Many thanks to our friend for this beautiful review of here experience at Torciano Winery!
With only one day in Tuscany, I have no doubt in my mind that we spent it at the perfect winery. At Tenuta Torciano in San Gimignano, we were treated to a private wine tasting with lunch. It consisted of 11 wines, 4 courses of food, and a comedic tasting lesson by Pierluigi.
Pierluigi is quite animated, and broke off from the typical snobby sommelier stereotype. While being educated on wine, we discovered that a good chardonnay should exude a “cat piss” scent on the nose. After 3 wines down, the table gets giggly and we rave about the 30 year aged balsamic on our plates of salad, cheese, and prosciutto.
Another 4 wines down and my lips and teeth start to turn a shade of deep purple, stained by Chianti after Chianti. We are presented a slice of Lasagna Bolognese, drowned in a heavy pour of the winery’s truffle oil. I decide, life isn’t worth living if I can’t have a supply of this oil, so we add a few bottles of it to our order form. It was, by far, the best dish of the trip.
At about 9 wine samples into the meal, there’s a crescendo of laughter and a lot of chatter. Our next dish is the vegetarian Ribollita Tuscan Soup, with beans and cabbage. Somewhere between sample #10 and sample #11 I lost all sense of table etiquette and devoured the food like a cavewoman.
After we successfully polish off 11 wine samples each, we are given a dessert wine with biscotti to dunk in it. Followed by a few samples of their fine wine. Thanks to the incoherent scribbles on our note pads, we remember that our favorite wine of the original 11 samples was the Chianti Classico Reserve, and we add it to our order form.
We leave the dining room and enjoy the fresh spring air outside at the vineyard. I lay on the ground for a moment, marinating in the limbo between tipsy and drunk, while the sun beams down on my dumbstruck wine-stained grin. We thank Pierluigi for our wonderful experience and making us feel like special guests, like family. Back into the car we go. We drive 3 hours to Rome, and I slept for 2.
