Category: Places to Visit

Power Tasting doesn’t do restaurant reviews so this is not a restaurant review.  It is about a restaurant that is definitely a place worth a visit if you ever happen to be in Nipomo, California.  Actually, no one ever just happens to be in Nipomo, so we’re really saying that if you ever are wine tasting in San Luis Obispo County or nearby Santa Maria, make a pilgrimage to Jocko’s.

A visit there is not just about the steak although the steaks are very good.  It’s about the experience.  For one thing, you feel as though you have been transported to a Saturday afternoon western of your youth.  (You do remember Saturday afternoon movies, don’t you?)  The bar is wood-paneled, with the heads of various dead animals (deer and such, not cows) shown proudly.  Sorry, the door is just a door, not of the swinging variety.  Surprisingly for a restaurant smack in the middle of Wine Country, the list is not particularly impressive although you’ll surely find something to enjoy with your steak.

Then there are the folks who assemble there.  Ten gallon hats and boots are much in evidence.  Everybody is a regular or, more likely, they treat everyone as though they were regulars, which is even better.  You’d better have a reservation as Jocko’s is quite well-known locally and seems always to be crowded.  Not that you’ll actually get a table at the time you reserved, but it will put you in the running to get a table and give you time to enjoy the bar.  Then, when it is your turn, you’ll hear your name bellowed out to overcome the din.

The dining room is a large, open space with cinderblock walls and Formica covered tables.  This is not a restaurant for gracious, elegant dining.  It’s for seriously committed carnivores.  Oh, they give you salad and vegetables, too, but the raison d’etre of Jocko’s (not that they’d ever use a phrase like raison d’etre) is enormous slabs of meat, mostly of the bovine variety.  There are some fish items as well, but really, why bother?

The firepit at Jocko’s.  Photo courtesy of A. Rios on Flickr.

So now you’ve ordered your dinner.  You can go out back and watch them cook it in a great, wide open, wood fired barbecue pit.  There are dozens of steaks and ribs and chops being cooked at any one time and at least one of them is yours.  The fellow tending the grill must be able to stand the heat, because he’s staying in the kitchen.

Go to Jocko’s for the experience.  Don’t worry, if you’re a meat-eater, you’ll love your meal.

California is, as everyone knows, the apex of wine making in the United States.  There are now, according to Wine Spectator, wineries in all 50 states and some are making wine that has promise.  Napa and Sonoma counties have already realized that promise and are even still continuing to improve, with many vineyards producing products of world class caliber.  The regions are easy to visit from San Francisco.

Then there are other areas in the Golden State that are cracking into the big time, notably in Paso Robles and Santa Barbara, the so-called Central Coast, which stretches so far that it’s hard to call it a single wine-growing region.  It’s at least a two-hour drive from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara and a minimum of three hours from, well, anywhere to Paso Robles.  In other words, if you want to visit these regions it will probably mean at least one night in a hotel, not a day trip.

Then, if you’re in Southern California, you also have a destination for wine tasting.  San Diego is a wonderful city with perhaps the best climate in the United States.  If you go, drive north on I-15 to the Temecula Valley, about an hour away, to experience the local Wine Country.

Photo courtesy of Temecula Wines.org

Don’t expect the same level of quality that the great Napa and Sonoma vineyards produce, nor the glorious vistas you can see in the northern and central parts of the state.  But it is very definitely Wine Country that you’ll be in, with all the attendant opportunities that go with such a region.  What’s most amazing is that the local grape farmers have used the popularity of wine drinking in America to make the desert bloom.  This is not the sort of Wine Country with the lush verdure of, say, Russian River nor with the grand chateaux of Bordeaux, Burgundy or, in its way, Napa Valley.  Part of the allure of Temecula is that you have a chance to see it and taste it before it becomes famous, which is a good reason to go.

If you are among those that think that the quality of a wine comes exclusively from the skilled hands of the farmer and the wine maker, then Temecula has a chance at making it big.  If, however, you are like us and think that terroir – the soil and the climate – are the dominating factors in a wine’s character then it may just be that Temecula is reaching its apogee.  Of course, don’t take our word for it; taste for yourself and make your own evaluation.

Two of the wineries we like best are conveniently closest to the Interstate.  If the name Callaway is familiar to you, you must be a golfer.  The club maker and the winery owner are the same folks.  Depending on your perspective, they are either the best or the most pretentious winery in Temecula Valley.  They are the only one there with a wine, the Owner’s Private Reserve, that runs $175 per bottle.  Is it worth it? Only your mouth can tell.

Just next door is Hart Family Winery.  It is one of the oldest wineries in the valley, going back to 1970.  The Hart family are farmers and winemakers, with no corporate empire behind them.  A visit to their winery, even today, brings back thoughts of what Napa Valley was before Robert Mondavi and other pioneers brought that region to the forefront.  And they are still among the few who will let you drink a glass of wine and take the logo-engraved glass with you.

A very nice feature of a visit to Temecula Valley is that many of the wineries have restaurants, running from Meritage at Callaway, which is similar to a sophisticated urban restaurant, to salads and flatbreads at Lorimar’s Pairings bistro.  Flower Hill is at Miramonte; there’s Café Champagne at Thornton (guess what the specialty wine might be); and Avensole has a “restaurant and marketplace” of the same name.

We enjoy visiting Temecula because we enjoy outings in Wine Country, wherever it may be.  We have tasted some pleasant wines but nothing that has ever excited us.  Your experience may be very different in that regard.  So come for the experience, keep your mind (and your mouth) open and have wonderful day so near to San Diego.

There are plenty of wine stores in Manhattan and no lack of specialty food stores either.  But Di Palo’s Fine Foods on Grand Street and Enoteca Di Palo next door are something special.

There is a long and wonderful history for the food store.  Starting in 1903 as a store for dairy products, the store is run by the fourth generation with the fifth working there as well.  Aside from the wonderful smell of cheeses, dried meats, sausages and prepared Italian specialties, Di Palo’s exudes a sense of place and time.  This is Little Italy, now greatly reduced in size from its height in in the first half of the 20^th century, still alive and real, even considering the incursions of New York’s Chinatown.  The three Di Palo’s (Lou, Sal and Marie) preside behind the counter over an empire of foods that are uniquely chosen in their many journeys back to Italy.

Sure, you can buy prosciutto and mozzarella elsewhere.  But where else is the mozzarella made every day in the back of the store?  You can see them bringing out trays of freshly made balls all day long.  The sheer amount of prosciutto sold here ensures that what you buy will definitely be fresh.  And in case there was any question, they will always give you a slice up front.  In Lou’s book, Di Palo’s Guide to the Essential Foods of Italy: 100 Years of Wisdom and Stories from Behind the Counter, he writes that it’s only fair to give the customer a chance to taste before he or she buys.

Lou di Palo giving a customer a bit of Piave cheese (Photo courtesy of dipalos.com)

What differentiates Di Palo’s is the connection they have established between the Old World and the New.  The members of the family are acquainted not only with the major producers but also – and especially – with the farms that keep the old traditions alive in their food in a way that only individual hand crafting can achieve.  You sense that the Di Palo’s know not only every farmer in Italy, they know every cow!

So here you find speck from the Alto Adige; pecorino cheese from a specific dairy in the hills outside of Florence; truffled cheeses from Tuscany and Sicily; select olive oil from the Musso family in Sicily; balsamic vinegar from Giusti, the oldest in Modena; Spinosi pasta, well worth waiting for; ravioli made not by the Di Palo’s but by a cousin…and on and on.  Every few weeks, whenever it’s a good day for a walk or if we’re running out of parmigiana, we go for an Italian or a Chinese lunch and a pilgrimage to Di Palo’s.

And when we buy what we want, we always ask Lou, “What wine should we drink with this?”  For Lou’s son Sam has opened a wine shop adjoining the specialty store.  Again, you won’t find the big producers here, no Bolla or Frescobaldi or Antinori.  In their place are unusual finds like La Salette, Filinona and Tiburzi.  You may not always think these are the best but the selection is certainly the most unique.

They often host wine tastings at Enoteca Di Palo, where you get a chance to meet the owner/winemaker of what you are sipping.  For example, they just held a tasting of wines from the Colli Orientale of Friuli, where Giorgio Colutta poured wines from his vineyard.  We don’t know Friuli very well nor Signore Colutta’s wines but that’s exactly the point.  Here you get a chance not only to taste and buy wine but to get an education in Italian wine, which was certainly the case for us.  Our appreciation for the wines of Italy came late and was largely gained by the tips we got at Di Palo’s.

 

Everybody knows the wine from Montalcino.  It’s Brunello, pure Sangiovese, always grown in the authorized confines of this small village in Tuscany.  Its earliest appearance was at the Tenuta Greppo, home of the Biondi Santi family.  The house still stands in the outskirts of Montalcino and so do their wines.

You approach the village up a winding road, just off a two-lane “highway” and somewhat further from a real autostrada.  As you approach Montalcino, you’ll see plenty of inviting villas where you can stop for a degustazione of that winery’s production.  No one would blame you if you only travelled to Montalcino for wine tasting, but you’d be missing out on a very charming corner of Italy if you didn’t carry on into the town.

We have to admit that parking is a bit of a problem.  If it’s a cold, rainy day in December you might find a place to park right by the town walls, but on a beautiful day at harvest time, you must park quite far down the hill and walk.  It’s a pleasant stroll, albeit with a lot of climbing up and down the narrow streets of the village.

Among the major attractions of Montalcino, much as you might imagine, are the wine shops and restaurants.   We had been advised to dine at Il Grapplo Blu and warned that it would be very difficult to find.  Naturally enough, it was the first taverna we came upon and so were way too early for lunch.  Il Grapplo Blu has no view over the valley, so we went looking for another place that did.  Even in mid-September, the indoor temperatures were so hot that we passed these up and went back to where we had been recommended and had a memorable meal.

On another occasion, we chose to sit outside in one of the two main piazzas, this one right in front of the village’s major church.  It was called Bacchus, understandably.  A selection of local dried hams and sausages there is well worth a try.  Of course, in both restaurants, we had to order a bottle of Brunello.  This can be a mighty expensive wine, but most wine lists have relatively affordable bottles to choose from.  Now, knowing the names of all those Brunellos is quite another matter, but we were quite satisfied with our choices.

All around Montalcino you’ll find wine stores offering tastings, usually for a fee and always from the producers that shop represents.  We chose to save our tasting time for the wineries themselves but others we know have whiled away their afternoons on the piazza in front of the stores.

Like all destinations favored by tourists, Montalcino has its souvenir stores and gimcracks aplenty.  But it also has many little boutiques with fashionable clothes and more exquisite (and expensive) handicrafts.  They provide something to do other than eat, drink and mellow out under an umbrella in a piazza.

Perhaps Montalcino’s greatest treat (other than the Brunello) is the views you can have from around the exterior of the town.  You’ll find your heart in your throat and your camera in your hand, for sure.

While Portugal has some excellent table wines, its glory is in the dessert wines, from grapes grown along the Douro River in the north of the country.  The grapes have names that are strange to American ears: Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz, Tinta Barroca, Touriga Nacional, Tinto Cão and Tinta Amarela.  The name of the wine they are made into comes from the city at the mouth of the Douro, called Porto.  Hence the wine famous around the world for its richness, depth and high alcoholic content is called Port.

But if you are in Lisbon you are three hours south of Porto. So if you want to taste Port, where do you go?  The answer to that question is very simple: the Instituto Dos Vinhos Do Douro e Do Porto (the Institute for the Wines of the Douro and of Porto).  It’s located at 45 Rua São Pedro de Alcântara, in the district called the Barrio Alto or the “high neighborhood”.  The building is an elegant old palace on a street that winds its way down the hill towards the River Tagus.  The Instituto is the august body that determines if a winery’s top production in any given year is good enough to be merited as a vintage Port, so they know their way around this delicious beverage.

The Instituto operates an elegant tasting room called the Solar, where admission is free.  The first thing you notice upon entering is that it is very dark.  Once your eyes adjust, you see that it looks very much like a club room, very hushed with large easy chairs for you to sink into as you sip your Port.  And oh, the Port you have to choose from!  There are more than 300 of them from more than 60 producers, ranging from simple ruby Ports to mature vintage Ports.  Prices range from a few euros to twenty-plus per glass.  The low end is a real bargain; the top end is also a bargain for what you get.

Photograph courtesy of the Instituto Dos Vinhos Do Douro e Do Porto

For the most part, the best Ports are sold only by the bottle, so you need to be with a group to savor these extra special wines.  It’s quite a show if you do.  Your server arrives with the bottle cradled in his arm, wiping away the accumulation of dust.  He lays it gently into a cradle that has a small crank.  In order to avoid pouring sediment into your glass, he uses the crank to gently tilt the bottle so that only unsullied liquid gets there.  He’ll serve you a plate of almonds to accompany your selection.  You are now officially in wine-lovers’ heaven.

If you want to taste by the glass, you are hardly left out of the fun.  You can try all sorts of combinations, such as the range from bottom to top of one producer.  This is best if you already have some knowledge of Port and have a favorite Port house.  Or to gain some knowledge of which houses you like, try tasting similar wines from multiple makers.  So for example, you can sample late bottled vintage (LBV) wines from Grahams, Taylor Fladgate, Dow and Fonseca side by side or one after the other.

Another good tasting is to try a vertical of tawny ports that contain a variety of well-aged wine from various vineyards (or quintas).  You can compare one winery’s 10-year, 20-year and 30-year tawnies.  Needless to say, the older the wine, the more it costs.  There are even some 40-year old tawnies that are quite pricy but are an exquisite experience.  Steve once tasted a 40-year old Burmester there and has never forgotten it.

Once you leave the Solar, turn left and walk a hundred or so feet.  There’s a little park with the best view overlooking downtown Lisbon and the Alfama hill across the way.  Don’t miss it.

The Solar is open until midnight, opening at 11:00 am on weekdays and 3:00 pm on Saturdays.  It’s closed on Sundays and holidays, of which there are quite a few in Portugal.  We recommend that, since the days are so lovely, you shouldn’t spend them indoors.  Go see the sunset over Lisbon and then taste in the evening hours.

 

There are many restaurants that offer a jazz brunch.  Usually, they are neither good jazz not good food.  Two for the price of one often means not much at all, even for the price.  A wonderful exception is Bacchanal Wine in New Orleans.  As the name implies, it is really a wine bar first with jazz as an additional benefit.  It is also a wine store with a pretty wide-ranging selection and a café with a menu that isn’t very wide-ranging at all. The food is more in the way of nibbles, with a soup and a sandwich available as well.

There’s jazz most of the day, starting with lunch.  Jazz, wine and food are served in a courtyard in the back, or upstairs if the weather doesn’t cooperate.

Now, about the wine.  While Bacchanal does have formal wine tastings (Wednesdays and Saturdays), the wines they have on offer at the bar are easy to treat as a wine-tasting.  They are all reasonably priced at around $8.00 a glass.  But if you go on a Monday, such as we did, they are all sold at $5.00.  At that price a couple can sample quite a lot.  We had the opportunity to taste two Rosés (Spanish and South African), two sparkling wines (American and French) and three reds: a Malbec from Argentina, a Nebbiolo from Langhe and a Rioja Tempranillo.  Some of those weren’t glassfuls but rather sips to see if we liked them.  A few we didn’t but most of them we did.  A nice feature is that the wine store supplies the bar, so if you like something in particular, you can buy it and take it home.

We had particular fun with the jazz.  The musician was Raphael Bas from Southwest France.  He plays Gypsy jazz (also called manouche) on guitar and harmonica. He is a special favorite of ours, whom we’ve heard play and sing for about a decade when we visit New Orleans – which we do a lot.  That day he was accompanied by Matt Schreiber on the accordion.  You can listen to Raphael at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grHKKhnBqCM

Raphael and Matt play indoors on a rainy day

A word about the location.  It’s a long way from the French Quarter in a sector called Bywater, probably because it’s by the waters of the Mississippi River.  The road there, the extension of the same Chartres Street that’s so pretty in the French Quarter, is desolate and industrial, with a shipyard just across the street.  When you do arrive at Bacchanal, you may well think you’re going into a dump, more of a tumbledown saloon that a place for wine and jazz.  Take heart; it’s better inside and in the courtyard.  It’s not a place to walk to, so you’d better take a cab and then get a number to call a cab to go back, because there are none trawling this neighborhood.  The bar staff will help you with a number if you don’t have one.

This is not a restaurant review, even though it’s almost about a restaurant, one of our favorite restaurants, but just a little to the left.  It feels as though Mustards Grill (www.mustardsgrill.com) has been along Route 29 north of Yountville forever, but actually it opened in 1983.  Steve would have sworn that he ate there on his first trip to Napa Valley in the 1970’s, but evidently it wasn’t so.  But we have eaten there a lot of times since.  The outside looks like an old fashioned road stop restaurant but the inside is bistro style and cozy. You’ve got to love a place that proudly proclaims on its outside banner that they serve “steaks, chops, ribs, garden produce and way too many wines”.  There have been many memorable meals there and way too much wine, but this is about the garden adjoining the restaurant.

Photo courtesy of Mustards Grill

The founder, proprietor and resident guru of Mustards is Cindy Pawlcyn.  She also owns Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen, a restaurant located on a back street (of course) in St. Helena.  It has the same sort of food but a very different ambiance. For one thing, there’s no garden.  Cindy (evidently no one calls her Ms. Pawlcyn) erected a vegetable and herb garden on two acres just besides Mustard s, so that she could have fresh ingredients for her kitchen(s).  There are other restaurants with private gardens, Thomas Keller’s across from French Laundry being the most famous.  But no other that we are aware of is so accessible to the public as is Cindy’s.

Diners are invited to stroll there before or after a meal.  (There’s no prohibition against walking through the garden without dining, but we would not recommend it.  Mustards’ web site says they also grow winter vegetables, too.  What a wonderful feeling walking among herbs and vegetables in a garden just outside the restaurant you’re about to walk into.  Or after your meal, you can smell all the aromas of those fresh ingredients that were just on your plates.

We are both city folks, but Lucie has family in rural areas who have what the Quebecois call jardins potagers, or simply vegetable gardens, so all this isn’t quite that unusual to her.  She rubs the herbs lightly between her fingers to extract and smell the essential oils.  Steve knows nothing about gardening and he is fascinated to see what a string bean or a pepper looks like before it’s ready to eat.

There’s fun in seeing what your food looked like before it even was ready to go to the kitchen.  Perhaps more so, it keeps you in mind that, for all the fun of going to Wine Country to taste exceptional wines, you could stay home and open bottles if all you wanted was to taste wine.  When you’re in Cindy’s garden, you know you’re in the country.  We both love Cindy’s restaurants, particularly Mustards.

General rules are meant to be broken.  In general, the wines served at in-town tasting rooms are sub-par compared with those at wineries surrounded by lovely rows of vines.  Fortunately, there are exceptions and there are good reasons to take a day to visit a town in Wine Country and find out what’s on offer there.

On a recent trip we decided to try our luck in the town of Napa, for several reasons.  Our trip extended over a weekend and we wanted to avoid the crazy Sunday crowds and traffic on Route 29 and the Silverado Trail.  Also, we had heard good things about the Oxbow Public Market and were looking forward to finding out what the buzz was all about.  Finally, we wanted to eat lunch at the Bounty Hunter, of which we have written previously.  [We never did dine there on this trip.  It was ungodly hot and their air conditioning was on the fritz.]

The main drag for tasting rooms is 1^st Street, running from the aforementioned Oxbow Public Market to the Napa civic center.  As we had expected, there were some tasting rooms we did not enjoy very much.  But there were also some that delightfully exceeded our expectations.  The first of these was Capp Heritage.  Even if you don’t like their wines – heck, even if you don’t like wine at all – their tasting room is worth seeing.  It has two rooms, one of which is a lounge in which they have musical performances on the weekends.  There are big easy chairs and a copper fireplace, which blessedly was unlit the day we were there. The other room contains brass chandeliers and a long mahogany bar that looks as though Diamond Jim Brady might walk up to it at any moment.    That, of course, is where they pour the wine.  (There’s a great wraparound picture of the bar on their web site, http://www.cappheritage.com).  The Capps were primarily farmers who sold to winemakers until, like many growers in the region, they decided to bottle their own wines.  We aren’t wine critics but we can say we enjoyed what we tasted, particularly an unusual Sangiovese and their Meritage.

Just down the street is John Anthony.  That’s the label, the name of the tasting room and the first two names of the proprietor.  We were surprised to learn that his last name is Truchard, son of Tony and JoAnn of Truchard Vineyards, which we have written about in a previous article.  The tasting room is nouveau chic, looking more like a night spot than a place for serious wine tasting.  In fact, that’s the way they advertise, appealing to those out on the town in Napa for an evening.  On a lazy Sunday afternoon, we were the only visitors and the server was able to give us his full attention and quite an introduction to the wines, which were very serious indeed.  There’s a top-end Cabernet, not usually available for tasting, that really impressed us. They have a special deal they call the List: sign up for as few as six bottles a year and they lock in the price forever.  We don’t understand he business model but it sounds like quite a deal.

Unfortunately, there were others that we didn’t enjoy nearly as much.  You may have heard of Cosentino Winery in Yountville.  Mitch Cosentino sold it a few years ago and opened pureCru, which can best be called a boutique winery with a hip looking tasting room just off 1^st Street.  Our server will be a twentysomething in a few years.  She knew very little about what she was pouring and so we just had to drink our wine and make our own determinations.  Fair enough, but we weren’t that enthralled with what we were drinking.

The worst of the lot was a dreary room two blocks off 1^st Street at Clinton Street.  There they serve Havens and Stonehedge wines.  The server seemed bored, unwilling or unable to answer questions and gave off an attitude that we were spoiling her Sunday afternoon solitude. We didn’t care for the wine much but that wasn’t the point.  If they had been presented to us in a friendly, welcoming manner it would have made for a better tasting experience and we might have liked the wines more.

There are other tasting rooms and bars with extensive by-the-glass lists in Napa Town.  The Oxbow Public Market is made for urban foodies out in the country for the day, which just about describes us.  It’s a fun place and you might want to have lunch or a snack at one of the many eateries there.  All in all, we spent a very pleasant day of our trip in the town of Napa.  We’ll be back.

We were on vacation in northern Italy and one of our stops was Verona.  It’s known for Romeo and Juliet and yes, you can visit that famous balcony and have dinner in Romeo’s house.  Verona is a lovely little town that gives visitors a chance to see the Roman, medieval and Renaissance worlds.  And it’s about a 20-minute drive from Valpolicella.

A generation or two ago, a lot of wine from Valpolicella was thin, acid and cheap.  It was red, hard to pronounce and it paired well with spaghetti and meatballs.  Steve’s father, who knew nothing about wine, favored Valpolicella because it’s what Hemingway’s characters drank in the The Sun Also Rises. Little did Dad know that the same region made Amarone, one of Italy’s vinicultural wonders.

Happily, it is easy to tour around the Valpolicella wine growing regions and the wineries welcome visitors.  A visit can have its peculiarities, though.  We pulled into the courtyard of one winery only to meet the winemaker, who spoke no English.   He figured we wanted to taste his wines so he invited us into his house where his daughter, who was studying English in school, poured us some wines at the kitchen table.

At another winery, once again the winemaker spoke no English and he had no daughter to help him.  All he could say, at the top of his lungs, was AM-A-RON-E.  We drank up, giggled a bit, and went on our way.

If you get off the highway in the village of San Pietro in Cariano, one of the first wineries you’ll see is Brunelli.  While not a Napa palace, it will look familiar to American visitors: a little bar, a lot of bottles and someone behind the bar pouring wine.  In this fortunate case, the pourer was Alberto Brunelli, winemaker and son of the founder.  He took the time to explain what Valpolicella wines are all about, with some excellent tastes to enhance the lecture.  Here’s what he said, in capsule form:

The primary grapes are Corvina, Corvinone and Rondinella, unique to the area.  The wine pressed at harvest (usually in August) is Valpolicella Classico or Classico Superiore.  It’s not at all bad these days, but it’s basically what Steve’s Dad was drinking.  The best of the grapes are set on drying racks and left for four months.  Of course, they shrivel and the remaining liquid is extremely concentrated.  These get pressed and become Amarone which must, by law, be aged in casks for a minimum of three years.  The skins are retained and some of the Classico is poured over them to make a Ripasso (re-passed).  The second vinification results in a more alcoholic, deep and rounded wine.

The Brunelli  Winery

At a top-end, rather Napafied winery called Zyme, we tasted a significant number of traditional and not-at-all traditional Valpolicella wines.  Our guide that day, seeing that we were truly interested in learning about Valpolicella wines, suggested we call her cousin’s winery to make an appointment for a visit.  The next day we asked our hotel to make the call and we drove off. The winery was called Quintarelli Giuseppe; we drove for hours trying to find it.  Finally, just before noon, we located it and pulled into their yard.  A pleasant young man greeted us and asked what we wanted, as they were closing for lunch.  We apologized and said that our hotel had called for an appointment but evidently they never had.  Crestfallen, we were about to leave when the nice young man said, “Oh, well, you’re here.  I’ll show you around.”  And so we got a personal tour and tasting from Francesco Grigoli, winemaker and grandson of the founder.  We were treated like family, meeting his mother along the way to the tasting room, where we discovered that we had happened on the premier Valpolicella winery, whose Amarones sell for $350 or more in the US.  And what wines!  Their Classico is really a Ripasso and their Amarone is, in Steve’s words “a religious experience”.

 

Francesco Grigoli showing Lucie the cask

On the way out, we asked Francesco if he could recommend somewhere for lunch.  He said most places were closed that day, but he did know one was open because his mother was dining there that day.  He made a call and all we could recognize in the flow of Italian was “due Americani”.  He then showed us a little white dot on the horizon and told us to drive there.  “How will we find the restaurant?” we asked.  “Don’t worry”, he said, “The only things in that village are the church and the restaurant”.

We arrived and were led to a table in the wine cellar.  Shortly afterwards, Francesco’s mother arrived with some industry people and greeted us like family.  The meal was one of the best we had eaten in Italy and the overall Valpolicella experience was a wine taster’s dream.

We were vacationing in Tuscany and of course we were taking in the cathedrals, the art, the piazzas.  And we engaged in a lot of wine tasting.  There are three wines that for which Tuscany is famous: Brunello from the area around Montalcino, Vino Nobile from the vineyards bordering Montepulciano, and Chianti.  The first two are near one another, southeast of Siena.  The best Chianti comes from the hills between Florence and Siena, the famous Chianti Classico.  The wine is comprised of 80% Sangiovese and some other grapes and is made throughout Tuscany.  Only the wines from the central region are Classico and bear the black cock identifier and a DOCG designation.

Now to be honest, Steve had always thought of Chianti in terms of straw-covered bottles, melting candles and thin, highly acidic beverages in the glass.  Travelling broadens your horizons…and tastes.  That is the greatest joy of visiting wine-growing regions: discovering a whole new world of enjoyment that you never before realized was there.

Piazza Matteotti during the Wine Expo in Greve in Chianti

There are three principal villages associated with Chianti Classico: Gaiole, Castellina and Greve.  They form a triangle in the center of the region and all the other villages associated with winemaking (like Panzano or Volpaia) are near one of the three.  The views are magnificent, the food appealing and the roads, well, are a bit of a challenge.  But even if you get a little lost, there will usually be a sign a few kilometers away that will put you back on track.

On just such a roundabout journey, we pulled into Greve on the main road and as we were looking for parking, caught a glimpse of a piazza with a lot of umbrellas off to our left.  Once parked, we wandered towards the umbrellas and, lo and behold, we had stumbled upon the annual Wine Expo!  The Piazza Matteotti had dozens of booths, one large kiosk and numerous caffès around the exterior.  The caffès are there all year but the rest only spring up one long weekend in September, after the harvest, and we were lucky enough to have caught just the right day.

You go to the ticket counter (biglietteria) and ten euros buys you a wine glass, a little pouch you can wear around your neck to hold the glass and a ticket that entitles you to taste seven tastes.  In this case, a “taste” means trying the wines of seven producers.  Each one with a booth on the square has at least one Chianto Classico, a Chianti Classico Riserva, a Super Tuscan and many have olive oils to try as well.  That’s a lot of tasting!  We learned that in general, Lucie prefers the youth and freshness of a Classico and Steve goes for the depth of a Riserva.

In the big kiosk, producers who don’t feel like staffing a booth have some of their best wines available, including some Vin Santo, the dessert wines of Tuscany.  Many in the kiosks are the better known wineries of Chianti, like Felsina and Fondoti.

In the individual booths, no one seems to intent on stamping your ticket but in the kiosk they’re more rigorous about it.  Not to worry, another ten euros will buy you another ticket.  But all those sips in a concentrated period of time can add up.  It’s a better idea to be content with seven.  In fact, Lucie was driving that day and gave her last two ticket stamps to Steve, just to be on the safe side.

The day was quite a learning experience.  For one thing, we now know that there’s a whole lot of fine wine in Chianti.  We didn’t see even one straw-covered bottle.  Having the opportunity to taste many different vineyards’ wines side by side, we definitely came away with some favorites.  And rubbing shoulders with the Italians while we tasted certainly added to the pleasure.

The Wine Expo is held every year in September.  You can learn more at http://www.greve-in-chianti.com/en/2010_wine_festival.htm#.VcuuTsuFPDc