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.

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.

Yesterday afternoon we went to pay our electric bill at the post office because that’s where you pay electric bills. The first post office we went to was closed because they have shortened hours in August. This was no big surprise because most everything in Italy is either closed or has reduced hours during August. We went over to the main post office, which does stay open all day, but found out that the window to pay electric bills is only open in the morning.

So we returned the next morning. We took a ticket for the electric bill service window, and our number was called immediately. The usual wait at the post office is at least 20 minutes, so we thought we caught a lucky break. We rushed over to the window…and waited. No one was there to service the window. We waited some more. Still no one. Then the electronic number counter above the window moved to the next number…then the next number…and the next. Still no one. A man whose number was called after ours asked the woman at a nearby window if ours was open. She said “yes.” Still no one. Finally, after 25 minutes, a heavyset man came meandering over to the window. He took one look at our receipt and told us we had to wait in line at the regular payment window because only customers with special accounts can pay at the electric company window. Of course, it would only make too much sense for us to pay our electric bill at the electric company’s window!

So we went back to the ticket machine, pushed the button for the regular payment service windows, and as expected got number that was about 70 numbers away from being called. At least this would give us time to try to puzzle together why our electric rate had suddenly doubled and we were being charged the higher rate retroactively.