Wini Moranville grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and attended the University of Iowa, graduating with a BA in French and English. She subsequently moved to New York City, where she worked for Societe Generale (a French bank), Elle magazine, and Oxford University Press. She was later transferred to the Oxford, UK, branch of this publisher, where she worked as a publicity manager. She obtained her MA in English from Iowa State University in 1993; in 1994, she began her present career as a food and wine writer/editor. Her food stories have appeared in lifestyle magazines including Better Homes and Gardens , Country Home , Simply Perfect Italian , Holiday Appetizers , Holiday Celebrations , Holiday Menus , Creative Home , Indulge magazine (a luxury lifestyle magazine in Fort Worth, Texas), and DSM (a luxury lifestyle magazine in Des Moines). She has also served as a writer and editor for numerous cookbooks under the Better Homes and Gardens imprint, including the past three editions of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book . Since 1997, she has also written over 500 restaurant reviews for The Des Moines Register . In addition to the dining column, she writes occasional pieces about wine, food, and travel for this newspaper.

In recent years, Moranville has added wine and culinary and wine travel to the topics that she covers regularly. She currently writes a monthly wine column for Relish magazine, a food magazine launched in February 2006, with a circulation of over 15 million, distributed through daily newspapers nationwide. Moranville is a member of the James Beard Foundation, and has served as a Restaurant Awards panelist since 2005. Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Good Wives , Little Men , and Jo's Boys . Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s.