8am, wake up. Still exhausted from yesterdays activities. All I want to do is sleep in. I have become red from the sun, slightly burned. The room is cold and my bed is warm.
I go downstais to meet the group and get on the bus that will take us to today's sights: winery, tomatoes, and lunch. The my conscious is telling me, "it's going to be a good day".
First stop winery, 9:30 am. I look around, no grapes, no vines. Okay, maybe we're going to go inside and see the process after picking (but wait, it's June, harvest isn't until the fall). We walk into a room that reminds me of a church fellowship hall, with the addition of a bar and a few hundred bottles of wine. There are is the normal tasting set up there before us, glasses, plate, and a tasting list. Surely we are not tasting now, it's 9:30 am. Not only am I half asleep, my taste buds are too and my stomach is empty. The list before us is 7 wines. 7. That's crazy. Most tastings are with a maximum of 4 wines at once, but 7??? Up comes the first one, I am a combination of embarrassed and upset when I try it. I taste nothing, I smell nothing, the translator doest know wine vocabulary, I'm fucked. Numbers 2-6 follow the same pattern, little flavor here and there, slight aromas, but nothing that I would be proud of. They lovingly paired food with every wine. The 7th wine was a muscato, a favorite of mine. The sweet flavor greeted me like an old friend, but at 10am? This was a bit too early for this reunion. And then came special no. 8 a 1993 muscato. The sweetness that had been bottled for the past 18 years greeted me and made me smile just a bit and reminded me that I do love wine. However, nothing of the morning was extremely notable, yet passible.
After we left the winery, we went to the vineyard, a bit unexpected. We got to see where they grow the grapes alongside an artichoke field. Here I learned the most today, how they trellised the different grapes, the trimming of the leaves prior to harvest to increase the sunlight on the grapes to develop color.
Afterwads, we went to a tomato place. Yep, that's right a tomato place. It is a co-op where farmers send their produce to be packaged all types of tomatoes, about a total of 6 that were being packaged for distribution to grocery stores across Italy. The co-op prides themselves on selling the best produce depending the season. They have strict regulations on both pesticides, and fertilizers that can be used.Today they were packaging tomatoes and hybrid miniature watermelons. We got to taste the produce, perhaps the sweetest tomatoes I've had but the watermelon was passable, not quite the South Carolina 4th of July classic.
The facility was a large warehouse on the side road out in the country. One side had several loading docks, the other side had places for pickup tucks from the field to be unloaded with a forklift. From there they were taken to a large room where they were placed on a conveyor belt and repackaged into smaller retail size containers, weighed and labeled for sale.
After the tomato plant, we went to lunch at a small restaurant on the side of the road in the middle of no where. The food started off promising and went down hillcourse by course. By the time we got to dessert, everyone was ready to leave and go to the beach.
We went to a small, little beach that was dotted with locals playing sports and making out on the sand. The water was littered with seaweed and palm pieces. I sprawled out on the sand and took a nice relaxing sunbath for nearly 2 hours. Resulting in a nice red color that will hopefully turn golden brown in 48 hours.
Afterwards, we returned to the hotel where I caught up on my blogs and got ready for dinner.
Dinner was all around good, I had a scampi mouse ravioli with a tomato and scampi cream sauce. It was nice to break away from the larger group and just a handful of us go out to eat and enjoy the walk back to the hotel instead of rushing.
Sometimes simple is better, take time to enjoy the simple things in life.
-Until
Matt
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