The family recently returned from a 5-day trip to Tuscany over Columbus Day Weekend. We stopped in Florence for the day on our way down to our destination. We spent Day 2 in Montalcino, the home of the famous Brunello wines. Day 3 was spent touring the fantastic town of Orvietto. And on Day 4, we had an amazing experience touring a winery outside of Montepulciano, followed by a wonderful lunch, ending in a tour of the hot-springs town of Bagno Vignoni. (Day 5 was a leisurely breakfast in our apartment, followed mostly by packing and then traveling home.)
I will save descriptions of the whole rest of the trip for another blog (maybe by Suzanne?) and focus this blog on just one of the remarkable events of our trip to Tuscany: the tour and tasting at Sanguinetto Cantina.
Understand first that when visiting wineries in Italy, it is certainly not always obvious where you should go. One time we have accidentally showed up at the winery owners' actual residence in town instead of their cantina that was located in the middle of nowhere. Another time we traveled down some remote dirt goat-trail of a road which led to the farm, only to find out that their cantina was in the middle of town. Clearly, it's not always obvious.
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| The entrance to Sanguinetto Cantina |
In this case, we had directions to a winery in Aquaviva, just outside of Montepulciano (where we were staying). There weren't many, if any, signs for this place. We pulled into a gravel driveway of this local farm and parked in an empty gravel parking lot. There was an old house, a barn, and a few other structures that looked typical for an old working farm. I told Suzanne and the kids to stay put, and I'd go see if we were in the right place. A woman stepped out of one little house, looking at us like we must be lost. I took a couple of hesitant steps closer, not wanting to impose ourselves anymore than necessary. Another woman came out of another building, and now I had two women staring at us as if to say "why are you people here? what do you want with us?" I asked gently (in Italian) if this was Sanguinetto Cantina and they replied with a very curt "si". .....ok.... I told them we were looking to taste some wine and asked if we were in the right place. They said yes, but kind of had this expression of "we would have been fine if you had never come here, but since you're here, we may as well drink some wine." Ok....so we unloaded the crew and were then escorted into one of the little farm houses, still not sure of what we were getting ourselves into.
From that point on, from my own perspective, I may have well have been taking a 2-hour orientation tour of Heaven. Even now, two weeks later, I am overwhelmed just thinking about it.
We have been to a lot of wineries by now and we've seen the gamut. This place was perfect. Simply perfect. First, the place was as much a working farm as it was a winery. They have 50 hectares planted with corn, soybean, grain, etc, and 4 hectares planted with grape vines. One hectare is about 2.5 acres, so it's not a huge farm (~150 acres) and a very small winery (~10 acres of grapes). They are, however, one of the oldest producers of Vino Nobile wine in the area.
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| Inside the cantina. |
The owner of the place was this wirey 72-year old woman, who was as weathered as she was friendly. She was raised on the farm, working on the farm since she was a girl, eating bread with butter and wine as main staples of her diet. She had long, thin, mostly grey, free-flowing hair. She was always smiling and had this big, wide smile that showed all of her bad teeth as well as this wonderfully genuine friendliness. She was proud of being an independent, single woman, and she walked around with this swagger like she would happily kick your ass if it came down to it. Yet, in a matter of minutes, it felt like we were the closest of friends. The thought came to me pretty quickly that this woman was a force of nature in many respects and definitely someone I connected with.
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| Guilia and Suzanne |
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| Guilia featured in an article about authentic, traditional, unpretentious wine making. |
Stepping inside the first part of the cantina was so interesting because for all the rustic nature of the outside of the farm, the inside of the cantina was a totally charming, immaculantly clean cellar. The inside had brick walls and archways. The space was filled with big wooden caskets that had natural finishes and ordorned with shiny black metal or bright red-painted trim. It was beautiful! So cozy. So natural. So authentic. Just beautiful.
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| Simple elegance |
Guilia, the owner, then gave us a tour of the fermentation room. We were visiting during the harvest season, so she showed us large vats that had been recently filled with grapes and had started the fermentation process. Josh came over to feel the heat on the vats from the fermentation process. Guilia asked Suzanne if she wanted to climb this old wooden ladder, that looked like it belonged in a museum, so that she could look down on the vats filled with crushed grapes. Suzanne braved it, and even took some pictures from up above. I then asked if this ladder might withstand my weight, considering the fact that I probably weighed more than Giulia and Suzanne combined. It did.
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| The ladder we climbed to peer down into the fermentation containers. |
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| Josh was feeling the warmth created from active fermentation. |
She gave us a full tour of the place. Meanwhile, Josh and Isabel are having free run of the farm outside. They were running around with full abandon, tending to the dogs, trying to get close to the geese, marveling at the roosters, making up games, being kids. Sometimes they'd run into the cantina with us for awhile, then go back out and find some other kid thing to do.
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| Kids having fun on the farm. |
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| Is this the same princess of mine who I was carrying around in the baby-bjorn the other day??? |
Now inside the tasting room, Giulia starts to give us samples of her wine. Che bellisimo! Yeah, the Brunellos are wonderful, but this wine was so good.
And Giulia is as authentic as they come. Suzanne asked about irrigation because it had been such a dry year. Nah, no irrigation, as Giulia would explain, Mother Nature knows what to do - it's we that need to interpret it. After doing this for so long, you could tell she was still so interested and passionate and curious about how Nature could produce such wonderfully different expressions of wine that is produced with the slightest variations in grapes, weather, soil, and technique. Clearly, the respect of tradition and Mother Nature was paramount, even when it meant a lower harvest, yield, or profit. This isn't about being organic for the sake of putting a label on your wine stating that you're organic, it's because this is just "how it's supposed to be done". There's nothing overly remarkable about it.
Now, it's like 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning and Giulia is giving us fairly healthy samples of each of her wines. She, by the way, is drinking along with us - why wouldn't she, she asks. Meanwhile, Josh and Isabel have started this game where they are "selling" rocks to us - rocks that they've collected from Giulia's parking lot, budding little entrepreneurs they are. Giulia sees all of this, leaves, comes back a few minutes later, and
gives Josh a large fossil that she has collected from her farm! We are perfect strangers, haven't purchased a thing (yet), may not ever see her again, and she gives my son this grapefruit-sized fossil that she's collected on her family farm. It's true I probably love fossils more than the average person to begin with, but I was just blown away by it. What a nice and thoughtful and generous thing to do. Such a cool gift.
This whole time, by the way, Suzanne and I have been speaking only Italian with Guilia, as in, not
any English. I'm not going to say that we understood 100% of what she was saying, but still.
Then I hear a couple of gun shots in the distance and ask if those were hunters (knowing that hunting season has started). She said yes. She told me
she hunted. I told her I hunted and that it was a real passion. She told me that she was the only woman in her local hunting association, and that she was the PRESIDENT of the association! And so we go on and on with each other about hunting (still in Italian). That takes us in a whole other direction of conversation, which led to a tour of one of her barns where she showed me a bunch of her deer antlers. Then we started talking about the possibility of me coming back down to go hunting with her!!! Ok, seriously???? SERIOUSLY???!!!!! She tells me that cinghuale (wild boar) season starts Nov 1st and maybe we can arrange a time for me to go hunting with her! Me....going cinghuale hunting...in Tuscany!!!! Forget about it. The
thought of it is ridiculous, right!?
So understand that by this point, I am so happy with life and wine and fossils and kids having fun and the thought of going cinghuale hunting in Tuscany with my new 72-year old winery owner friend, that I have basically stopped talking in full sentences. I am wearing a perma-grin, and the only Italian I can muster is a series of "si", "prego" (after you, you're welcome), "bellismo, "che bello" (how wonderful), "si, piu per favore" (yes, more please), "grazie mille" (thousand thank yous), etc, etc, etc. I was a man totally and completely overwhelmed with a that is good.
(Actually, the only time I say anything negative at all is when we were in the midst of sampling the wine and Guilia brings out that little container for when you don't want to finish your sample and dump it out. THEN!...THEN is when I dropped my perma-grin, got dead-serious for a moment, and said with a low, somber tone, "Ah....no! No thank you. But we won't be needing that!")
Coming out of the barn with the deer antlers, I see a whole stack of big, glass demijohns, mostly covered in the thick plastic baskets that are used for carrying them when they are heavy with wine. I've kind of had my eyes open for a few of these big, old demijohns because they're kind of cool. I am even told they are sold in Pottery Barn as fancy-dancy home decorations. Whatever. Heck, I o
wn a couple of medium sized ones that I buy bulk wine in, but the bigger ones are kind of cool, especially if they come from some old barn and there's a little story behind how you got them. Whatever. I say something to Guilia about them. She says something back. Then my eye catches one or two demijohns off to the side which really stand out of the other 50 or so that are all around. They had irregular shapes with chipped tops, and instead of the heavy plastic baskets around them, they are wrapped in a basket made of really old rope. The rope was this really thick, old looking, fibrous, cord-rope. It looked like something that would have been used 300 years ago for pulling oxen. Or maybe something you'd see in a museum exhibit of Native Americans. So me being the curious cat I am, I asked about it. Guilia's expression changed a little and told me that ahh, these were
antique demijohns - these were very old, very antique, hand-blown glass demijohns! I was totally blown away. She said a bunch more stuff, but I wasn't really comprehending the Italian much anymore. I just kept saying si! bellisimo! che bello! bravo! piu per favore! siiiiiii! certo! bellisimo! - just kind of overwhelmed, and a bit tipsy, and just was not following the Italian anymore. I was still stuck on the hunting thing. I was still stuck on how good the wine was. I was really still so appreciative of the fossil-gesture thing. I was useless at this point.
So when Guilia asked if I wanted to see another one of these antique demijohns, I just answered with the same siiii! che bello! etc, etc, etc. She leads me over to this other area of the farm and shows me another demijohn. It's as beautiful as the last one. She hands it to me to look at, which I do. These things are pretty big, by the way, like 2-3 ft in diameter and 2-3 feet tall, all glass. I hoist this thing up into the sunlight, look at it's irregularity because it was hand-blown, look at the small bubbles of "imperfection", appreciate it's authenticness and it's simple beauty, and hand it back to her. No, she says, and hands it back to me. ...."Bellisimo!" I say, because that's ALL I've been saying for the past 45 minutes, and hand it back to her.... NO! she says, looks at me, and gives it back to me.... Then I realized that when she asked me if I wanted to
see one and I had answered with such an enthusiastic "YES! How Wonderful!", she had actually asked me if I wanted to
keep one!
I should point out that we had traveled to Tuscany for 5 days, with two adults, two kids, two accompanying car seats, all of our luggage for 5 days, including a small cooler, homework/books/games for the kids, clothes to cover us in case of chilly/warm/rainy weather, etc, etc, etc....in a standard 4-day sedan. Our car was pretty much packed at the start of our trip. Since being in Tuscany, we had also accumulated by now, boxes containing over 35 bottles of wine (imagine how much space that requires), bags of pottery and ceramics (highly breakable and fairly expensive), and a 5.5 ft long, rather-expensive, oil painting of Tuscany that we bought in Orvietto. We accumulated all of this without any idea of how we could make it all fit. And with all of that, I am now being handed an antique, breakable, hand-blown glass demijohn, roughly the size of a small dishwasher.
Did I take it?....oh HELLS yes!
I was pretty convinced that Josh would have to go home by himself on the train...and I was ok with that! I was NOT going home without that demijohn.
Do not ask me how I did it. I have no idea myself. I packed all of that stuff, ALL of that expensive, highly breakable, highly irregular shaped stuff, in the car, with kids, for a 4.5 hour car ride home, on the autostrada that was jammed with 18-wheelers and crazy Italian drivers, during a torrential downpour, without breaking a thing. Honestly, I think I deserve a PhD in family vacation packing to have pulled that off.
In any case, we're back now. The whole trip was just so wonderful. It has been one of the best trips we've taken in a year chalked full of wonderful trips. And one of the highlights was the incredible morning we spent with Guilia from Sanguinetto.
p.s. I have already warned Suzanne that if by some long-shot of a chance I actually get to go cinghuale hunting with Guilia in Tuscany....I am officially done! Don't expect another useful or productive thing out of me, like ever again!
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