This One's About Wine

A couple of weeks ago, Lisa's friend-since-high-school Keeley joined us here in Florence and we've had fun walking, exploring, eating, going to museums, playing Monopoly Deal, and drinking wine together. Thanks to Keeley, we went on a guided Tuscan wine tour last weekend.

Keeley had to do her laundry and, unimpressed by the machine in our apartment (one machine, which takes 3 hours to wash clothes and then another 4 hours to make said clothes approximately halfway dry), found a laundromat nearby. In the laundromat, Keeley met Max, an American originally from California who has lived in Florence for 22 years. When he isn't cleaning laundromats, Max is a tour guide for a company called Fun In Tuscany. We signed up for their wine tour and Max was our guide. Along with five others (three women from Maryland, in their 50s or 60s, and a couple from London in their 40s), we drove into the Tuscan hills – otherwise known as Chianti country – in a mini-van navigated by a hyper-caffeinated, super-talkative Max.

The tour included visits at two wineries and a stop at the town of San Gimignano.

Winery One: Poggio Torselli.

I mean, can you even believe this landscape? Now we know where all those Renaissance painters got their imagery for heaven.

The winery set in this landscape was started by a laborer from the nearby town (the same town where Machiavelli was born) who left after his family farm was destroyed in the massive floods of 1966. He emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, somehow made a fortune, and returned to purchase this estate. We learned all of this from our extra-cool Hungarian tour guide, Nora, who also helps run the winery.

That's a view from the front and then out toward the fields from the garden in the back. The Maryland women were ready to move into this place. They also seemed ready to vote for Trump and highly suspicious of us, but then Max told a story about the worst Americans he ever had the displeasure of escorting around Florence, and following that we all sat down to taste wine. We're pretty sure Nora liked us and gave us more wine than was normally included in the tasting. Two bottles to go, please: one chianti, one rose.

Winery Two: Il Colombaio di Santachiara, and the town of San Gimignano.

At least we think that's what it was called. To be honest, we also got two bottles to go from there (one white, one sparkling) and we've already finished them so we're working from photo documentation. Here we had a five-glass wine tasting over the course of a lunch with, shall we say, very generous pours. Did we mention that one of the three Maryland women would only drink Chardonnay and therefore had almost none of the wine served at either of these locations? Her friends drank her cast-offs.

We were all getting along really well at this point, let me tell you. Clearly the solution to political tensions in the U.S. is for everyone to drink more wine together with some dry-humored, weekend-away-from-their-three-kids-including-a-set-of-five-year-old-boy-twins Brits. Afterward Max drove us to the town of San Gimignano and bought us all a gelato and let us wander free for an hour. Most of us fell asleep in the van ride home.

(this post is dedicated to Leah Shannon, who's invited on our next wine tour!)