Enjoying life in Umbria

We took the bus from Siena to Assisi as there is no train connection and have now settled in here for a few days.

We are staying in an old palazzo in the quieter part of town,that's our place with the window opened.

The apartment is full of old style furniture but is well stocked and comfortable.

The view from our window looking down the street.

We decided that since we are staying in Assisi without a car we would join some tours to see the countryside which is really the heart of Umbria.

So we took another wine and food tour with a British guy who has lived here for years. We were a small group but drank a lot of wine. The typical Umbrian wine is red and is called Montefalco Sagrantino, made from a grape that is only grown in this region. The wine is quite big,dry and very tasty.

In Italy wine is considered a food so is only to be consumed with meals and they take great pride in producing wine to go with different types of foods.

Don is helping himself to an endless supply.

The producers we visited are all very small, often working on land that has been in their families for many generations.

This time of year most all the wine has been harvested and the fields are going back to their natural state...

 

The few grapes of lesser quality are left to fall to the ground as nutrients for the next year.

 

The wine producers also produce olive oil which is being harvested as we saw on our tour.

Usually the olives are picked by hand but here they are shaking and raking them into a machine which catches them in a large net.

 

The newly pressed olive oil is delicious and nothing like I have ever tasted before. They serve it on toasted bread,rubbed with garlic and topped with olive oil.

We visited three wine makers that day to see their properties and taste their wines. This producer was the biggest of the three and has been in the business the longest so their wines are being exported and also gold and silver winners at international wine shows.

The view from their terrace, it was a beautiful fall day.

 

They have invested in expensive barrels and have as much as 6 years of wine aging in them.

So more wine tasting but this time we started with a white, our favourite, so Don was checking out the bottle!

Our final stop was at a very small winery but we enjoyed it the best.

The wine maker wasn't there as he had gone to the city to sign up for compensation for lost crops this season. There had been a lot of rain and many of the grapes were lost to the storms. Then during the harvest it kept raining and many of the grapes became moldy so it was a very poor crop which is devastating for small producers.

So we were met by Mama Maria and the family dog who warmly welcomed us to their place...

The dog even participated in the tasting.

They were very generous with their wine as well...

Mama Maria was very interested in us, where we lived, why we were there and so on.I only wished I could speak the language.

And of course there was lunch at a local agriturismo, which are farms in the rural areas that invite tourists to stay and sometimes they have restaurants as well. Our guide told us that the government invested a lot of money into this program when many farms were in danger of being lost and disappearing from the rural landscape.

We were met by the grandfather who was 82 and the 23rd generation to live on that farm.

The view from their terrace...

This is a working farm and they too were harvesting olives.

Of course we had another four course meal with a ricotta lasagna in a pastry with a squash puree...

There was antipasto, veal and we finished with this...

Italian tiramisu

Some drive by pictures...

There were lots of fields of dried sun flowers which are harvested for their oil as well.

So many shades of green...

An Umbrian hill town

It was another great day in the country and both of us are already saying we should come back here and spend a longer time in one of these smaller villages with few tourists and live the Italian way of life.

 

Posted with Blogsy