Vino

Thursday, 6/23

Today we learned about the wine of the region. We visited the Fattoria del Colle of Donatella Colombini Cinelli, a winery in nearby Trequanda. The winery was able to represent both the Chianti and DOC Orcia regions as it has vineyards in both areas. The history of this land was fascinating; the two brothers who originally owned it were run out of Italy for becoming protestant and the church took the land from the family that remained behind, passing it to different noble families throughout the generation, eventually a relative of the original family bought it. It was bequeathed to Mrs. Donatella who decided to hire a female wine maker, which was unheard of at the time (way back in 1990) but by the mid 1990s the winery was winning awards from wine spectator magazine, showing that the women could do it just as well as the men. We tasted some delicious wines but being that we will soon don our backpacks again, we enjoyed the taste but decided not to purchase any. The evening was to bring more wine, as it was the night of the pici (pronounced pee-chee) dinner. Pici is the local pasta of this valley, akin to a fat spaghetti. Isabella and a local woman taught us how to make it on the veranda at Cretaiole. Everyone pitched in by kneading the dough and hand rolling the pasta, they made it look so easy to make uniform strands, sort of like when you were a kid making Play-dough snakes but very skinny. It was much harder than it looked but after a while you develop a rhythm and the strands emerge more evenly. Regardless of the appearance of the pasta, it was delicious. This dinner was another full blown Italian meal. As we had prepared for this trip we realized we focused our training on the wrong area. We worked on our physical fitness when we should have been working on our eating endurance! Though we learned from experience to pace ourselves, the food just keeps coming, and at some point you just need to say "basta!" (enough) [Though we also realized that we should take care when using some of the phrases we've picked up from the locals, as to not offend anyone along the way... Best to add 'per favore' and 'grazie' when ever possible.] We had bruschetta that Carlo grilled over a wood fire with olive oil and garlic. Then olives were passed. (This is before we even sat down). Finally seated, the bread water and wine was on the table with cucumber salad to top the bread, and the pasta with ragu and a vegetarian variety. (This would have been plenty). Then ribs from the grill and sausages emerged, for vegetarians a plate of grilled cheese (heaven). A bean salad. Not done yet, the cheese course, yes more cheese! Fresh pecorino from the farm. Then fruit; watermelon and cantelope...not done yet. Dolci: sweets of all sort, biscotti, cakes, candies, grappa and Vin Santo. Somewhere around segundi Greg dropped out of the eating and grabbed the guitar to entertain us. We enjoyed the background music and during the dolci requests began. Those endurance eaters that remained gathered around one table. The Danish guest introduced a game, where each person had to begin a song and the rest sang along, "unda song unda song, Gregorio singa unda song." It was fun to see which songs popped up and of course Greg played along with each one. Finally around midnight we cleared the table and hit the hay, a good day for wine and food (and music for that matter) in Tuscany.