Not Quite Rome

     A funny thing happened to us on the way to the forum.  We stopped at a winery somewhere between Florence and Rome.

     We took only our second, and last, bus ride while in Italy.  Quite different from many of the tours which take you to ten places in 12 days.  I think there must be a lot of bus time for those folks.

     As our airplane ride approached its end on our way to Venice, we flew over some really rugged mountains with here and there a village clinging to the slopes.  I kept looking for that territory as we rode from Venice to Florence and from Florence to Rome.  I never did see it.

      We did see mountains, but with rounded peaks and wider valleys than the ones I recalled seeing from the plane window.  We crossed Italy from east to west, but we must have taken a kinder gentler pathway.

       The bus pulled off the interstate and into a village.  We wound through the narrow streets and eventually left the pavement.  We climbed the curvy path upwards and eventually came to the winery.  We weren’t the first tourists to arrive there.  A big sign in the driveway near the yard said “Busses” with an arrow pointing to the left.

      In that section of the yard, there was room to turn a bus around, and probably room to maneuver farm equipment and trucks bearing the farm’s bottled product to the rest of the world.  During the climb up the graveled road, we went through a fog bank.  We climbed through the fog and could see the clouds now beneath us.

       It was still a bit cloudy as we debussed.  There was a ring of chairs in the pleasant yard behind the main farm building, maybe the home, but certainly the business office and the great room to host tourists and wine-tasting events.  Nobody sat since the clouds and fog left everything, including the chairs, dripping wet.  The clearing skies hadn’t had time to dry things off yet.

      So our hostess stood, and we stood, under the trees as she told us about the farm.  Grapes were the main crop on a 15-year rotation.  After 15 years, the vines need to be replaced.  When the old vines are torn out, the land is planted to alfalfa to replenish the nitrogen and restore the soil.

     I assumed that there must be something like 15 plots on their 750 acres, a pretty sizable spread compared to most European farms we have seen.  After a year of alfalfa, that crop is turned into the soil and a new crop of grapevines goes in. 

      After about 15 minutes of introduction to the agricultural portion of the place, we went into the great room which had a huge table in the center and chairs all around the walls.  In one corner was another table with wine glasses and bottles of wine.

      We got a lecture on wines and wine tasting.  Our hostess demonstrated wine appreciation:  first with the eye—hold up the glass and look at the color.  Next, with the nose, smell the contents of the glass and try to determine what fruits the wine was made from.  Then, you taste it, with sucking sound as you draw in air and roll the wine over your tongue.  Finally, you spit it out.  The lady held a crockery jar and used it as a spittoon.

      We were invited to taste, and swallow, and pour out what remained in our glass into the crockery jar, if we didn’t want to swallow it, rather than spitting it out.  That seemed a much better solution for wasting the wine we didn’t want to drink.  I knew if I drank all of it, there would be four samples, I would be asleep for the rest of our trip to Rome.

      So, I tasted the first glass, a white wine.  It was good, for wine, that is.  When the crock came around, I dumped the remainder of my wine into it.  Martin, our guide who sat next to me, gave me an elbow in the ribs.  “You wasted that wine!” he hissed.

      “What was I supposed to do with it?  I can’t drink it or I’ll fall asleep if I do.”

       “Give it to me!” he replied.  So after the next two pours, after I had taken a couple of sips, I poured the remnants of my goblet into Martin’s and he polished them off.  Sometime later, it dawned on me why he sat by me.  He knew I preferred beer to wine and always made sure I got beer when we took our evening meal together as a group.  He knew I wouldn’t want much wine and he could get a double portion.  Sly fox.

      Each wine goes with certain foods.  Wine that doesn’t go with a food will not taste good.  The lady made the point by having a man and a woman among us taste a wine after we had cleansed our palettes from the first wine by taking the proper appetizers from the big center table.  Neither of the guinea pigs liked the red wine very well.

      Then the two were asked to eat something, cheese, cracker, something I don’t remember.  Then they tasted the wine again.  And this time they liked the wine much better.

       We then all had to make the circuit of the big center table and choose the correct finger food before tasting the wine.  After three wines and the appropriate food from the table, we were ready for the final course, dessert.

     I think we tasted three white wines and one red.  The dessert wine was white again.  After the dessert wine, we were invited to go outside again where the sun had come out, dried off things and burned off the fog.  We could now see across the valley below us and take a few photos.  And line up to use one of the three bathrooms on the place.

    

      Thankfully, our bus driver carried his own lunch and didn’t imbibe in the wine.  He had turned the bus around and was ready to takes us back down the hill into the village and back to the busy interstate which like all roads in Italy, led to Rome.  On our way down, we could see much better with the now-clear skies. 

      It was a beautiful setting and a welcome change from the cities where we spent most of our time.