Inbetween a day of exploring towers (we’d been to San Gimignano in the morning and had Pisa to look forward to in the afternoon) our full day’s excursion from the Emerald Princess during its port stop in Livorno included a light lunch and some wine tasting in an Italian winery. The winery in question turned out to be Tenuta Torciano.
Now, regular readers of the travelogues on this site might have just spotted something amiss with the size of the scroll bar on the right side of the screen just about now.
Mark… I’m scared. Is this going to be a short post? I mean, a short post for you?
Do not be afraid my child, but, yes, this is going to be a short post.
But why!? We don’t come here for tiny amounts of SEO-friendly text repeating the same phrases from your post’s title over and over again! That’s what we’ve got the rest of the travel posts on the internet for! We come for the seemingly unending drivel that you can’t stop typing and the total overuse of photos in travel diaries when only a handful will do. Don’t say you’ve become one of… them!
No, panic ye not! There is a simple explanation and it is thus: there’s only so much you can say about eating cold meats and drinking wine. That’s all.
I’m still worried, Mark. Slippery slope and all that.
I’ll try to pad things out with fictional conversations loosely connected to this brief visit to the winery. Try not to let the fear overwhelm you.
Well, okay then.
The winery wasn’t very far from San Gimignano so the journey from there was in the vicinity of half an hour. Our bus pulled up at the entrance to a fenced field and waited for a large gate to slowly slide open. We then drove into a small parking area and disembarked close to either an homage to Arnold Rimmer or a helicopter landing pad. Probably the latter. Fences, automatic barriers, and places to pick up and drop off helicopter passengers: yeah, this place had the feel of money about it.
We were then greeted by the owner of the Tenuta Torciano winery, Pierluigi Giachi, who took us among some of the vines to tell us a little bit about the history of the winery, the types of grapes they used and wines they produced, and to point out all the hills around that we could see, all of which belonged to his family too. Yeah, this place had a real feel of money about it.
From the ordered rows of grapes on vines we were then led to where we’d be commencing the wine tasting. This involved passing through a small but perfectly maintained garden area dotted with the sorts of statues you associate with the Mediterranean region, occasional benches, tables, and a few gazebos too. Tenuta Torciano looked to be well set-up to accommodate wine tasting groups of any size and appeared to be a lovely setting for a wedding celebration too which, of course, they are more than happy to provide you with quotes for.
Our group was led to a covered area next to a building where tables were laid out with small plates of cold meats, salads, cheeses, and biscuits. There wasn’t a lot to eat so for a full day’s cruise excursion that’s worth bearing in mind if you’re one of those people who feels the need to have a proper lunch. I’d hazard a guess that it was the wine that was the main draw of the trip for the majority of people (and certainly for us), though, so we were absolutely fine with what was offered.
Wine tastings are simple affairs and you quite likely know what to expect from one but, very briefly, you receive small amounts of wine in a glass and you taste them. Slightly less briefly, there are some accompanying explanations of flavours and smells you’re supposed to pick up (we struggle a lot here), –
It just tastes like red wine. It’s nice.
No peppery edge? No blueberry notes?
Red. I’m getting red.
Okay, well try the white. You should be picking up vanilla tones at the back of your mouth and around the front of the tongue there is a little lime, no?
Er… it smells like ham and tastes like liquid ham strained through an unwashed sock.
Really!? Oh, wait, no, you’re right. That is what Chardonnay is supposed to taste like.
– and with some wines you compare a sip with and without any food beforehand to see how the various salts, sweetnesses, and textures alter your tastebuds’ perception of what you’re throwing down your throat while pretending to be sophisticated.
This wine tasting also included some olive oil tastings (they make their own) and a special mention must be made of their truffle oil: ooh! Gorgeous!
Two elements of this particular wine tasting were a little different from others in which we’ve partaken. Firstly, there was an explanation in how to hold the wine glass and drink. Should you decide to visit Tenuta Torciano then you can feign a better upbringing than you really have by following these steps:
- Take the glass by the stem using the left hand.
- Transfer the glass to the right hand, again holding by the stem.
- Pull the glass to your chest and swirl the glass in small circles to make the wine dizzy.
- Lift the glass and sniff deeply, placing your mouth in the open rim to draw in the aromas.
- Take a sip and coat the inside of your mouth and surface of your tongue with the wine before swallowing.
- Take another sip and this time hold it in your mouth and draw some air over it by gently reverse-whistling.
- Transfer the glass to the left hand and set it down.
- Repeat until drunk.
Secondly, there was an amusing explanation regarding how to drink dessert wine. Dessert wine isn’t something we’d normally drink on account of us being sweet enough already (shut up) but we were given a tale about how hard cake was used in conjunction with dessert wine to both soften the food and alter the taste of the drink. This was acted out with the help of two of our fellow cruise passengers, Canadians who we’d met the day before when boating along the Italian coast and with whom we’d shared a table in France the day before that when they’d polished off a few bottles of wine between them at lunch. We liked them. You can see video of this dessert wine and cake tale of young love in the entertaining video below.
And that was our visit to Tenuta Torciano winery complete. There isn’t a lot you can say about a wine tasting if you’ve done one before because they all have to follow more-or-less the same process but each one has something to make it stand out and recommend and with this particular visit it would be the genial hosts and entertainment from the accompanying tale. If you’re travelling in this part of Italy on your own then you can’t just turn up at this winery if you want to taste the wine; you’ll need to make an appointment so check their website as to how and how much that will be. As part of a cruise excursion we liked this a lot and can certainly recommend it whether you have or haven’t experienced a wine tasting before.
Our final stop on this day’s tour from the ship would be to Pisa and that will be covered in the next travelogue in this Emerald Princess cruise series.