There’s no sense easing into it, I’ll just dive right in. One of the wineries we visited plays Mozart 24/7 in their barrell room… to make the wine taste better. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say, The Fibonacci Sequence came up.
Alright, done googling the Fibonacci Sequence? Great. As expected, the wine and the wineries themselves were amazing and beautiful and a whole bunch of other 5th-grade-level adjectives that aren’t coming to mind right now. We were on a tour with 6 other folks, plus a guide. His name was Matteo and he was like wine Superman; answering every inane question we had about wine, the region, the process and even questions about specific vintages and why they were good or bad. He knew more about the weather from any year in the last 15 than I could tell you about any day last week.
We tasted 8 wines and two olive oils (wow) at two wineries with a stop at a famous butcher shop in between for lunch. Our fellow travelers were from New Jersey and parts of PA, you can’t make this shit up. The one mom in the group doesn’t like wine and is a vegetarian, so her trip through wine country with lunch at a butcher shop was a bit curious. She also doesn’t drink coffee. I’m like 60% sure our local guide thought she was a robot or at least a human severely malfunctioning. DID NOT COMPUTE 🤖 for him. Regardless, she seemed to have fun and we certainly enjoyed watching her try. Side note, she started the trip with a NJ accent and ended it speaking broken English with another unidentifiable (no, not drunk) accent. Sarah and I both noticed it independently and were quite confused… maybe she was a robot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We’ve been on probably 6 or 7 tours together, all in CA, and I think we learned more on this one trip through Chianti than all the rest combined. Italians have an incredible passion for wine and food that’s rivaled only by their attention to detail regarding it. One winery was still using a bread oven from the 12th century and a hand-cranked meat slicer, because y’know, powering it with electricity spins the blade too fast and can burn the meat.
It’s really quite impressive and endearing how much love and thought goes into this craft.
