Italy 2012 – Tuscan Wine Country

May 4, 2012September 29, 2016 Mama

I’m very upset! Something went wrong with my Garmin file for this tour and now I don’t have a map…

Friday was wine country day, although it didn’t involve as much wine as I would have liked. But, given my current pregnant state, that’s probably okay. Plus, I’m actually glad to feel like we have something new to look forward to on our next trip: a dedicated wine tour. Our tour yesterday was more a general tour of the wine country area.

We started off the morning at Altesino winery in Montalcino, Tuscany. We took a tour of the winery, and I finally started to understand a few of the concepts I realize I was supposed to have learned in my college wine class. Apparently, Italian wine was crap until about the 70s, when the government stepped in and started regulating it. Now, it’s heavily regulated, more or less so depending on what kind of designation you want your wine to have. In general, certain designations denote better wine than others.

The highest designation is DOCG: Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita. This is wine is generally a specific variety (or it can be a specific blend of varieties) of grape, with strict growing rules (for example, no irrigation allowed, even if it makes for very bad crops one year), and it’s tested by the government to ensure all the rules have been followed.

Then there’s DOC, which is the same but it’s not Garantita, which is to say it’s not all tested by the government, but the same rules apply.

Then there are IGT wines, which can be just about anything, as long as all the grapes come from the same region.

There are also certain rules to call a wine Classico or Riserva.

At Altesino, after the tour, we got to taste one of each kind of these wines that the winery produces. I must have bad taste, because I thought the cheapest wine, the IGT wine, was the best.

From the winery, we visited the towns of Montalcino, Piensa, and Montepulciano. These are all fabulous little medieval towns in Tuscan wine country. Actually the square in Montepulciano is where they filmed the Italian portions of New Moon, so I got this photo for Adi in the same arches the bad guys were found to be lurking in the movie.

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Location:Montalcino, Italy