Italian Cheese and Wine

 One thing Mike and I wanted to do while in Italy is some cheese and wine tasting.  There are many places to taste wines in Umbria and Tuscany.  Some of the most famous wines in the world come from this area.  Our problem was that we would not do a wine tasting and have Mike drive and myself navigate him back to Cortona.  And as for the cheese tasting, we had not found a place that offers that alone.  So the solution was to do our own little cheese and wine tasting at our apartment.  We have become quite good at shopping at the local food market in Camucia called the Coop.  It is not a Coop as we know it in the US that is just its name. We know to take our own bags, where to find the fresh versus canned goods, how to weigh and tag our own fresh produce, and where the beverages are located.  When we shopped a couple of days ago we decided to pick out a few different cheeses to taste on our own.

What we selected was some pecorino from Pienza  (sheep milk cheese), a grotta cheese from Bontalegio (cheese aged in a cave), and a fontal (cow milk cheese).  The fontal tastes like a mild cheddar, the pecorino is a mild but tastey cheese,  and the grotta also is also mild but with a bit of aged taste.  Notice that none of the cheeses have a color other than white.  In Italy they do not add color to cheese, but let it have its original color.

We have randomly tasted some local wines until we went into a wine shop at the piazza republica in Cortona. There we found a large variety of wines from the Cortona region of Tuscany.  We also found out that this wine shop does wine tastings on Friday evenings in front of their store and also provide for a wine tasting dinner which they provide a shuttle for.  We decided that we would take advantage of that.

The first thing we did yesterday was walk to an area of Cortona that we had not visited before, the Duomo of Cortona and the Museo Dioesano.   There is a statue of Santa Maria Margherita in the piazza there as well as one of the oldest churches in town.  The museum contains many paintings by Fra Angelico, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Lucca Signorelli.  The paintings were, once again, beautiful with many colors and some gold paint in the clothing and of course the halos.  The best part was the original worship area which had frescoes on all of the walls and on the ceiling.  The paintings were dated from the mid 1300's to the 1500's.  I am amazed at how well they have been preserved.  Once again, I have no pictures because they do not allow photography on the inside.  You would think it is to protect the paintings, but the lighting inside these buildings is so harsh that I think it is just so they can sell their souvenir post cards.   And that is okay because it is their place not mine.  The inside of the Duomo had some very pretty frescoes at the back of the altar area, but otherwise was fairly sparse.

Statue of Santa Margherita

Museo Diocesano

Duomo - simple but still pretty on the inside

Later in the evening we came back to the Piazza Republica for the wine tasting.  There were many other tourists, of course, many from the United States and some from Australia.  We spent about an hour tasting about five different wines from the region and learning about them.  And they had several different cheeses to taste. So this fulfilled both types of tastings we wanted to do.  Our favorite was an aged pecorino.  I think the one we bought is a fresh pecorino.  One of the things we learned about the wines was that one of the wines Mike picked out and really likes is a Syrah from the Cortona area which is very famous.   About 8:00 pm the shuttle arrived to take us to the restaurant.  The restaurant was a surprise because it looks like it belongs in Texas and is run by a real Italian cowboy.  However, the food was true Italian.  We sat at a table with a couple from the US that have lived in the Cortona for about six years.  They make their living renting a renovated farmhouse to tourists.  The other couple at our table was a retired couple from Australia who have stayed in Cortona for a year and are about finished with their stay.  Both couples had interesting insights about what we should do with the remainder of our stay.   This was the second time that we felt like we were in an episode of "Anthony Bourdain" where he is around a lot of foreigners, eating a lot of local food, and drinking their local beverage.  The first time was at the wheat harvest festival.  This only will make sense to those who watch his show on The Travel Channel.   It was a late but very interesting evening.

We have five more days to spend in this area.  We have some specific things planned, but those may change daily.  That is the beauty of being in one place so long and not being on a tour.  Until next time, Ciao.

Saturday, June 25, 2011; 10:07 am