April 26-30
After our quick trip to Rome, Michael and I jumped on a train to Florence. With so many rental cars over the past month or so, this was our first intercity European train ride of the trip. Yes! The trip was an easy hour and a half and we arrived pumped to spend time in Florence and pumped for my mom to arrive!
We headed off to check into our airbnb and then to eat (no surprise to anyone who is paying attention). Then I went out to the airport to greet mom. In classic form, it was a hurry up to wait kind of situation. I bought a bus ticket to take me the 20 minutes, but then missed a bus by just a few minutes and didn’t want to risk being late by waiting for the next one. So I took my paid bus ticket and jumped in a cab. Whomp. I got there right on time for her flight that ended up being delayed 20 minutes, only to be followed by 30 or so minutes of her trying to get through customs. Apparently the bus would have been sufficient. But it gave me time to jam out to the new T Swift album.
Just when I was starting to get worried and figuring out exactly how ridiculous it would be to try to page her through the airport security desk, she walked through the doors. Yes!
We jumped on the bus back to the city and I got to use that one ticket I’d already paid for. The airbnb was only a few blocks from the train station where our bus dropped us off and in those few blocks, mom was already scouting a new purse and haggling with the shopkeeper.
Welcome to Florence! With a few days to shop around, we arrived back to the airbnb without any purchased goods.
It was pretty late and mom was coming off about 30 hours of flying, but she still wanted to head out to dinner. So Michael found us a great little local place and we had a delicious meal to celebrate mom’s arrival.
The next morning we were on the move again. No rest for the weary! We packed everything up and headed back to the airport. But not before some coffee!
This time it was to grab a rental car for our drive out to Tuscany. We still have some issues when renting a car since Michael doesn’t have a driver’s license, I don’t have an international driver’s license, I don’t drive manual and these rental car companies typically don’t rent automatics. So it is always a song and dance to get the car rented and then figure out what is the most responsible way to navigate the waters. They wouldn’t put Michael on the rental agreement as an extra driver but also reminded me that if I get pulled over by a cop that I’d get hit with a large fine for not having the international driver’s license. That’s better than Spain who claims you “have to have it”, whatever that means. Under a very close eye, there was no way Michael was driving that car out of the lot. So that left me. Ugh.
I didn’t stall the car as the rental car worker watched on. But I did rev the engine in a pretty dramatic fashion. I got out of the parking lot and immediately was thrown onto a fairly busy street with a lot of traffic circles and merging. I survived. I did well on the highway and I even did fairly well at the two tolls even though there was a lot of stress involved. The drive was about two hours to get to Montalcino and upon entering the town where we were having lunch, I entered a traffic circle, on a hill, with a bicyclist that just cut right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and killed the engine. Luckily, there was a restaurant that overlooked the traffic circle and a dozen or so people watching as I tried to get the car started again while on the hill. It took a few times but I finally got it. We drove uphill a bit more before deciding we needed to turn around. When trying to pull off, I killed the car again. Ok – nerves are shot. The car is hanging out on the street right off a curve. And that is when I put on the parking break and got out to make Michael take over. Truthfully, there was zero chance I was doing anything productive at that point. We didn’t get hit by some act of God and I was done with my driving stint.
Time to get out of the car and eat something delicious.
After a quick bite, we popped into a winery so we could get a sip of the reason we are in this area: Brunello di Montalcino.
Brunello di Montalcino is 100% Sangiovese. The climate is one of the warmest and driest in Tuscany and create some of the most delicious (my opinion) and expensive wines in Italy (not my opinion). There are about 3000 acres of vines in Montalcino compared to nearly 41 thousand acres of Chianti in Italy. The soil is a mix of limestone, clay, schist (you’ll have to ask Michael what that is), volcanic soil and marine deposits. This diversity adds to the range and complexity of Brunellos. The aging requirements for Brunello are at least 2 years in oak and at least 4 months in the bottle before release, although the wineries varied on this quite a bit.
Our first winery was Fattoria dei Barbi and it was a great place to start. We tried a few different years so we could taste the difference in the ages. We also got a chance to try a Vinsanto which was a pleasant surprise to me. For some reason, I though Vinsanto was exclusively Greek. Not so. Apparently there is some level of disagreement between the Greek and the Italians as to which country Vinsanto really “belongs” to.
After Barbi, we headed into the historic town of Montalcino to walk around and see what was going on. Yes… and to also have another glass of wine.
Mom gets her wine straight from the barrel.
Then we were off to our Airbnb. It was a bit farther out of town that I had anticipated, so I was bummed about that, but within a few minutes of our arrival, I was over it. The place was amazing.
The home was a small complex with room for a few families. The stone building was supposedly over 200 years old and was just beautiful. And beyond being beautiful, it was full of anything we could need – full kitchen, lots of places to sit and relax both inside and outside in two courtyards, and a super modern bathroom. Amazing mix! All the feel of a historic home but all the comforts of modern living. It was just like Under the Tuscan Sun, but without all of the construction hassles.
After welcome drinks and snacks from our hostess, we…. did… something. As I’m typing this, all three of us are on a bus heading to Bosnia and none of us can remember what we did that night. After a lot of back and forth, we’re pretty sure we we went to the grocery and Michael cooked at the Airbnb.
Moving on. The next day was our big Tuscany cooking class! This we remember. We arrived and were treated to a coffee from our host, Alessandro who, along with his girlfriend, taught the class. We also took this as an opportunity to ask how to use the coffee maker shown below so we could make coffee the next morning in our airbnb.
We also walked around the beautiful grounds of the restaurant which includes a garden and a vineyard.
The class was great. They started with us out in the garden and talked through the types of vegetables and herbs that are important in that region’s cuisine.
They also spent some time talking about their history and how after the two of them traveled around the world, working in different countries, they decided they wanted to come back to their home and open a restaurant with their family. So they bought an old farm house and did a huge gut reno to create the restaurant with enough space to also do a small cooking class in the kitchen.
First thing’s first when we got into the kitchen: PASTA! Michael has made pasta from scratch a time or two but not recently and this was definitely new for me. It is also something that all three of us were really excited to learn.
A little beet purée makes pink pasta!
I could tell you that it was really challenging, but that would be a lie. They gave us a very simple recipe that was easy to follow and easy to replicate. Also, they showed us 6 or 7 different pasta shapes that we could make without buying any tools, which makes it that much nicer.
There was one tool that we used – a pasta guitar – that made perfectly sized spaghetti. It was cool, but it wasn’t cool enough to necessitate buying it instead of just cutting our spaghetti and linguine.
Here is Michael making some Ravioli!
And the whole crew hanging around:
Pasta making is definitely the type of activity that, if done properly, can take a bit of time. However, the extra effort created really beautiful pasta. This is a skill that all three of us are planning on using in the future, so everyone should get excited to come visit and have meals with us.
Besides pasta, they taught us a simple sauce, a rolled turkey dish and tiramisu. The sauce was fine – super easy, but not our favorite. The rolled turkey dish was delicious, but probably not something we’d really make again. But the tiramisu!! Yes! This is another recipe that is not terribly difficult, but seeing first hand how to make the dish was really helpful. Now once we settle back in the US, we’ll have to find a place to source these ingredients! I’m sure it won’t be a problem.
Here are our beautiful tiramisus!
Then, for the best part: lunch!
It was delicious and it gave us some time to chat with the Australian couple that had been cooking with us.
It’s a hodgepodge of shapes because we wanted to try all the different designs they showed us. The bow ties are my favorite.
Here is the rolled turkey dish. Delicious, but not as cool as learning how to make pasta.
After a wonderfully slow Italian meal, mom finally got to try grappa.
It wasn’t her favorite. Anyone who has sampled grappa can understand why.
Then we headed back through town to hit up the grocery store. Michael cooked some steaks for dinner that night and started a bolognese for Sunday dinner.
All of us loved our hustle and bustle Sunday schedule. We got up, went from town to town searching for a mass. Many of you know that you can find mass times online through a handful of different websites, often including the parish websites. This was not the case for these small towns in Tuscany. Each town had at least one church, but with no info online, we just woke up, jumped in the car and stopped at each church to see what their situation was. We found a couple of churches that only do Saturday masses. So we missed the boat on those. Then we found a few churches that were open, but no real time masses occurring. We did happen upon one mass in Montalcino that had about 4 minutes remaining when we arrived. So we got a closing prayer in Italian at least! Better luck next week.
After mass, we grabbed coffee and a pastry before heading back to the Airbnb. And then, we did almost nothing for the rest of the day. It was wonderful. Michael got in a run while mom and I sat in the sun and read for hours.
This little butterfly hung out with us for awhile.
Then we put our new skills to work and made some homemade pasta for Sunday dinner. It was awesome. We completely nailed it.
Plus, Michael’s bolognese blew the professional’s sauce out of the water. This pasta was legitimately my favorite pasta of the last six months. It was amazing!
Then after dinner we played some cards and relaxed some more. Just a wonderful relaxing day. Also, here is a picture of mom pointing at something that night. The moon? No way of knowing.
On our last day out in the country, we went into town and hit up two wineries. The first was Siro Pacenti, a relatively new producer of Brunello.
This was our first experience with a Rosso which is similar to a Brunello, same grapes, same area, but with less time in oak and less time in the bottle. So they are newer, younger wines that don’t need to be aged to be delicious.
Our second winery was the favorite for all of us in Montalcino: Baricci. Google maps dropped us off at a small building without signage. We had come to a moment that we know fairly well from these past six months: do we bolt or do we awkwardly knock on this random door and see what happens.
Thankfully, we knocked. And by “we”, I mean Michael. He bears the burden of these kind of interactions pretty frequently on our behalf. It definitely makes my life easier and is something I’m grateful on this trip. So Michael popped in to see if we could do a tasting, and if this was actually even a winery and sure enough, we were in the right place.
Baricci is a family winery, started with the grandfather
The husband of his daughter then took over and now second generation works with his two sons to run the winery. It is a very hands on family. While we were there, the second generation spoke with us about the terroir of Montosoli which is a specific hill in Montalcino that all of their vines are planted on. Montosoli is the only area that produces the grand cru of Brunello and the higher quality grapes can be attributed to the marine deposits in their soil.
While the second generation was moving some of the wine from steel tanks to barrels along with his winemaker son, the other son talked through the history of the vineyard and, of course, gave us the tasting.
What’s cool about the family? Well, when Montalcino began organizing itself back in 1967 a small number of families began coming together to determine the rules to be applied to the wine and created an organization called the Consorzio Del Vino Brunello Di Montalcino. This organization now has hundreds of wineries, but originally there were just a dozen or two. As each winery joins the organization, they get a number that they are then tracked by. Baricci was the very first winery and as such was assigned number 1. I think that’s awesome.
What is also awesome is how delicious the wines were. Their Rosso, which they call their Baby Brunello, was fresh and easy to drink and their Brunellos were complex and delicious. Michael asked why they don’t just make Brunellos since it’s the same grapes and you can sell them for so much more than bottles of Rosso. And the man told us that they don’t make the wine to maximize profits. The Rosso is a good guide for how that harvest will taste as a Brunello in a few years. Also, he said that it is much harder to make a good Rosso than a good Brunello. Since the Rosso gets produced so quickly, if it doesn’t taste right, you don’t have any time or way to “fix it”. Whereas you can leave a Brunello in oak longer or adjust the blending if it isn’t exactly right because you have several years to taste. I thought that was interesting.
What we enjoyed the most was how important family was to the group. It was just a really feel good ending to our Tuscany wine tour. Montalcino was a beautiful town and we enjoyed traveling around the area, eating and drinking.
One final note before we leave Tuscany. With the hard boiled eggs that mom and I ate on the last morning, we used the last of our black pepper that Michael and I had acquired in Chile months ago. We have consistently seen a black pepper deficit in the airbnbs and restaurants over the past 6 months and this pepper has come with us everywhere except Antarctica. You have been a great companion. Thank you for adding flavor to our lives. We will miss you.
