Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Italian Food and wine: Can it really get much better than that?!

I honestly don't think you can beat authentic Italian food and homemade red wine. But that's just me! So in honoring such a fabulous combination, I think wine harvesting was in order! It was such a picture perfect day. (I feel I say that lot, but that is honestly the best way to describe it!) We drove up to the Tuscany region of Italy to a small hill town a ways from the bigger town of Viterbo. The particular vineyard we went to is just becoming popular and increasing it's ranks in the Italian competition. The "head honcho" said he has about 20 acres of grapes and about 10 acres of hazelnuts, which is significantly larger than a typical vineyard. There is quite a variety of grapes grown at this vineyard.
Brittany and Chris harvesting grapes!


All the grapes we picked!
Upon our arrival to this beautiful place, we were put immediately to work harvesting the grapes. But who knew picking grapes could be so fun?! We harvested for about an hour and a half and we had a whole truck full of crates piled high with red grapes! (They were delicious right off the vine I might add!)
As soon as the grapes are picked, they are put through a machine that completely "de-stems" the grapes and sends them to these large cylinders. Red grapes are crushed while the white grapes aren't. In the cylinders, the yeast is added and fermentation begins. For the red wines, it takes about about a month to complete ferment and whites take about half that time.
This is the machine that de-stems the grapes,  with the "head honcho"


By Italian custom, if you will, after a day of work, Italians reward themselves with a huge 3 hour long meal. So of course, we had to do the same. We get to the fancy little restaurant and the waiter takes us down some stairs and we walk into the coolest room ever!
First course, with the chardonnay!

It is basically a wine cellar with two huge tables set so fancily for lunch. wine was EVERYWHERE! One huge barrel (walk-in sized) was the focal point of this room with tons of wines inside! It just made my day! The waiter comes out with course numero uno. I have no idea what it is. It was some sort of cheese spread with pesto, turkey and cherry tomatoes. Whatever it was it was out of this world. To go along with this first course, was the white wine from the vineyard we were just at. If anyone wants a phenomenal white wine, try this stuff!

We had the food and wine professor with us from our school (I wish sooo sooo bad that we could take that class! It has my name written all over it for sure!), and he showed us the proper way for wine testing. We swirled the glass, took note of the transparency and smelled it. The aroma was gorgeous: a hint of peach and banana! Well, the waiter continued to pour all of us more of this white chardonnay. I think we had about 2 glasses and that was just the white wine for starters! Course numero due followed. Roasted veal with gravy. Holy guacamole! I don't know what to say to that, it was so darn good though! That was accompanied with bread and the first red wine. This one had a bit of a bite to it, a bit on the dry side, but went soo well with the veal! Shortly after came the wine from the grapes we harvested: the red merlot. This was my favorite one out of the three we tried. Had to have a few more tastes of that one. So after this amazing meal, lets just say everyone was relaxed and very happy :) Even the professors agreed!

                               Food, wine and good company is definitely a recipe for the perfect day!

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