D171 -- Wonderful wine tasting

Volterra, like San Gimignano, is a walled medieval town full of brown brick buildings and cobblestone streets perched on a hilltop. Very photogenic!


It's known for its alabaster workshops, so our first order of business upon arrival this morning was to do a little shopping for items made with the beautiful translucent stone. Of course
shopping always works up the hunger, so we stopped for lunch at a fabulous hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. There was just a little counter separating us from the wood burning oven, and it was so fun to watch the chef work. I couldn't believe how quickly he put pizzas in and pulled them out of the oven with his “pizza spatula on super-long stick” thing. And he could cut a large pizza into slices in under 2 seconds. I felt like making Batman sound effects while he worked. Whah-pah! I would have to say it was the best pizza I've had on the entire trip.

We visited some Roman ruins on the way to the car, but didn't dally too long because we had a wine tour scheduled at 5. Well, three of us did, anyway. One of our group decided to go home to watch the US play Ghana. Can you guess who? So we drove back to San Gimignano where Patty, Dan, and I boarded a bus with four others to Il Lebbio, a winery about 10 minutes away from our villa. Luciano, whose family owns Il Lebbio, met us in the vineyard on his little white Vespa. With the help of our fashionable Italian tour guide/interpreter Ana Maria, he showed us some vines and explained how the grapes are grown. We got to see vernaccia grapes, which are used to make Vernaccia wine - a specialty of San Gimignano – and Sangiovese, the predominate grape used in Chianti.


From there we followed Luciano to the winery, which looks like a big garage behind the family's house. There he explained the steps in the process that turns the harvested grapes into wine.

After the tour we were invited to taste four or five wines at a table overlooking the Tuscan hills. Along with the bottles was a lovely spread of snacks prepared for us by Luciano's mother: fresh-baked bruschetta, pecorino cheese, and homemade salami. Anna Maria poured our first glass, but then all the bottles were uncorked and we were allowed to pour ourselves as much or as little as we liked of each. We ate, drank, and chatted with the other members of our group: a couple from Dublin and newlyweds from Seattle. It was more like being at a cocktail party than a wine tasting. SUCH a different experience from the more corporate wineries we've visited. We had so much fun!

-Elva