Montalcino

After our visit to Sant’ Antimo we decided to stop for a late lunch in Montalcino, another of the small hilltop towns which populate southern Tuscany. Certainly most foreign tourist have left the area by mid-September, but the beautiful weather brought out the Italians in droves. We anticipated a relatively easy job of finding parking and ended up searching all over the top of the mountain for a free space. Even within the old city walls, the streets are incredibly steep and narrow which made for a few harrowing twists and turns for Amy at the wheel. Lunch was at a small café where we indulged in local pasta and shared a half bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. As it turns out, the tiny town of Montalcino is the heart of one the most famous “big” wines of the world. A hearty, robust red, Brunello is produced by hundreds of small vineyards in the area immediately surrounding the town. They are currently selling the 2005 and 2006 pressings which gives you an idea of how this particular wine matures in the bottle. It changes with time and can be drunk across a decade or more. I have discovered that I tend to enjoy middle aged Brunello the most. Too young and it is more tannic than I can handle, too old and it is more earthy than I tend to like. As with Goldilocks, the middle is just right. Perhaps the most novel adventure of the entire trip was our attempt to follow the GPS system directions for heading out of town. After careening down a hill through a gate so narrow we nearly brushed the rear view mirrors, we turned onto, I kid you not, a single, lane dirt road that plunged off the mountain. Intrepid driver that Amy is, she obediently followed directions until we came to the barrier telling us that the road was closed! So she had to turn around (no easy feat) and retrace the entire ordeal only this time going uphill. Needless to say, the GPS got put away for a bit until we got ourselves off the mountain and it connected back in with reality.