Last month we made a return visit to our favorite place in Italy, Podere Le Nonne in Montecello Amiata. We spent the weekend with the hospitable, entertaining and oh so talented duo, Martina and Tutilo, who make the best wine and olive oil we’ve ever tasted. On our first day, after a simple but delicious lunch of local cheeses, cured meats and home-made bread, we spent the afternoon hauling tree branches and vine clippings into a brush fire. Winter and spring in wine country are the seasons for burning off all the extra growth that was trimmed off in the fall and winter. In the hills in the distance we counted no less than six billowing columns of smoke rising from other farms and vineyards.

Dinner that night included lots of new foods for us. First was an antipasto of sliced up cardi marinated in olive oil and red wine vinegar that Martina makes herself. Cardi (cardoons) looks kind of like a celery stalk but tastes like artichoke. Then we had white fish with Jerusalem Artichokes (which are neither from Jerusalem nor are they artichokes). They look kind of like small ginger bulbs, and they’re a real pain to peel and cut up because of all the small knobs, but the tangy, sweet taste is worth it. And finally for dessert, we had fichi d’india sorbet made from the cactus flowers that grow right outside Martina and Tutilo’s front door. We also got to sample two vintages of Gideone, the wine Tutilo makes. We got an early preview of the 2006 variety, which we helped bottle, and Tutilo is so happy with it that he’ll enter it in an international wine competition in London this month.

The next day we went hunting for asparagi selvatici, wild asparagus! After a quick lesson in how to identify we plant, to look for a long, thin strand of vine with wispy, green spikes, not to be confused with fennel stems which are more feathery, we set out through the trees and brush to find our lunch. About 2 hours later, after picking through a season’s worth of leaf covering on the forest floor, scaling steep hill sides, traversing old stream beds, and being attached by pricker bushes we came up with a grand total of about 10 asparagus stalks. Luckily, the far more skillful Martina and Tutilo vastly exceeded our catch and we ended the morning with plenty of asparagus to make an abundant dish for lunch.

After lunch we drove down the windy road from the hilly interior of Maremma province to the capital city of Grosseto near the coast. The old city is almost entirely enclosed by old city walls. One section with an old armory still open for visitors to explore. The historic city center is full of pedestrian-only streets lined with shops. The large main square is flanked by a pink and white marble cathedral, a brick façade town building, and a row of colorful buildings atop an arched walkway.

The town of Alba is situated in southern Piemonte, a region known for strong red wines such as Barolo and Barbaresco. In this wine producing region Alba stands out for its food, and more specifically for two products: hazelnuts and white truffles. Alba’s hazelnuts are said to be the best in Italy and are used in Nutella and Ferrero Rocher chocolates. Truffles are a type of mushroom that come in black and white varieties, white being the much rarer species. They look more like dirty rocks than mushrooms and grow entirely underground, making them very difficult to find. This year, the weather in Northern Italy hasn’t been conducive to mushroom growth because it hasn’t been rainy enough. This means that the normally expensive price of white truffles has shot up even higher. One kilo costs somewhere between €4,000 and €6,000. That’s about $3,000 to $4,000 per pound! A sprinkling of white truffles on top of your pasta in a restaurant will run about €5 or €10 per shaving!

Every Fall Alba hosts the International White Truffle Festival. The town’s narrow streets are transformed back to medieval times with bales of hey lining the streets, festival workers wearing period dress, and piazzas filled with themed games like “fishing for wine” and “throw the dart at the salami.” My personal favorite was a game which involved placing a guinea pig in the center of a circle of hay bales, and guessing which numbered opening in the hay it would run into. The winner won a bottle of local wine.

The center piece of the festival is a truffle exhibition hall. As soon as you pass through the doors the rich, earthy scent of truffles wafts through your nose. Local producers of truffle-based products such as oils, butters, and creams man little stands alongside wine, cheese, and salami vendors. Free samples are encouraged, though this doesn’t apply to the truffles themselves. Hidden in an area towards the back the “truffle hunters” sit behind their display cases, which could just as easily display rare coins or stamps. The dirty looking clumps of culinary jewels are lined up in perfect little rows with price tags marking their value. Occasionally, a generous truffle hunter will reach into his case and pull out a sample for you to smell. The intoxicating aroma makes you momentarily forget that the walnut sized specimen drifting beneath your nose has a €163 price tag!

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.

We will be in Monticello Amiata in Tuscany from Friday, August 31st (Happy Birthday, Mom!) until September 8th volunteering at a vineyard for la vendemmia (grape harvest).

Upon our return we’ll have a few posts ready to go up, including “Une Semaine a Paris” and “Lerici and Portovenere”.

See the video below for a little idea of what we may be up to this coming week. I, for one, am hoping our experience is very similar to what you will see.

A Presto!

Just in case the video doesn’t show below, click here.