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Author: Susan Viebrock

[click "Play" to hear Chef Richard Chen on the Telluride Wine Festival]

Chef Richard Chen - Wing Lei photo by Barbara Kraft

Forget what you remember about the Chinese food from your childhood when superstar chef Richard Chen comes to town for the 28th annual Telluride Wine Festival. We are not talking about Moo goo gai anything. We are talking strictly uptown: "Reverse fusion." Chef Chen's food is French-influenced Shanghai, a mix of Shanghai, Cantonese, and Szechwan cuisines. His restaurant, Wing Lei at The Wynn, Las Vegas, is the only Chinese eatery in North America to have earned a Michelin star and the AAA Four Diamond award, also in 2008.

Cooking is in Chef Chen's  DNA. He began his career at the age of seven, working in his parents’ restaurant in his native Taiwan, and continued to work in their kitchen after the family established a restaurant in suburban Chicago.

23 June, 2009 /
[click "Play" to hear Maria Bachman on the concert series]

Telluride 2009 5
The seven year itch may ring true for marriages, but fans of the Telluride Musicfest have grown more ardent over the years – and with good reason. The heavy breathing always begins when the Hungarian beauty picks up her 18th century instrument, a Niccolo Gagliano violin, and starts fiddling: The ensuing pyrotechnics mesmerize.

She is Maria Bachman, artistic director of the Telluride Musicfest and a member of the Trio Solisti, recently described by The New Yorker as "the most exciting piano trio in America." The musical materiality between her and her colleagues,  Alexis Pia Gerlach on cello and Jon Klibonoff on piano, is the reason: their complicity is perfect and other-worldly. They play as one.

23 June, 2009 /
[click "Play" to hear Bouqion interview]

Bertrand New 1-07dCopy You may hear unfamiliar murmurings on the streets of Telluride this weekend. The conversation won't be about dogs on sacred tracts of land or the local economy.
The talk may be about "terroir" versus technology. This weekend is all about drinking wine, consuming copious amounts of fabulous food. It is the 28th annual Telluride Wine Festival.

The French word “terroir,” from a Latin root meaning “earth,” describes the relationship between a given wine and the place that wine comes from. The ongoing debate in the wine world about “terroir” versus technology asks the question: Is wine about some place or about the expertise of someone, aided by technology? At its heart, however, the debate is all about the Old World, meaning primarily France, telling the New World, meaning places like Napa, it’s all about the land stupid: We have had it for centuries. You are upstarts.

22 June, 2009 /
[click "Play" to hear Barbara Heinrich]

Unknown Jeweler Barbara Heinrich of the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art is a gold medal artist specializing in gold. Her professional training began when she was a young woman living in Germany, her native country, where she studied goldsmithing at Pestalozzi Kinderdorf Wahlwies for four years.

Barbara moved to America to earn a second masters degree in her craft at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and never looked over her shoulder.

21 June, 2009 /
[click "Play" to hear Andrew Karow]

Dad and Morgan at beach Put the words "green" and "bank" in the same sentence and the conclusion is obvious: we are talking about money, right? In this case, half right. Headed by regional president Andrew Karow, Telluride's Alpine Bank is one of 37 branch locations on the Western Slope, whose primary business is managing its collective total of $2 billion in assets. However, the bottom line at Alpine is not just the bottom line: it is about accomplishing its goals in as environmentally friendly way as possible.

Alpine Bank, which is employee-owned, was one of the first businesses in the country to declare a goal of becoming a paperless environment, and they are well on their way. In 2005, the institution took the next big step, creating a Green Team. As the initiative evolved, Alpine did what banks do: It found a way to measure the success of its good idea. Alpine's Environmental Management System (EMS) is now earning recognition statewide for environmental leadership.

21 June, 2009 /

[click "Play" to hear Ted talk about puppy training] Telluride Inside and Out is pleased to continue its weekly column about dog training with expert Ted Hoff of Cottonwood Ranch and Kennel in Crawford, Colorado, where we and so many other Telluride families board their...

20 June, 2009 /

Rattlin Bones Roots music goes global when Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson perform at the 36th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival on Saturday, June 20.

Country music by any name – bluegrass, roots, Americana –  is as southern as Martha White's self-rising flour, the Confederate Flag and hospitality, the genre derived from the Scots-Irish who settled in the Appalachian Mountains to the Africans who worked plantations in Georgia. But like so many industries, that sound has been outsourced, in this case with great success.

19 June, 2009 /
[click "Play" to hear Kristin Holbrook on scarves]
IMG_1565 It's Friday in Telluride, the end of the week, a great day to tie one on. But I am not talking about bending the elbow at a favorite watering hole. I am talking about scarves.

According to Telluride Inside and Out's fashion expert, Kristin Holbrook of Two Skirts, scarves, classically associated with cold weather, are, the hottest summer fashion accessory and about as glam as it gets. Think anew Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Sarah Jessica Parker (aka. Carrie) in "Sex and the City."

More recently, Jennifer Aniston was photographed on the set of her lastest movie, "the baster," wearing a cashmere silk number by faliero sarti. Other A-list actors and models, including Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon and Heidi Klum, are similarly all wrapped up.

19 June, 2009 /

[click to hear Dr. Ptak speak about skin rejuvenation] Obama's stimulus package is meant to address our sagging economy. Telluride's Dr. Jeff Ptak, a board certified plastic surgeon with a private practice in town, has a stimulus package of his own to address your sagging...

19 June, 2009 /