy is taking a break from teaching and is pursuing other interests that are related to her passion for all things Italian, such as working for P.M.C.A. She currently handles the booking and marketing as well as some general office duties while Peggy is in far away places. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee where she also works as a part-time pastry apprentice at Marché Artisan Foods.
Laine Boswell, Wine Expert
Laine, born and raised in Seattle, Washington became fascinated by food, travel and all that surrounds it at a very young age. Whether it was grilling freshly caught trout over a campfire in Montana, sampling spicy noodles in a rural farm kitchen in central China or enjoying a meal of steak frites in a Paris bistro, Laine grew up appreciating local cuisine as an expression of culture and hospitality. A year spent abroad during college and another year teaching in France after graduation also introduced her to the complementary culture of wine.
She returned to the United States to learn as much as she could about the wine industry and began work as the marketing and public relations manager of small boutique winery in Washington state. Later, she joined a wine import and distribution company based in Seattle, where as a sales representative, she managed mainly restaurant accounts. She completed intensive sommelier training, and also offered consulting servies in developing wine lists and designing food and wine pairing menus.
In 2007, she was accepted into the O.I.V. (Organisation Internationale du Vin et de la Vigne) Master’s program in Wine Science and Management at the University of Paris X, and spent the next eighteen months traveling to more than twenty countries around the world, studying the production, marketing and distribution of wine.
Given that some of her favorite wines came from Italy, she chose to pursue an internship in Tuscany, where she immediately fell in love with the countryside, the people and their way of life.
She was fortunate enough to meet Food and travel afficianado Peggy Markel while in Florence, and was invited thereafter to participate as Peggy’s assistant in her most recent culinary adventure tour in Morocco. The experience was so enriching and the potential of working together in the future so great, that many plans have been in the works ever since with the end goal being to continue the exploration of the food and wine culture of Italy and beyond, and to share their discoveries equally with Food/Wine lovers and consumers the world over.
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