[Itinerary Page]The daily diary of a wandering restaurateur
May 23 - The Road to Piemonte
The road to Piemonte is mostly on the autostrade ... and in this part of Italy, that means a whole lot of tunnels. I swear that we were on the far side of Genoa before we had spent more time in the open air than in concrete tubes. My hat goes off to the Italian road builders for figuring out how to make all this work. When they didn't tunnel, they somehow hung a four-lane road off the side of a mountain or built an unbelievable high bridge. I don't even want to think about what the construction costs might have been.
Actually, even with heavy traffic, things moved pretty well. Very possibly this was due to the practice of using the far left lane only when you are actually passing another vehicle. If we could get people doing that in the States, it would smooth things out a lot ... but we both know that it won't happen in our lifetimes!
The road to Piemonte was also wet. We had off and on rain from Genoa to the wine region at which point it cleared off. Our final stop on the trip (if you exclude the hotel at the Milan airport for the moment) is the Villa Tiboldi, a vineyard estate in the heart of the Piemonte wine region. It was not all that easy to find, but I have picked up enough Italian to decipher what the shopkeeper was trying to tell me and we wound our way through the vineyards and up to the top of the hill only a few minutes before the receptionist arrived to open the gates.
This place is very impressive. The facilities are new -- or at least newly renovated -- so while it does not have the ancient rustic charm of Umbria or Tuscany, it is much more liveable. The rolling hills are covered with vines and many think the best wines in Italy come from within ten miles of where we are staying. (Those who think so are not the Tuscan residents of Montalcino or Montepulciano!) The wines of central Italy are based primarily on the Sangiovese grape. Here the mother red grape is Nebbiolo.
It doesn't look like we will have enough time (or cash!) to do any serious Barolo or Barbaresco tasting, but there are many very impressive iterations of Nebbiolo that do not carry the cachet -- or the price tag -- of those better-known wines. In fact, I discovered that one of the wines produced by the Villa Tiboldi's Malvira vineyard has consistently won a top rating for its type. I may have to add a few bottles to the stash and hope that US Customs is feeling benevolent when we arrive.
The restaurant at the Villa was closed today so we were directed off to another spot a few minutes away where we had a totally wonderful meal. You can learn more about that via the link below.
© 2005 Restaurant Doctor