A taste for snacks, Italian-style.(Chicago Tribune)

Joyce Goldstein, San Francisco chef and cookbook author, has been in love with Italy and its enotecas since she spent a year there 40 years ago.

These wine bars, she says, were "unpretentious neighborhood hangouts" offering a limited selection of wine chosen by the owner/host. Many haven't changed their ways. Like the wine, the food offerings often are local products, sausages and cheeses, for instance, prepared ahead and served in small portions on small plates.

"I loved the idea," she said during a visit to the Chicago Tribune's test kitchen. "Spanish tapas have gotten all the press, but the Italians were doing it first."

Her mission in "Enoteca" (Chronicle, $24.95) is to bring Italian wine bar food directly to the American home cook and wine lover. By and large, wine bars in this country have treated food as a secondary attraction. Not so in Italy, as she illustrates with about 75 recipes, most of them adapted from ones she had tasted during visits to the countryside over the years. In head notes, she describes the enotecas where she found the recipes and the personalities of their owners.

"There's no rule on what may or may not be served," she writes. "So the recipes are perfect for casual entertaining. You simply mix and match what appeals to you and put the dishes on a buffet with a selection of several wines."

The recipes are grouped in sections with titles such as "fritters and frittatas," "cheeses, condiments and preserves" and _ of course _ "pastas and grains." You could choose recipes to make a traditional dinner sequence, but that would miss the point, Goldstein suggests.

"The enoteca or American wine bar provides us with an opportunity to learn, but in an unscheduled and unstructured manner, to experiment, to expand our palates."