VINO

Here's something about Italy that I hadn't previously appreciated: The wine is plentiful, excellent, and inexpensive.  On our Italian Landscapes tour we had wine with most lunches and virtually every dinner.  I am not one for photographing meals, as were some of our fellow travelers.  But I did manage one photo of the wine.

I hope that doesn't say too much about my priorities.

After our visit to Pienza, we spent a couple of hours touring a nearby winery before returning to our hotel in Cordona.  Personally, I find winery tours a bit tedious, perhaps because they generally have the same story to tell.  The Altesino winery, in the Umbrian countryside, though in a beautiful setting, was no different.

I find it difficult to get landscape photos of vineyards.  Instead, I find myself taking much closer shots, where I can better control conditions.

Partly for documentary purposes, here are a few of the photos I took of the Altesino winery operation.

Of course, the primary reason we were there was to sample the wine, poured by our able guide, one of the members of the owner family.

To give some sense of how inexpensive the wine was, at one of our hotels my wife and I decided to order an extra glass of the red we were drinking.  We knew the charge for this would be on us rather than the tour, and I expected that the glasses might cost in the 8-10 euro range.  Turned out they were only 4 euros each.  On another occasion when four of us were at a restaurant for lunch we decided to get wine and thought we were ordering by the glass when we ordered wine for 7 euros each.  Turned out it was 7 euros for a bottle, not a glass.  Now that's a bargain.  Fortunately, we were able to change our order to one bottle rather than four.

John