Wine

“I drink wine”
–Adele

The last weekend I was in Italy, I went for a wine tasting at two different wine vineyards. My brother has informed me that I can just refer to them as “vineyards.” I said that sometimes the haters gotta know that you’re not drinking grape juice.

So, I went to some wine vineyards with a few of my new Italian program friends. There were a few usual suspects there, namely Cody.

It was Cody’s idea for a few of us to head into the mountains for a wine tasting, as a last hurrah in Italy and obviously I said yes. The trip was to go into the mountains, further into the Chianti region of Italy, and visit two different wine vineyards.

As we traveled up the Italian countryside, which was now speckled with orange and red trees, I wanted to take it all in, but my motion sickness wasn’t having it. Having been shaken up like dice in a can, we arrived at the first wine vineyard.

The vineyard was filled with dead winter trees, but with an incredible view of Tuscany. A woman showed us around the vineyard, making references to the chianti and fava beans they grew there (they were just begging me to make a Silence of the Lambs reference). Then we got to the good stuff: a room with a table full of filled wine glasses.

We tried whites and reds, eating salami and cheese the whole way through. I tried chianti, with and without preservatives, and found out with which one I preferred. I bought my parents a bottle of my favorite and snail-mailed it to them to enjoy in the New Year.

We went to the next vineyard, now nighttime, and we continued what we started with more wine and cheese.

I learned how to hold a wine glass by the stem and swirl it around in order to get all of the flavors activated before shoving my face into it. I wrote down my observations about the wines, but all I could remember was that the last one was a sweet white wine that tasted like honey as we dipped cookies into it. Overall it was a good day of trying new things and saying “cheers.”

I was well aware the whole time of how fortunate I am to have moments like this in life. My arm getting tired from lifting it to cheer the whole time and then bending it towards my face is the very definition of champagne problems.