A wine tour of sorts...

This morning I woke up bright and early to head on a half-day trip to Greve in Chianti. I realized awhile ago that I won't have time to fit in a wine/bike tour in Tuscany during the rest of my trip, so I found this place in my guide book and I sure am glad I did!

It took about an hour to get there from Florence. Once there my friend Cory and I walked around a little bit before finding the main piazza. There were a ton of enoteca (wine shops) lining the square. But according to my guidebook there was supposed to be an enoteca with more than 150 bottles of wine for tasting - Le Cantine di Greve in Chianti. We got there at about 9:55a.m., 5 minutes before it opened. I know it sounds bad going to taste wine so early in the morning, but there really won't be any other time I'll get to do this on my trip and I wanted to see what it was all about!

Me in one of the many enoteca in the main piazza in Greve.

Wild boar is also a specialty of the area, so there were quite a few meat shops.

At 10a.m. we headed into the doors to the half museum, half enoteca. The people that worked there were very helpful and told us a good order to follow in tasting wines (dry to fruity). We each bought 10 euro cards that you would basically put in a slot that would then allow you to pour a little sample of wine into your glass. It's sort of hard to describe how it works so please refer to the picture below. They use a technology in which bottles rest in vacuum-valves, which is how they are able to have so many wines "on tap". The wines that we sampled were between 0.8 to 1.5 euro. We were able to try ten different wines by the time we left at 11:30. Also, there was a similar machine that dispensed different kinds of olive oil for testing. Although I don't know much about wine, the trip really was a great experience and I'm glad I got to partake in a wine tasting.

An wine opener used in the early 19th century. It's actually pretty similar to those used today, just a little bit bigger.

Grape crusher, although I'm not sure how old it is.

This is how we tasted the wine. You insert your card and then the buttons would light up and you could choose which one you wanted to taste. There were about 10 of these stations in Le Cantine.

Cory and me toasting to our first Chianti. If you click on the picture to make it bigger you can see the amount of wine we got for each sample. So I admit after 10 of these in an hour and a half, I was a little tipsy. But I couldn't space the tasting out over more time because I had to get back to the Villa for class!