Good Food and Views are Worth the Journey
Alto Adige or Sudterrol (to the local Tyrolleans) is a piece of Austria in northern Italy complete with alpine landscapes and crisp white wines such as the Gewürztraminer. This was the second last stop in our April wine tour of Italy. Our trip had taken us from the well known Tuscan wines to the heel of Italy on Mt. Etna and refined Amarones around Verona, but this is an area with its own lingo and culture.
We drove to St. Paul's winery in the Alto Adige from Verona, around...
I knew nothing about Amarone so our visit to winemaker Nicolis this past April was a most enjoyable education particularly when accompanied by copious amounts of food and wine at dinner and a twilight walk in Verona. The tasting of good Amarone also debunked my view that this wine tends to be sweet. It was, in fact, one of the nicer red wines we tried on our wine tour of Italy.
After the rugged scenery of Sicily, we were back in the rolling hills and sculpted gardens of northern...
The third visit of our April wine tour of Italy took us to Sicily where we dropped in on Cusumano's winery in Palermo and had a tour of the company's new vineyards on the slopes of Mt. Etna. The tasting introduced us to some fascinating new wines, including an extremely promising white wine, as well as some of Palermo's best "street" food. The vineyard visit gave us some amazing views on Etna.
Cusumano is a Palermo based company producing a variety of white and red wines, ranging...
There is a lot of good wine in Tuscany and I had a memorable visit to Carpineto winery this past April. The Montalcino and Montepulciano areas are home to the Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile Montepulciano, red wines that have gained prominence over the past decade. While a prior trip last year included visits to Brunello specialists Casanova di Neri and Poggio di Sotto, a visit to a large producer like Carpineto gave us a chance to try the winery's broader region products including a...
Southwestern Tuscany, namely the province of Grosseto in the Maremma area, is not as well visited as the rest of the region but I was out here in April to pay a visit to a winery and found some great food and views along the way. This was our fist stop in a wine tour of Italy, and the highlights here include a visit to the Mantellassi winery, the walled cities of Pitigliano and Magliano and the best tortello of our trip.
We stayed at the Borgo Magliano which I imagine would be filled...