Life on the Vine

My worlds of books and wine converged in a pleasant and unexpected way last October.  A recommended winery in Greve in Chianti turned out to have a historical connection to a book that one of my college professors had used as an example of a strong opener.  This was more than twenty years ago!  The opener, we'll get to shortly.  But first, the wine.      A quick web search reveals there are more than 45-THOUSAND wineries in Italy.  Since 2017, we've visited just over 110.  Even THAT is a lot of wineries. So given the bounty of wineries, what makes a winery stand out?  The wine, of course.  The winemaker.  The family.  The origin story.  The cellar.  The labels.  The view.  The vineyard.  The tour.  The wine-food pairing experience.  All true and all things any winery can potentially offer.  But when a winery has a surprising connection to the discovery of your nation and to a book of...

It has been a very long time since I've done a wine-focused blog post.  Once again it's a holiday weekend and movement is restricted to essential travel (i.e. work, food shopping, medical, etc.).  So it seems like a good time to write a blog post and I thought it would be fun to do a wine post. My last blog post was about books keeping me sane in 2020.  Well I know one other thing that probably bonds us all in 2020 and that is alcohol.  We all probably imbibed a bit too much.  Living in Italy, I have certainly been drinking more than usual for 3.5 years.  But you toss in lockdown and the numerous challenges of 2020...I was having a drink nearly every night.  Although one of my co-workers laughed at me when I talked about how much I was drinking.  She said she was drinking a bottle every night!   So tell me...did you drink more in 2020?  Which camp were you in?  A glass a night or a bottle a night?  Inquiring minds wan...

Six months ago grapes looked like this... Fattoria Le Vegre - 28 April And now they look like this... La Dole Vigna - 08 September  And the harvest has begun. What better time to do a retrospective wine blog going back to April and coming forward through August, right?  Our wine adventures this past Spring and Summer included visiting sixteen wineries (two of which we had been to before); one Vicenza Spring Bizarre, where we got to taste wine from two new wineries, and an annual wine festival where we tasted wine from twelve wineries, one of which we'd had before.  It also included a fun girls' day and a trip to Tuscany for Tom's birthday weekend.  All total we went to, or had wine from 30 wineries.  We've been busy! We started with Fattoria Le Vegre , a recommendation from my friend Nancy.  I've mentioned Nancy before.  We worked together in Germany and she lived in Vicenza while we were back home in Arizona.  She moved b...