We visited Avignonesi last week on a tour arranged by some friends. It’s about halfway between Cortona and Montepulciano. A nice range of traditional Montepulciano wines, including two rare Vin Santos, plus some modern wines that were less interesting (to me). Nice tour, plus they served the wines with a mid-day meal outdoors overlooking the valley.
BUMP
Next month, my wife and I will be renting a car for a day out of Florence to explore Tuscany. Would love some winery visit and restaurant recommendations. Also looking for opinions if we should stay in the Chianti area or head down to Montalcino.
Is booking an appointment with a winery necessary, or can we drop in some places?
Thanks in advance!
Hi Nick
Normally I would say an appointment is absolutely necessary, but Tuscany is different. For instance Montepulciano has plenty of cellar doors / tasting rooms, that you are free to drop into unannounced. Others will be able to comment on Chianti.
There are places that follow the more normal Italian setup, where an appointment is the only option. In addition, personally I would still make an appointment, as the experience between those places I popped into, and those I made an appointment for, are utterly different. The appointment gives the impression you are genuinely interested, rather than someone who has meandered in off the street with no great interest.
regards
Ian
We stayed at this place (overnight) and did their dinner with wine tasting. Nothing short of sensational. If you can do the same, do it! In Tuscany, wild boar and various other local fares are on the menu, so this is very unique. The rooms are very simple, but interesting. Love Italy!!!
I also liked Badia Coltibuono a good deal. I very much enjoyed visiting Quercetto and I notice that now they are a part of: Agriturismo Castello di Querceto.
I stayed at Castello Volpaia which was great, not far from Radda in Chianti.
If you visit Montalcino, consider checking out Poggio Antica, Altesino, and Biondi Santi (in that order). As others have said, the restaurant at PA is not to be missed. My wife and I visited two and a half years ago and had a wonderful time.
agreed wholeheartedly on Poggio Antico. also recommend Caparzo strongly.
I had a strange time at the restaurant at Poggio Antico. Went there Fall of 2015. It was small, only 3 tables, the rest of the room was reserved for some private event. The food took forever to come out, surprising since it was just 3 tables! Between our appetizer and our main course, it was probably at least a 45 minute wait. Then, the beef I’d ordered, it was one of the worst pieces of beef I’ve had during my Italy trip, extremely chewy (like 10 minutes chewing before I just gave up and spit it out), lacking flavor, I just gave up. The food was also very expensive (I wouldn’t mind the cost if the food that came out was great). The tour/tasting there itself was nice though.
Hi Bryan
FWIW I quite like a wait, indeed I get a bit frustrated that Italians try to speed up service for us foreigners, when I’m very much of the slow and relaxed food mindset. 45 mins is long, but I do like a break of 15-30 mins.
The beef - can’t see any excuses for that.
My only thought is that the focus was on the private event - such things have happened a couple of times in Italy in such scenarios. Maybe the beef was being slow cooked to be ready when they rocked up and they waited as long as they could before dishing yours up, still under-done?
Yeah, thinking back, I think it might have been a bad due to the private event prep. It was still empty (the reserved private event tables) when we left and we started lunch early. Not sure what was going on. Yeah, I think we budgeted around 1.5hr-2hr for lunch so that we could drive over to Casanova di Neri and then drop our friends off in Florence before dark and come back out to our B&B in Greve. The rest of our meals in Tuscany were awesome though, Ristoro di Lamole for lunch one day and our B&B (http://www.villabordoni.com/en/) for all our dinners (I was not comfortable driving country roads in our dinky rental car at night so this worked out well).
yes, we’re similar in not aiming to drive in the dark. It can influence our choice of accommodation, indeed it should have influenced us on a couple of earlier visits. We learn from those mistakes!
It was my first time so we got lucky our place had great dining accommodations! All this talk of Italy… ahhhhh I want to go back this year!
Thank you all for the advice, it is greatly appreciated!
Bryan, how was your visit to Casanova di Neri?
It was a bit lackluster and awkward. I emailed them beforehand, and they mentioned they have walk-in free tastings. Since I wasn’t sure if we could make it or not, I opted for potentially dropping in instead of booking a tour/tasting. After lunch at Poggio Antico, we had time so we dropped in. This was around late October, property was fairly quiet and we found someone that walked us over to this gift shop area where we had a mini tasting. Two brunellos from I don’t remember which vintages, seemed random and that was it. We felt weird and ended up buying a bottle of olive oil and headed back outside to wander around the property and take pics.
I kind of felt my daytrip to Montalcino bombed this go around but I know much more now than I did then, so next time I visit, I’ll spend more time (multiple days) and line up more wineries.
We need an emoticon hanging from the end of a fishing hook - “We’ve caught another one, reel him in back to Italy!” ![[basic-smile.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/83717c74df9b0ce202453063bc4f11baf0ee6b8a.gif "smile"){kind=small}
We go most years, and occasionally twice in a year. I think we’re in the keep-net now!
This discussion needs a little more detail. Will this be a day trip only or will you be staying the night in Chianti or Montalcino? If a day trip, how early will you head out and when do you want to be back in Florence? It’s important because Montalcino is a much longer drive and the time you have available could easily impact your appreciation of the area.
Personally I prefer Montalcino (the fact that I have a cat named Brunello could be a hint) but for one day from Florence I’d recommend (and have done several times) Chianti. Chianti has a lot of different areas from which you can choose to focus and has a lot of walk in cellar door/tasting rooms (that is still a relatively new development and I still tend to make appointments). While there are some walk in tasting rooms, appointments are more necessary in Montalcino. (As a side note based on a comment above, I had a great visit at Casanova di Neri, with a vineyard tour and a helpful geography lesson, ending with a fairly broad tasting including Cerretalto, but we had scheduled a visit. Just stopping into the tasting room gets a much more limited tasting.)
Last year we did a day in the Panzano area and it was great. We stopped in at five tasting rooms without appointment (including Fontodi), had a very nice lunch in Volpaia, then a scheduled tour at Monsanto before heading out. It sounds like a lot but it was actually a very relaxed leisurely day.
It will only be a day trip. We were thinking of leaving around 8:30-9am and getting back around 5-6pm. The distance of Montalcino is what concerned me originally and why I reached out for advice.
Honestly, I have very little experience with drinking wines from Tuscany, but know that Montalcino is one of the “premier” areas in the region for Sangiovese based wines. That was one of the main reason for singling out the area, along with the fact that I don’t know which producers in Chianti are worth visiting. These new names (to me) popping up in this thread have been very helpful in trying to create a schedule. If you think that we should stay closer to Florence due to distance, that is good to know. We want to see the country side, taste some great wine, and have a “Tuscan” experience – if that makes any sense.
I would love to hear about more wineries/areas to focus on like you mentioned above. Bonus if the producer imports to the US so we are able to buy some when we get home.
Personally - and this is personal taste - I’d be looking to somewhere in Chianti or Montepulciano, well before I’d consider Montalcino. Others will disagree vehemently, and for their palates they’ll be right.
For me (and this is a gross generalisation) Vino Nobile tends to be the leaner, more boney style, with Brunello more full/rounded. Chianti covering a broad spectrum in-between.
If you’ve not got much experience in Tuscany wines, I reckon a selection of Chianti producers covering a range of styles, but reasonably close to each other for logistical convenience, would be ideal. However for this I’ll defer to those with better knowledge than I.
Looking at the map, I reckon I’d be straight across to Selvapiana, if only for a chance to meet the owner who sounds like a very interesting character, though possibly an acquired taste!
Yeah! My main issue is the gf only has limited vacation days and she wants to see more of Europe. I think I’ve negotiated to do an Italy trip every other year as long as I learned some Italian. So I’m learning more a bit casually, hopefully I’ll be more chill at ordering at restaurants.
Hi Bryan
Good on you for learning the language. On my first trip my learning was limited to reading a phrasebook on the flight over - yet my appalling attempts to speak the language were appreciated even then.
I then did a self-learning language course (CD + book), which was brilliant for long train journeys I was doing when travelling away from home for work. This got me a long way down the track, but it was only when I started doing some evening classes (2 hours per week for 30 weeks) that I discovered I’d embedded some mistakes, plus focused a little too much on the formal. The classes were brilliant, with a wonderful guy called Claudio from the Veneto. A most inclusive and supportive teacher, coping brilliantly with a class of very mixed strengths and weaknesses. His manner is of a man who you’d not only be happy with your daughter dating, but might feel the urge to encourage her to do so!
It’s now c. 3 years since my last serious stint at trying to learn, so it’s really only my visits to Italy that keep it going. Those first couple of conversations sometimes feel like the rather rusty cogs of my brain are struggling to turn! There is still massive improvement needed, both in listening and speaking, but it does amaze me how much is embedded and does just naturally come out.
I would like to offer the encouragement, that, perhaps more so than any other language, Italian is generally pretty easy to get going with. Being relatively modern (a couple of hundred years since it was crystallised from a base of the Tuscan dialect), so much of it is structured and hence easy to learn. In addition many of the irregular forms are really logical when you think about it, and how it would sound ‘different’ if it followed the normal rule. Then of the remaining irregularities, much is of words so widely used / historic that you can understand why, but also get plenty of practice in learning these foibles.
Enjoy the mistakes when in Italy - some of mine still amuse me thinking back, and anything that makes an Italian laugh, means you’ve broken the ice with them.
One good phrase for restaurants that does get a bit of use, is ‘Cosa c’è in dentro?’ (literally - what is there inside?, i.e. what’s in it?). All too useful when a dish is listed as in the style of the region e.g. Zuppa inglese, cotaletta alla Milanese - in many situations a dish will be as unknown to a holidaying Italian as it would be to us.
Another useful and easy to learn word is ‘pausa’ (literally pause, pronounced ~ ‘Pow-zah’). Even just saying ‘una pausa?’ would be enough to indicate you’d like a break between courses. We’ll often ask for a break between secondo and dolce courses if feeling full.
I hope you enjoy the learning - I certainly did, and I found it much easier than doing French at school (I was utterly rubbish at it!).
regards
Ian