The Eggplant does bulk grocery shopping online on a regular basis, with uneven results.But online shopping for specialty foods is a better idea, especially for those of you who live in areas where these goodies are hard to find.
One of the major online purveyors of gastronomic specialties is igourmet.com. Of special interest to those who are partial to Italian food and wine (the vast majority of humanity) is its search function, which can be filtered by country. Thus, to concentrate on Italian cheeses, you would use "cheese" as your search term and then filter by country "Italy." Wines are already broken down this way. There is an ample and interesting selection of Italian products.
One drawback is that the label ingredients are not given, although sometimes a general listing is provided. When you intend to pay a lot of money for a jar, it's good to know exactly what's in it and in what proportions. An example: their jar of Radicchio Tardivo di Treviso (in photo). This is a vegetable that is hard to find in any form in the US, a great loss to food-lovers. But here they have not really specified that this is a sugo and not just the preserved veggie, and that it should be used mostly as a topping for pasta. I found this out by going to the producer's original Italian website.
However, the service should be checked out, with some caution.
