Trequanda, Apr 5 Truffle Hunt

Today is the reason we booked this trip in the first place! But our hunt isn’t until 3PM. So we get up at 9AM and head out to visit Pienza which was cut short a couple days ago because of our small bout with food poisoning! We visit the Duomo at the top of the city and find breakfast. As we walk around, we find a wine tasting in the center of town. So we try out more Tuscan wines!

Then we head out and check out a castle that we have passed by several times and this time we drive in and it turns out to have the best wine tasting of the trip! FREE! so we taste several wines and I buy a bottle of their best one which is only 21 Euros! We can’t believe our luck! Then we go back to our villa for an hours rest before our hunt starts!

We finish our visit to the castle, which has some fun statues that are clearly very old along with some other very old relics and we drive away past an olive orchard!

Promptly at 3PM, we meet Andrea, our Hunter, and only one other couple is with us with their 10 year old daughter. They are Leon, Vera and daughter Marie from Tarzana, CA, a mere hour drive from where we live! We’ll need to stay in touch! We follow Andrea down the road a kilometer or two and park. Andrea releases her truffle dog, Mia, but the dog answers to the name “Puppy” which is only a puppy but seems to know it’s stuff. We walk off into the woods following Puppy and soon enough, she is digging at the ground. Yes! A truffle! I will go into more depth on the kinds of truffles but for now, we have found truffles! All in all, the puppy finds 47 grams of truffles (as weighed later) which is about 23 Euros worth, plenty enough for dinner for 4! Our hunter throws in a black truffle she found this morning and we have 60 grams!

There are 3 basic kinds of Truffles, Marzuolo (found in the spring and the ones we find today!), Tartufo Estivo O Scorzone (Black Truffles, found in the summer and fall mostly) and Tartufo Bianco (White Truffles, found in the fall into winter)

Andrea gives the truffles to our chef, Giovanna, for the evening, and we all agree to meet at 7:15PM for dinner. So we go back to our room and relax until then. We have a couple hours and I even get a nap in! We all meet at the agreed time and are ushered into the dining room and get seated at the table. Our truffle mates are a Russian couple, Leon, Vera and daughter Marie, that happen to live in Tarzana, CA and we get along famously! So much so that those of you that live local to us may even get to meet them one day as they are now on our invite list!

The meal is fabulous and every course includes truffles! We ask what the courses are but no one speaks English! So the photos will have to suffice! Dessert is the only course that doesn’t use truffles and we feign mock disappointment and everyone laughs! Then they serve us Grappa, which Elee and I have been dying to try. It is a sweet Anisette, licorice flavored after dinner drink, which is interesting but I probably won’t order again! Strong!

So it’s back to the room to write this blog and retire. A fire lit, we kick back and turn on Netflix and turn in!

Trequanda, Apr 4

Today we wake, much refreshed from yesterday’s illness scare! What we both thought might be another Covid scare, it turns out we think we had a short bout of food poisoning from some bad ground beef (that we watched being ground just for us!). So we’re back in good shape and we have breakfast and head off in search of adventure! We find Pienza and tour a little bit of the city and end up in Montalcino for a wine tasting and tour that came with our current lodging. Another old winery and we are very amazed at what we see in their cellars. Fattoria dei Barbi!

The doorways are barely large enough for a human to fit through and I have to ask our guide, Irene, how they got wine barrels in the cellar that are 8-10 feet wide and as tall? She tells me they assembled the barrels in place! Over 100 of them! We then all go into the restaurant and taste some of their wines. Good in their own right but not California wine by a long stretch!

Our tour guide, Irene, is one of the most personable we have met. In the wine cellars, she takes us into a set of rooms that store wines as old as 100 plus years! We ask her if she will open one and she smiles at us. Not to be done but hey, it was worth the ask!

We drive on and find ourselves in the heart of town in Montalcino. we tour the Duomo we find there and acquire more ceiling photos, LOL. As we step out, we see a couple of people walking down a path from what looks like a castle and I ask them what is up there. “I don’t know, I am from Montelcino!” Hey wait, we are IN Montelcino! Oh well, shaking my head, we walk on. The Tramontana winds make it feel extremely cold here! We drive away again and soon find ourselves in Siena. Another interesting old little town! We find yet another place to have a wine tasting and we indulge again! Caffe di Fondesco!

So we find our way back to our Villa after driving through the Orcia Valley and take a couple hour nap. Then, a little after 7PM, we head out in search of dinner. Have I mentioned that in Italy, restaurants close at 3PM and open back up after 7PM for no one goes out to dinner before that! We find a place called “Piccolo” and we both have a seafood pasta dish that is fantastic and cooked perfectly! We are the only patrons in the restaurant and the owner comes and chats with us about life in general and the conversation is fun!

Then we drive back to our Villa, get a roaring fire going (remember the heating system isn’t working?) and relax for the night with a bottle of good Italian wine!

Good night!

Trequando, Monday Apr 3

Today we get up leisurely and make breakfast. Then we head out to check out Pienza, a half hour away. We get there and easily find a place to park. We are only a block from the Duomo and we easily find our way there and walk around, going inside for a few photos! Every Duomo in Italy has it’s own charm and this one is no different.

We walk around the piazzas that we find and this is an old world charm! But for some reason, I am exhausted on my feet and we opt to go back to our villa and I sleep for most of the day! Elee is feeling under the weather also and we both take a leisure day.

Later in the afternoon, we are both feeling a bit better and we seek out a small restaurant down a small dirt road that we have spotted in our travels and we decide to check it out! It is called, “FicoPazzo” which translates to ‘Crazy Fig’!

We order a tasting menu that includes bruscetta, handmade spaghetti, Roast Rabbit and a panchetta dessert! It is all wonderful especially when you toss in a couple glasses of Italian wine! So we make it back to our villa and will make it an early night!

Trequanda, Sunday, Apr 2

We are in leisure mode now so we wake up when we wake up. Our villa is freezing cold and the heater appears not to be working. So we brave the elements and get our day going. Elee makes breakfast consisting of scrambled eggs! First egg breakfast in Italy! And the coffee we bought in a grocery store last night turns out to be really good cooked in a percolator in the kitchen! Throw a banana in and breakfast is complete!

We eventually get dressed and take a walk around the resort, our cameras busily grabbing photos of the local flowers and plants and they purr happily! Elee whips up some open face sandwiches out of ingredients we bought yesterday and all is good!

We head out and find some wine tasting places. First is “Cantina Contucci” in Montepulciano. Back in the old part of the city that was originally built in the 4th or 3rd century BC (yes, I said BC!), the buildings are medieval and fantastic according to our camera lenses! But don’t believe them, look at the photos for yourself! Okay, so my cameras were right! And you didn’t believe them! Shame on you, LOL

We walk into Cantina Contucci and it is busy. The sommelier sees we have just arrived and steps off to the side and invites us to visit the wine cellar and points the way! We walk into the cellar and my camera snaps at me for not letting it loose! This is fantastic! We first see bottles covered in 1/4 to 1/2 inch of accumulated dust! Wine barrels that are 10 feet tall by 10 feet wide and stacked to fill every crevice of the caves! Literally hundreds of barrels that must each hold 2000 gallons each! And it appears they must have been built in place for there’s no way they would fit through the passageways! And they are all in current use!

By the time our camera lenses are satiated, we arrive back in the tasting room. The people that were here have gone and we are two of only a half dozen people left. So she focuses on us and another sommelier takes on the rest of the patrons. We taste four of their finest wines and I am underwhelmed. Their prices range from 15 Euros to 50 Euros per bottle. Understand that 1 Euro is approximately $1.20. Won’t be buying from any wineries soon, but we’ll keep tasting!

So we move on and find a couple of wine rooms that are closed. We finally find one that we call and it is open and we locate it in an industrial part of town, “Vecchia Cantina”. Gabriel is the sommelier and he treats us to tastings of 4 of his best wines. At least one of them I would love to take home and lay down in my wine room, but this trip we are traveling light with just carry on bags and we won’t be able to take any on the plane. The one that shows promise is still young and the wines we are buying we will drink here. So it defeats the purpose of trying to bring his wine home! Sorry Gabriel, we wish you well!

A storm has taken over the skies for an hour or two and we find a store with a couple more sundries we need while the storm passes. We go back to our Villa where Elee cooks some egg noodles we have bought in the grocery store. She does another fabulous job on dinner and we settle down to eat and enjoy the fire I have lit in the fireplace!

We stopped into a small store that I described yesterday where a local lady translated for us. Both she and the proprietor talked me out of purchasing some expensive wines and I picked up a couple at 15 Euros. I’m drinking one of them right now and it is quite nice!

Well, in closing, since Elee cooked, it is my job to clean the kitchen, so Ciao for now!

Montepulciano & Trequanda, Sat., Apr 1

We awaken in Firenze (Florence) and pack up our stuff to move on. It’s a 10 minute walk to the car and we get there with no issues. We head onto the highway and make a stop at a now common sight, the AutoGrille. And as we have been finding out, they carry really good coffee, pastries, sandwiches and more! So we have what is becoming a staple breakfast for us, coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich on really good bread! I’d love to find a place to have a good omelette but that appears to be way too American for this country!

We head on and leave the Autostrade (highway) intentionally as the highways are a good way to get from point A to point B but not to see the countryside! And today’s journey is just over an hour by Autostrade. So we leave that road and tell our GPS to avoid toll roads. We are now driving in the Italian countryside and the pleasant factor of the trip skyrockets!

We find ourselves driving through Montepulciano, a famous area of Tuscany. We have been recommended to visit a couple of wine tasting locations by Lucrezia in Tuscan Taste in Firenze. So we navigate to the La Dolce Vita and it takes us up narrow winding roads among throngs of tourists walking in the middle of the roads! And the roads are only wide enough for a car and a half! Very picturesque buildings a thousand plus years old! Once inside, we drop the name of the lady in Firenze and the owner caters to us personally! He tells us a story of someone who came to see him named Peter. Peter Mondavi. Yes, that Mondavi! About how Peter came in search of his store!

So he gives us tastings of 7 of the wines he sells and we settle on a glass each to relax with after the tasting. The red wines were so good that Elee settles on a glass of red, Brunello di Montalcino! It is very good! The tasting turns out to be very upper class and makes a real dent in our wallet! The owner tells us that if we order 2 or more cases, he will ship it for free! A case is 12 bottles and his most inexpensive wine is 49 Euros ($57)! We take a hard pass!

So we resume our journey through this old medieval town and take what photos we can while driving. Then we navigate to our final destination for the night, in Trequanda, another 20 minutes away. We are staying at Cignello Wine Resort, that will be our home for the next 5 days. We’ll finally get a respite form our hectic schedule to this point. We have a 2 bedroom, 2 bath suite on a ranch. We kick back for a while and then head into the next town over, Sinalunga, where we find grocery stores to get sundries and a restaurant to get dinner.

At the Wine Resort we have a 2 bedroom apartment all to ourselves for the next 5 days! Quite spacious and comfy! And it comes with a view! We find out the bad news later on when we discover the heating system isn’t working! But the staff brings us a space heater and plenty of wood for the fireplace!

We find a place to park near the top of a hill that comprises the town of Sinalunga and as we are checking out the parking spaces because they are marked like Italian handicapped spots, we come up next to a person getting out of a car. “Scussi?” we ask. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes”, she answers.

“Is it okay to park here? these look like handicap spaces!”

“Oh, we don’t pay attention to that!” She responds and we all chuckle.

This lady is very friendly and personable and we ask her if there are any grocery stores nearby. She tells us there is a small one a block away and much larger ones down the bottom of the hill. She then tells us she knows the proprietor of the small shop and would be glad to go with us and translate for us. (Her English is very good and she tells us she has lived in the States and in the UK) This lady is a wonderful and good person. We get some fantastic sliced meats and cheeses along with breads for sandwiches and wine. So we are good to go.

We drive on and weave our way back down the hill and come across one of the larger grocery stores and stop in. We have noticed that there are no basic sundries in our Villa. (Such as spices, condiments, Paper Towels, etc.) So we spend more money and get a few basics.

We stop at several restaurants to start with and they either did not serve what we were looking for or they couldn’t accommodate us due to it being Saturday night and we didn’t make reservations! Then we come across one called Alle Volte Ristorante and it was empty! We ask them what time people come to eat and they tell us 9 or 10 PM! I guess we are just old, LOL. But we look at the menu and they offer the meal we couldn’t find in Firenze, Bisstecca Alla Fiorentine! It is a T-Bone steak sold by the kilogram, seared and raw in the middle! So we splurge and order it and it is melt in your mouth tender! Add a glass of wine each and the total meal isn’t even out of sight on the final bill!

So another bucket list item checked off, we are satiated and happy. Now to go back to our Villa and I find my cell phone is missing. The one and only GPS tool that could find the Villa today. Oh my, what to do? We use the GPS built into the Italian rental car we have and it luckily gets us close enough that we find the correct dirt road to take us there! We go inside and my cell phone is not there either. So I do my best to stay calm and Elee, my girl scout, hands me a flashlight bless her heart, and I search the path to the car and open the door and find the phone in the darkened interior! Crisis averted!

So we are in our Villa and now have 2-3 days of breakfasts, lunches and a dinner to save us from all restaurant meals! Tomorrow we will explore this area in more detail.