Heading to Umbria

Leaving Montespertoli with no regrets the next day, we headed further south to Montefalco in Umbria, a town that was starting to build a name for itself with a local wine called Sagrantino. We were looking forward to the visit as this was an exciting old wine that had recently been 'discovered' and we were to visit the company mostly responsible for introducing it to the market – Arnaldo Caprai.

Arnaldo Caprai was a name well known in the silk industry. They manufactured predominantly silk ties and other silk items. Arnaldo had started the winery many years ago as a hobby and it had now passed down to his son, who I must admit was doing a very good job.

Marco Caprai

The winery was very interesting, there was an experimental vineyard where they trialled all sorts of training methods for the vines and had rows of many different grape varieties, a wonderful tasting of their range of wines and when we had finished, a visit to the barrel store underground.

We walked around the vineyard and learnt about different clones and what grows well where, we had the tasting – lots of different vintages and various experimental blends and finally we were to see the barrel store underground. Great.

Young vineyards

Acres of vines

One of our group, a gentleman well known in the wine industry,  had a problem walking around. He used a stick to assist him when he walked around and said he would stay upstairs while we saw the cellars, he would be too much trouble. A very generous act by a kindly old man or was it?

We looked around the cellars for about 15 minutes and came back up stairs.  We noticed there wasn’t a skerrick of wine left in any of the glasses or bottles, someone had gone round and emptied every glass, we thought of the obvious – the staff had been around and cleaned up but why leave the empty glasses? Apparently they hadn’t as we soon realised,  ‘John’ had helped himself to the leftover wine in the bottles and glasses and was fast asleep all on his own. We discovered later that he was an old soak. (I have since seen him several times and he has given up drinking and he's actually a nice guy).

We continued our magical mystery tour the next day. ICE (Instituto Commerciale Estero) had promised us a truffle hunt unfortunately they hadn’t confirmed with the owners of the company that it would take place. Apparently it was the wrong time of year for truffles and instead the company, Urbani Truffles,  had organised a lunch for us. This five course extravaganza was a fantastic feast of dishes all made with aromatic truffles, each plate more delicious than the last – even the dessert was truffled gelato with 'fruita delle bosco' (fruit of the forest). None of us missed the truffle hunt or complained about the hospitality and it is a meal I will always remember because of the generosity of the people involved and the food.

That night was to be our last in Umbria and we had been invited to a dinner starring Italy’s famous Castellucio Lentils. The dinner, which was attended by the Italian Minister for Agriculture and other big wigs, was to be prepared by a world famous chef (who nobody had ever heard of) and like the truffle dinner,  every course would contain lentils. I felt sorry for the chef having to come up with five different dishes with this pulse which is really quite boring.

He succeeded for the first three dishes but faded quickly on the fourth, but his dishes were not the only thing creating excitement.

We had a female journalist from Phoenix, Arizona on the trip. She had never travelled before and we had to stop the coach every couple of hours because she got car-sick.  Dressed like Holly Hobby, the cartoon character, in her denim dresses and flat shoes and big straw hat, she had been the target of jokes the whole way through. She seemed to ask silly questions at inappropriate times and she was a real ‘innocent-at-large’.

Her column in a regional Tuscon paper was used as a filler and we wondered why she had been invited as there were a lot of better-value journalists who have jumped at the opportunity to fill her place. She had never left the state of Arizona before so this was a really big adventure for her.

But let me set the scene: The dinner was held at a large restaurant with a large outside area where we were served cocktails. We were sat in several groups, my group contained six men, our friend from Arzona and myself. At some stage during the meal my friend got up to go to the bathroom. In Italy there are some older places where the bathrooms serve both males and females and in this instant this was the case. It was quite large with eight cubicles and a large area with vanity units but both men and women used the toilets.

One of our colleagues in the group, a lecherous Frenchman who had been sitting at another table, was already in there washing his hands when she entered. He started to speak to her in French and to be polite, she kept nodding and smiling, unclear of what he was saying. She claimed that the next thing she knew he was all over her kissing and pawing her. She ran out of the bathroom and straight back to the table. She looked awful and her hair was in disarray when she sat down and I asked her ‘what happened'?  She started telling me when she realised that all the men at the table were listening as well. She stopped and told me she would tell me when we got back to the hotel. She sat through the rest of the meal in complete silence. It must have been a big, big shock. That night when we finally arrived at the hotel in Sirmione (near Verona) we went to bed while she called her husband in the USA. The next morning she was on a flight home where she believed she would be safe. I’ve often thought of her and wondered what is she doing now, I guarantee she has never left home again.

Next post: More about Sirmione and we go to Vinitaly