Wine, Cook, Wine. Walk.

I got up bright and early this morning to meet the Accidental Tourist guide and fellow members for a wine and cook tour of a subdivision of Tuscany. Breakfast was delivered to my room promptly at 8:30 - can't beat that.

view of the Arno River from Ponte Alle Grazie (a bridge).

The other "tourists" included Jim and John from Boston, Meredith and Perry from Virginia, John from Ireland and our guide Steve, an American who has lived in Italy for 30 years.. I think. We all climbed into a nine-seater van and began our journey to wine country.

view of the river with wine hills in the background.

grape vines. yum.

looking down over grape and olive fields.

After many, many winding and bumpy roads, we reached our first stop: the Grignano vineyard. This house and property was built as more of a status symbol than actual home decades ago, and now sits vacant except for once a year when the Milanese owners hold a fashion show and reception on site.

what if this were home?

view from the villa. pictures don't do it justice.

Steve showed us around the estate and explained how wine and olive oil is made with the fruit of this vineyard and the work of local hands.

hundreds of old bottles create an inventory of past vintages.

As soon as the olives are ready to be picked (first of November), a crew of about forty start on the job. Traditionally this took twice the man power and almost double the time, but recent advances in technology has made picking the olives very efficient. Olives are separated from leaves and stems, cleaned and disinfected, and dropped down into this machine.

Here the olives are pressed. Basically they are smashed together whole, pit, skin, etc. Next a centrifuge is  used to separate some of the water, filters strain out solids, and another centrifuge removes more the water. If one were to pick an olive off of the tree and eat it, he would be surprised to find a very bitter taste. This bitterness is in the liquid of the olive. Therefore, it is important to remove the water (bitterness) from the oil. Next the oil is placed into these large ceramic vats, as they have been for over a century.

inscribed: Fornace Grignano 1891 - made in the kill on site in 1891. pretty cool.

Next was our wine lesson. Similarly the grapes are picked and very quickly put into the process. Machines remove stems and automatically begin the smashing the grapes. Interesting fact: red wine uses the entire grape, while white only uses the juice. Why? To make red wine red and white wine not red. After fermenting in stainless steel vessels, the wine is transferred to large oak barrels.

After this informational (and interesting) tour, we had a chance to taste the fruit of their vines: oil and wine. Delicious.

Next, on to cooking. We made ravioli stuffed with spinach, ricotta cheese, parmasean cheese, freshly grated nutmeg and a pinch of salt. The pasta was made with 4/5 cup Semola (a type of flour), one egg and a pinch of salt.

Steve chops up spinach for our ravioli.

group pic as Steve and John use the pasta makers.

look!! I'm making pasta!

what a great family. see our delicious ravioli?

Jim, John, me, John, Meredith, Perry

After preparing the pasta, we found a huge meal prepared for us. We enjoyed artichoke omelets, tomatoes with bread crumbs, pizza, our ravioli in a butter and sage sauce, our fettucini with a tomato sauce, homemade strawberry gelato, and coffee. It was so good I was barely hungry for dinner.

saying goodbye to Tuscany.

Upon returning to Florence, I shopped around a bit and enjoyed being in the city. Irish John and I met up for dinner (chicken and artichoke salad), meandered around the city, and had a nightcap of gelato and coffee.  I could get used to this.

After this terribly late night (2:00am), I am getting up early to run to the Accademia to tell Michelangelo's David hello, visiting other tourists spots during the day, and the Uffizi Museum in the afternoon! GOOD NIGHT!