Montalcino and Siena

It was very nice to rise with the “luxury” to choose what clothes I was going to wear, so that cute little sun dress and that adorable pair of canary-colored strappy sandals I had packed…ahh…joke…Today was a day that I was really looking forward to since the move to Montalcino, and therefore to more traditionally styled wines, was a move right into my wheelhouse.

We drove north, and after about 45 minutes of travel, we noticed the topography begin to change. While the Maremma and Bolgheri are a bit rugged, and arid with more grays and russets, as one drives north to Montalcino, the elevations rise, the mountains sweeten and become more verdant, and the temperatures begin to change. Maremma and Bolgheri’s relative proximity to the sea moderates their climates. Montalcino (and Chianti as well) have more “continental” climates which means greater extremes, i.e. hotter days, and cooler nights.

Before gettin’ all winey wit it, we stopped at the ancient and important Abbey of Sant’ Antimo, just ouside of Montalcino. Sant’ Antimo is one of the oldest abbeys in Italy. It is a handsome, early Romanesque structure whose construction was actually commissioned by Charlemagne himself. As we ambled around the building’s cool stone perimeter, shafts of light plunged through the high windows lighting the sweet, blue, curling frankincense smoke that burned in a gilded censer on the altar. While a few people kneeled in prayer, a monk sat at the back of the church adjusting and playing (beautifully I might add) an oboe. I’m not sure why…

We left the abbey and rumbled further up into the mountains to visit one of the truly great producers in all of Montalcino: Piero Palmucci and the Poggio di Sotto estate. Signor Palmucci is what anyone would term a “character”, with a dry, acerbic wit sheltering shy little boy. He and our Italian guide Filippo know each other well, and traded barbs throughout the tour (Palmucci continually called Filippo “bandito” [which does not translate as “bandit”, but rather as “banished one” or “disgraced one”]. Sig. Palmucci worked for years in the international wine trade before founding Poggio di Sotto, and speaks 6 languages fluently, English being one of them. Poggio di Sotto is unquestionably what we Anglophones would call a “boutique winery”, though with a decidedly traditional approach. Not a barrique to be found anywhere…Despite Sig. Palmucci’s slow and deliberate manner, it only took a half an hour to tour Poggio di Sotto’s entire facility: crushpad, vinification room, barrel room, bottling line, shipping station, and his personal cellar.

Sig. Palmucci then led us into a darkish narrow room dominated by a long heavy wooden table - it was time to taste! Palmucci makes only 2 wines: Rosso di Montalcino and Brunello di Montalcino. He made an emphatic point of saying that the grapes that go into his rosso are IDENTICAL with the ones that make up his Brunello. In may cases, Brunello producers’ rossos are made with either the “second cut” of fruit, or with fruit sourced from younger vines. Further, his rosso is aged for two years in the same traditional 30 hectoliter Slavonian oak casks in which he raises his Brunello. Rosso di Montalcino requires only one year of age, but he gives his rosso two. His Brunello gets over four years. So what were they like? In a word, sublime. They were sublime: deep, clean, elegant, complex, “sweet”, balanced, and very long. Almost everyone purchased a few bottles (if not a few cases) to have shipped home. For reasons I cannot get into, I cannot get these wines for our shop, so this ain’t no kind of sales pitch, but if you see Poggio di Sotto for sale, and you can part with about $140 for the Brunello (the rosso goes for about $50), treat yourself. You could not possibly be anything but enchanted…

By now it was time for a late lunch. We filled the pullman and headed up to a winery that I shall leave nameless. I sold their wines wholesale years ago, and never much cared for them even then, and the ones we drank at lunch confirmed the fact that, at least for me, little had changed. This winery-that-shall-remain-nameless produces exclusively organic wines, and their “greeness” extends to the macrobiotic food they serve at their on-site trattoria. We dined on dirt cakes, raw millet eaten directly from personalized feedbags, wheatgrass shakes, salame with large chunks of bone in it, and honey-coated insects in a pig’s milk yogurt infused with cow farts. Despite the claims made for the health of this food, everyone who served us looked sickly. Hey, I’m not knocking organic/vegetarian food, but this lunch was that in the extreme prepared by people who have no idea how to cook. Yuk. But, after one stellar meal after another, I guess we were due…

So it was back onto the bus for our ride to the first “city”, Siena (if you can call Siena that - it’s got 60,000 souls soaking wet). Busses larger than “X” are forbidden to enter center city Siena, so we tranferred to a minibus and made our way into the town. Undoubtedly, many of you have indeed visited Siena, but if you haven’t, and you find yourself in Tuscany, make it a point to go. Siena, Florence’s long-time enemy from the early middle ages through the early Renaissance, was essentially stopped dead and dropped into amber by the first wave of Black Plague in 1348. Little has changed there since then, and that includes the sheets on my hotel bed (ba-dum pissssh!). Siena’s cathedral is not to be missed, and the city’s main square the Piazza del Campo is undoubtedly one of Italy’s most beautiful.

A guided tour of the city had been arranged for us, but the slender German woman (who I hypothesize was a failed actress) was so phony and generally abrasive, Iwas able to slip the group by clevely pointing upwards while shouting out “look out for that squirting buboe” and when everyone turned to look, I kicked my red felt pointy-toed shoes back towards the hotel…That night we scaled a steep, cobbled street to reach the evening’s dining spot. The proprietor and chef had ridden in and won (in 1967) Siena’s truly obsessive/compulsive barebacked horserace called the Palio. The walls of the subterranean brick restaurant were hung with photos of his equestrian exploits. The dinner’s highlight for me was the local pasta called pici, which are a sort of fresh, handrolled, ultra-thick spaghetti, usually dressed with a wild boar ragu`. Oh yeah.

The previous days of travel and prandial excesses were really beginning to catch up with us, so we rolled ourselves back down the bumpy street to the hotel, and hit the hay. What some of us didn’t realize was that Siena is a BIG college town, and it was their equivalent of “senior week” in which all of the grads. don medieval students’ dress, blow trumpets, drink, and harrass passersby into the wee hours of the morning. I sleep like the dead, but at breakfast the next morning, some of the more delicate souls in the group said they were at it ’til 6 AM…

TOM CIOCCO