It’s practically forbidden to spend the entire month of August at home in Italy because August is meant for vacationing. Not wanting to slight Italian tradition, we packed our bags and spent a week in Paris. The highlights for us were:
The food
In Paris, everything is delicious. From pain au chocolate for breakfast, falafel for lunch and lamb shank for dinner it’s hard to go wrong eating here. One of the most basic and delicious staples of the French diet is the baguettes. There’s just something irresistible about a fresh baked, crusty on the outside, warm and chewy on the inside French baguette. They’re eaten any time of day, with or for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and it’s pretty common to see people walking down the street with a baguette poking out of their bag, or clasping onto the rectangle of wax around the center while breaking off chunks from the top for a snack on the run.

A delectable indulgence is a little pastry called a macaron, not to be confused with macaroon. Macarons are heavenly little sandwiches of an airy cake with a paper thin crust stuck together with a dense icing. They come in flavors like pistachio and chocolate. For a little more substance we had delicious French food, including the just mentioned lamb shank, at Le Panier, a little café in the 10^th arrondissement, and sampled an endless varieties of tarts at an impromptu potluck dinner at a local co-op restaurant. Something else nice about the culinary scene in Paris is that it’s in no way limited to just French food. You can find almost any type of cuisine that you crave, whether it’s Middle Eastern, Japanese, Thai or anything else. I had the best falafel at L’as du Falafel and couscous at 4 Freres, and we finally got a little spice in our diets at a Vietnamese restaurant in the 13^th arrondissement, which is known for it’s Asian cuisine. We also pay special thanks to David Lebovitz, whose website pointed us on the path to some of these great eats in Paris.
The bike program
Paris has been getting a lot of press over the last few months because of their new bike program, Velib. 10,000 bikes were donated to the city, and now there are literally hundreds of stations around town where you can pick up and return the bikes all for the low annual fee of €7 and a per hour charge of €1. The one catch is that you need a credit card with a microchip in order to use the bikes (which most of us non-Europeans don’t have), but other than that, anyone is welcome to use them, residents and tourists alike.

Inspired by the biker friendly feel of the city we rented bikes from a little shop and spent the day riding around the city from Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the north, through Le Marais neighborhood in the city center, along the Seine to the south before ending up in the Luxembourg Gardens. We knew going into the day that the traffic police had been cracking down on two wheeled drivers, maybe due to the recent surge in bike traffic. Despite our best efforts to obey the rules of the road we made the mistake crossing at a cross walk next to the painted white lines rather than on them. We were informed of this error when an angry police officer pulled us and a few others who made the same misassumption. Luckily, some adept arguing by our friend and guide Kent got us out of a potential €80 fine each.
The parks and gardens
Paris is a park and garden lover’s paradise. There must be dozens of areas with sprawling lawns, pristine gardens and tucked away green spaces. We found the Luxemburg Gardens, Tuileries, and Jardin des Plantes to be bursting with colorful flowers and accented with lawns so plush and green that its forbidden to even walk on them, which would have been a shame were it not or the park benches and lounge chairs set up along the walkways and around the ponds.
Modern Art Installations
I’m not normally the biggest fan of modern art, but even I appreciate the efforts the city makes to beautify its already glorious open spaces. All over the city, and in the most unexpected areas, there are modern art installations. Whether its giant metal globes in the courtyard of Plais Royal or a big dragon statue made out of recycled material in the Jardin des Plantes, the city is keeping its already well established art tradition alive and encouraging creativity.
Musée Carnavalet
It costs a lot to see the sights of Paris from the inside, so it’s always welcome to stumble upon a free museum, which is what we did at the Musée Carnavalet. This museum is all about the history of Paris and is one of about 20 free (and generally lesser known) museums in the city. Musee Carnavalet is full of paintings, sculptures and other artifacts that chronicle the city’s very famous history. You can see models of the Bastille, a famous building which no longer exists, and view paintings of what Paris looked like long before it became the giant urban center that it is today.
The architecture
You can’t talk about Paris without paying homage to the incredible buildings and architecture. The city is brimming with impressive and historic buildings and structures like Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc d’Triomphe. My favorite discovery this trip was the Hotel de Ville, a former palace now city hall. Tall windows and life sized statues of famous Parisians line up in alternating order across the building’s façade, which is at least a city block long. A steeply sloping blue-grey roof punctuated by a regal clock tower and still more statues tops off the building. Whether it’s a famous landmark, intricate statue, or elegantly laid out square there’s something to marvel at around every corner in Paris.

The only problem with Paris is that there’s so much to see and do but never enough time to do it all. At least that leaves you with a reason to return!

To see our pictures from Paris click here.

At the south eastern-most tip of Liguria, past Cinque Terre and just before Tuscany, lies a long, narrow inlet called the Gulf of La Spezia. On each side of the Gulf, sitting almost directly opposite each other, are the two villages of Lerici and Portovenere. They have been popular vacation spots as far back as the days of Percy Shelley and his contemporaries who lived and traveled in the area so much that it became dubbed as the Gulf of Poets.

Lerici is on the eastern side of the bay, and on a clear summer day it’s swarming with people browsing the open markets along the waterfront and wandering the narrow streets in the old city center. The main square, Piazza Garibaldi, is a colorful, triangular space that opens to the harbor and is lined by pastel buildings and open air cafes. Overlooking the harbor sits the Castello, a defensive fortification dating back to the 13^th century. It rests atop a little point that forms a protected area full of sailboats and speedboats. Below the Castello a wide, rocky jetty stretches out into the bay where sunbathers take up residence on the flat rocks. The wind gusts and fills the air with the melodic sound of rigs and pulleys clinking against dozens of sailboat masts. A tall set of stairs leads from the waterfront up to the Castello where there are sweeping views across the Gulf to Portovenere.

A well-serviced bus system links all the big towns in this area of Liguria, so we took the bus from Lerici to Portovenere, pausing briefly at the midpoint of La Spezia for a bus transfer. There’s a running joke in Genova (the capital of Liguria), “which city is worse La Spezia or Savona?” The joke comes from the fact that both cities are smaller provincial capitals and are shipping ports, which therefore means not so pretty. We found nothing to complain about in La Spezia, much like our visit to Savona. With its wide, grid-like streets, including a few pedestrian only shopping areas, it was a breath of fresh air from the overcrowded quarters of the much more touristy Lerici and Portovenere.

Portovenere is out on the western-most tip of the Gulf of La Spezia and is accessible only by one road due to its isolated location on a rocky point. It’s a very popular spot with the tourists, and for good reason. A row of five and six story, pastel colored buildings line the tranquil bay. Behind that, a narrow street is filled with elaterids, bakeries and souvenir stores that are always fun to browse. At the very tip of the point on which Portovenere lies is the small, white and grey striped church of San Pietro. It blends into the surroundings so well that it looks like it grew out of the rocks themselves. From the church you can look to the left across the Gulf towards Lerici and to the right along the open sea and to the steep hills that hide Cinque Terre in their folds. Behind San Pietro, higher up on the hill is an old defensive castle where there are memorable views looking down towards San Pietro with the open sea as a backdrop. It’s a perfect spot for escaping the crowds and enjoying the spectacular scenery that is Liguria.

To see more of our pictures, click here.

There’s nothing like the feeling of grasping a plump bunch of grapes in your hand as you snip off its stem from the leafy vine. We spent Saturday morning carefully clipping away at the mouth watering bunches of Sangiovese grapes. Done the old-fashioned way (by hand) grape harvesting is a tricky job because the bunches grow on and around anything in their path, stray leaves and support wires included. Sometimes the bunches are so dense that it’s impossible to tell where they’re growing from, so you must meticulously clip away at leaf stems and tiny corkscrews of new vines in order to release the bunch into it’s proper home, the collection container.

Two hours and 28 containers later we had the whole vineyard picked thanks to the help of a few other eager volunteers including Franco, an Italian neighbor who had indeed squished grapes with his feet back in his younger years.

We transported the brimming containers via tractor up to the cantina, which is the winemaking basement, where we dumped the grape bunches into the destemming machine, a shiny table sized device with an open top and series of rotating coils below that separate the stems from the grapes. The mashed up grapes are expelled through a tube at the bottom and propelled into a tall, steel fermentation tank where they are on their way to becoming the 2007 vintage of Le Nonne’s Gideone Superiore Montecucco DOC wine.

A Lesson in Tuscan Wine Naming Conventions

Tuscan wine labels can be a bit of a puzzle to put together. They usually contain the name of the wine producer or vineyard, in this case Le Nonne, as well as a specific name for the wine, which is made up by the producer. The wine we helped make is called Gideone Superiore after the former owner of Le Nonne. If the wine comes from an area with an established DOC (Denominazione di origine controllata) and adheres to the standards for the wine, it will also include the name of the DOC name; in this case it’s Montecucco. A DOC indicates a defined area of production with specific requirements for the type and proportion of grapes used to make the wine. Chianti is perhaps the most famous DOC in Italy.

Unfortunately, you won’t find any Gideone Superiore on the shelves at your local wine store. Le Nonne only makes enough for family and friends and a restaurant or two in nearby towns. But if you find yourself passing through Monticello Amiata in Tuscany, you could look up Le Nonne and pick up a bottle right from the source!

To see pictures from our time at Le Nonne, click here.

We spent the better part of Tuesday and Wednesday bottling wine from the 2006 harvest. This wine is a mix of mostly Sangiovese with a little bit of Pinot Nero. It will be the first vintage that confirms to the Montecucco DOC standards, and Tutilo thinks it will be good enough to enter into competitions. It still needs to age in the bottle for another six months or so, but based on the generous portions that we’ve sampled during the bottling process, we couldn’t agree more.

Bottling consists of attaching a small pump with a system of tubes and vacuum seals to the wine tank. Each bottle is filled up by hand, one at a time by placing it under a special nozzle on the pump and opening the faucet on the wine tank. Then the bottle is moved to a very simple corking machine where a hand operated lever squeezes the cork into the bottle. We’ve become quite deft bottlers and corkers…518 bottles later.

Friday was spent getting ready for the 2007 vendemmia, or harvest. There will actually be three separate harvests this year to ensure that each bunch of grapes is picked at optimal ripeness. The early ripening Pinot Nero was picked about 2 weeks ago, and the late ripening portion of Sangiovese will be picked in 3 weeks. Tomorrow is vendemmia number 2 for the first batch of Sangiovese.

Tutilo has prepared a chart of the entire vineyard with a space for each individual grape vine. I spent the day trailing behind him as he tested the sugar content of the grapes from each and every plant so that we could mark on the chart which vines to pick and which to leave to ripen further. The sugar is tested using a little device called a refractometer that resembles a small telescope with one end cut off at a sloping angle. Grape juice is smeared on the plastic plate at the end, covered with another clear plastic plate and held up to the light for reading. A reading of 100 is optimal. Anything below that will be too sour and acidic, anything much above that will be too sweet and alcoholic. A sugar reading of 100 translates into an alcohol content in the final product of about 14%. A perfect, strong and complex wine!

We haven’t stomped any grapes yet, but we’ve come close. Highlights so far include:

La vendemmia (the grape harvest) will be on Saturday. The pinot nero grapes we were going to be picking this weekend were ready early because of the hot weather this summer. We will be picking the first batch of Sangiovese grapes this weekend.

The grape must explosion I mentioned was perhaps one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. We had to pump the fermented wine, grape skins and all, into a strainer to separate the liquid from the must. At the end of this process, a pressurized press is used to squeeze out every last bit of liquid from the must. There was a little too much juice left in the must because as it was being pressed with about 150-200 pounds of pressure, the must exploded from the strainer all over Tutilo (the winemaker extrordinaire), myself, the ceiling , and the wall about 20 feet away. Tutilo’s face was so completely covered with grape skins that when he took his glasses off, two bright circles around his eyes were the only part of his face that was still clean. (Think Elmer Fudd’s face when Daffy Duck pokes his finger in Elmer’s shotgun). Nonetheless, the room was cleaned, no one was hurt, and most importantly, there was still enough must with which to make grappa.