A day of wine tasting

11/10/2009

Today we had plans to see some more Tuscan towns and so some wine tasting in them. We work up and did our usual morning routine of getting ready and having breakfast at the restaurant. Come to find out, Francesco’s mom is not named Isabella, her name is Anna. Isabella is the head lady of the Tuscan Way and organizes multiple villas’ that are involved in the program. Mom kept calling her Anna and I thought she was just losing it, but I was looking at some papers and realized that she was right all along. Despite how dumb I felt after making this realization, I am really glad that I officially never addressed her by her name.

Anna really impresses me. She made us the equivalent of chestnut nutella, using chestnuts that she had found inn the forest around the villa. I think it is so cool how everything she cooks and serves from ice cream to pasta is homemade. She says that she thinks the best restaurant is her own kitchen. Last night she showed us the menus from the weddings that were at Villa Gaia this past summer, and whoa talk about a lot of work. It all sounded amazing. The largest number of people she has ever cooked for at once is 150.

Francesco arrived at the restaurant to pick us up, and head out for the day. Our first stop was the town of Montelpulciano, but before we got there we had a couple of mini stops, saw a lot of neat things, and learned many interesting facts. As we were driving we saw some people picking olives. The way they do this is by spreading out a large net underneath the olive tree. Then they pick the olives by hand and drop them down into the net. From the net, the olives go directly to a box and then directly to the olive oil making machine for first press. As soon as the olives are off the tree they start ripening and do so fairly quickly, so it is important to also be quick with getting them to the pressing machine. The olives are ready to be picked when they are a violet color with a little bit of green in them. Later on in the day, we did see some people picking olives by using a machine to shake the branches. This would probably be faster to do it this way, but I don’t know if you would damage the olives like that.

Some fun facts that we learned in the car ride are the following..
At one point, we were driving along the crest of a mountain. If you looked down one side of the mountain it was very green, and if you looked down the other side it was brown. The green side was Montalcino and the brown side was Chianti. It was neat to see how two different types of grapes could so drastically affect the look of the land and be so close together. We will be doing our wine tasting on the Montecino side, but maybe we could work a Chianti wine tasting in if we have some extra time.
I knew that the choices of places you could eat in Italy went from a bar, to a trattoria, to a ristorante, and each one was more expensive than the last. We kept eating and passing places that were osteria’s. Turns out an osteria is similar to a trattoria but when you eat there you know a family is doing the cooking and you are eating food typical from the region, which is prepared with fresh local ingredients. In the old days, at both a trattoria and an osteria, when you stopped there for dinner you could also spend the night there. A cool concept of figuring out what type of restaurant you would like to go to and what you will get in return
Truffles are harvested twice a year, once around October and once around April. Black truffles are native to Tuscany and white truffles are grown up neat Torino. Now a days they are harvested with dogs. It takes three years to train a dog to find truffles and you absolutely need them in order to find the truffle. The truffle is located about 20cm deep in the ground. The dog sniffs if out and then the farmer comes over and hand digs the truffle out. Truffles are so expensive because of the time it takes to train the dog and hand dig the truffle out. You can use a machine to dig them out because they are too delicate and deep and it would crush the truffle. Truffles could really be all over Tuscany, but you would never know because you don’t have dogs sniffing all over Tuscany.
Every time we go into a new town, Francesco points out the color of stone that all of the buildings are build with and tells us that this is the native stone to this town. If one were to build a new building in the town they would need to do so by using the native stone. They would go to the stone store and buy a huge chunk of the native stone from there. Then they would go home and hand cut the huge chunk of stone to hand build their new building. Talk about a lot of work, but “it is the way it must be” says Francesco.
A lot of times we ask Francesco and Anna questions and our questions get ignored because they have no idea what we just said. So we just ask the question again a couple of minutes later and normally it gets answered then. It works out.

The first mini stop was the town of Bagno Vignoni. It is famous because it is over hot mineral springs. The town uses the hot water to have a naturally heated swimming pool in the town center and also has a couple of water mills. Francesco told us that the other night he was a party at a bar in Bagno Vignoni. After he left the bar, he sat with his feet in the how water spring for an hour, just relaxing. How nice! The town also has a couple of spas in it that people come to from all over, year after year, to heal from the mineral water.

The second mini stop was at a ceramic factory. This place was unbelievable. It had huge ceramic statues, tables, pots, plates, pretty much anything you could ever want of beautiful Italian ceramics. Patricia told me that the style of painting ceramics differs from the region. I think it would be so cool to do a giant trip all around Italy and pick up a tile and place setting from each region so that they all had different styles of painting on them. I got a picture next to one of the ceramic statues. The lady is plump and curvy, which is exactly what I am gong to look like when I leave Italy! All of the ceramics are made to be kept outside and do just fine in the elements.

So we finally made it Montepulciano. This town is famous for its wine. It also is a town that to walk around in it, you are always walking up hill. Francesco gave us an hour to walk around and explore the town. He pointed out a very cool bar (café) and leather store. We got a hot chocolate in the bar that was very similar to the hot chocolate that I got in Venice. It was extremely thick dark chocolate, which just seemed to be melted, that you ate it with a spoon. It was rich and wonderful. The leather store was a factory store. We did some more shopping! Haha we just cant help ourselves because we know the quality is good and we keep finding exactly what we are looking for. It is a famous leather brand, and since it was the factory store you really can beat the prices. Even with the Euro being expensive, you cant find prices like these for these products in the States!
Then we met up with Francesco to take a tour of the “old city’ and to do a wine tasting. To start the tour of the old city, we walked into a wine store and down a stone stair well, which seemed to lead into a basement. There were many rooms and staircases below the store that housed many wine barrels. Now the store uses the rooms for storing the wine it makes because it is the perfect atmosphere (dark and 13 degrees C) but the rooms used to be an underground city. Francesco also explained how the wine making process with the wooden barrels, which was cool to see how it was done in the old days and now. For the wine tasting we tasted montepulciano wine (obviously), but the wine we liked best was the nobile montepulciano. It had stayed in the wood for a bit longer.

Our next stop was the Town of Piensa. Piensa is famous for two things, pecorino cheese and a pope lived there. It is the only other place in Italy that can fly the flags of the Vatican other than the Vatican. We went inside the Pope’s church, but it really wasn’t the most impressive church we have seen so far. What a claim to fame though! We ate lunch in Piensa. The original plan for lunch was to just try a bunch of different cheese and meats special to Piensa, but Francesco’s favorite place that did this was closed, so we ate at the next best thing. We still ordered a meat and cheese platter for our first course that served three different kinds of pecorino (aged young, medium, and old) with four different kinds of marmalade (onion (my favorite), strawberry/balsamic (my second favorite), a fig/orange, and an orange). I really love the combination of cheese and honey and marmalade. Mom and I also split a vegetable soup and wild boar soup at lunch and by the end I was so full, I thought I was going to explode. The wild boar stew had an unbelievable gravy with it, which Francesco said the key to making it was marinating the wild boar in wine and then making the gravy with tomatoes. We also had wine with lunch too, even after the wine tasting in Montepulciano and so when I got back in the car to go to the next town, I had to take a little nap on the way. The last thing that Piensa is famous for is the picture of Tuscany that is on Windows PC is taken from a look out point in Piensa.

Next we went to a wine production site in Montalcino. Francesco said that the town of Montalcino was nothing special, so he always prefers to just go directly to what makes it famous, the wine. We did another wine tasting here of Rosso and Brunello wines, but nothing really knocked out socks off. The one we liked best was the riserva (because it is the nicest) but it wasn’t anything magnificent and was very expensive. We were also very tired at this point in the day and ready to get back to the villa. On the way back, we stopped briefly at an abbey that was from the last millennium. It was cool that it was so old, but by far the least impressive church we had seen. When we walked in, the man working the desk was humming and we felt like we were almost imposing on his quiet time.

We got back to the villa and had about an hour and a half before we had to be down at the restaurant for our last official cooking course with Anna. She is going to Israel tomorrow on holiday with her girlfriends. Mom and I both took much needed naps in order to have enough energy to get through the night. Tonight’s cooking course, was by far the easier, but nonetheless just as delicious as the rest. We had been meaning to take pictures of all of the dishes that we prepared, but tonight was the first night that we actually remembered. I have a whole list of pictures that I wished I had taken, oh well. Some of Francesco’s friends joined us, which was great because it meant that all of the food we made got served and we didn’t have to stuff ourselves. The friends were very nice. One spoke great English and worked at a spa/resort in Bagno Vignoni. The other one was very excited to meet us and wanted to know exactly where we lived and what type of city Norfolk was. When I was able to show her a picture of our how, she got very excited. Mom told her that she liked her scarf and she gave it to mom, because “that is the Italian way”! We all had a very nice time at dinner and got in a lot of pictures. Gina, the beagle, was being very naughty tonight and kept trying to pick fights with her brother, Uggo. She is the boss, even though she is the littlest, and lets everybody know it. Tomorrow, we have the morning off, so it will be very nice to sleep in and take out time in the morning. As with everyday at Villa Gaia, today was a great day!