Video

Our friend at Tuscan Trails started a wine club earlier this year. Todd is a great guy who lives in Florence and has been running wine tours in Tuscany for over 15 years.

He just released his 2020 fall offering, and I have to say that not only are the wines top shelf, the pricing is competitive, and they are delivered to your door! This is a really unique deal - I don't think you can wrong here. I was a buyer of his earlier Brunello offer earlier this year, and I will be snapping up this one also.

There's only one catch - you have to get your orders in by October 14th!

Here is my friend Francesco Gioffreda from Casa al Vento speaking about his property and wine. I just found this on Vimeo while I was looking up the video of the harvest I made:

I have yet to taste any of these. I tend to shy away from the big producers, but the La Colombina sounds interesting.

We had a great time in Panzano yesterday at Vino al Vino, the annual wine event in Piazza Bucciarelli. The quality of the producers in Panzano is amazing - and this event is really about enjoying some spectacular wines.

We started with lunch at Mac Dario Dario DOC (yes - McDonald's made him give up this name!), Dario Cecchini's latest restaurant incarnation. Mac Dario is was a play on "McDonalds" and for lunch there are two set menus - for €10 you get a half pound burger, roast potatoes, pickled onions, bread, water, and sauces. Maybe the best deal meal in all of Tuscany (still the same price in 2014!).

Between the three of us with glasses (€12) we tasted just about everything, including Candialle, Castello Dei Rampola, Fontodi, La Masssa, Panzanello, Villa Cafaggio, and one of our favorites, Cosimo Gericke's Rignana. They were pouring the 2007 Chianti Classico, which I had not previously tasted. It was excellent of course - Rignana's expression of Chianti is classic and very real - earthy, but always with excellent concentrated and dense dark red fruits, spice, and a strong tannic structure. I don't think there is a better wine to pair with a wide range of Tuscan food - especially roast pork, Crostini Toscano, or local cheeses.

I also had fun talking with Renzo Marinai who was working his own booth. He told me that he likes to play music in his cantina - Mozart and Beethoven, etc. because it is good for the wine - that the wine is alive and it needs to live. And he had a very interesting white wine - a blend of malvasia, trebbiano, and chardonnay that goes straight from stainless to bottle. It was probably the surprise of the day for us. I'll leave a review when we drink one of the bottles we bought.