Pienza, Tuscany, Italy
Friday, June 5, 2009
NORTH TRIP BEGINS!!! The trip we have all talked about and waited for was now upon us. First stop:
Pienza. Woke up early and started to four hour drive, but we were cool with it because we had a full bus just for the 23 of us so we were all able to stretch out and relax and sleep until we got to our first stop. We visited Agriturismo Podere S. Gregorio for a food tasting. We tried some Sangiovese grape wine( which I thought was very good) along with some pecorino cheese. It was pretty neat to see a place that does work similar to what I may end up doing one day. I really liked that it was a small place too, they only produce about 6-7 thousand bottles per year. They talked about how they focused mainly on quality instead of quantity; something that the United States needs to get back to. Ever since the Nixon years we have focused all efforts on high quantity at low costs and what did we get?- disease and epidemics… joy. Anyways, we had a short lecture in the main square of
Pienza called Piazza Pio II and then we had a short time for lunch. Naturally we all tried to find the bathrooms and gelato before getting back on the bus for another drive. After our gelatos we were off to destination two:
Montalcino. We stopped at another small vineyard named Sassodisole to try another variation of the Sangiovese grape. I thought I liked the one we tried earlier in the day, but this was so much better. I'm glad we were able to taste the same grape processed differently. It strikes up a lot of thoughts for me since I have a large interest in the engineering side of food science as well as the nutritional side. After tasting the variation of the wine we departed for S. Anna in Camprena, our residence for the evening. We were actually living in a monastery that still had some fuctiional properties to it. I’m at a loss for the type of monks that lived there but I know it will come to me… either by the end of this blog or in a later one. It was nice that we also got dinner there in a special room that was used to teach people about the catholic church. We had a long day though and we knew that there was more to come for the next week or so, so we decided to crash a bit early and make the most of our comfortable accommodations.
