MARISA FINETTI | Category: Sip Trip

January 6, 2024January 6, 2024

A bounty of deliciousness in Reggio Emilia

The tri-colored Italian flag was established here. It’s the birthplace of a renowned educational philosophy, and the city where the young Kobe Bryant started dribbling the basketball. Reggio, as locals call it, is also the home of Luciano Pavarotti’s first operatic performance and the headquarters of Italy’s Max Mara fashion house. Amid its cobbled streets dotted with historical churches, theatres, galleries, and monuments, Reggio Emilia is already culturally and fashionably rich. And then there’s food and wine. Situated perfectly between…

October 15, 2023October 15, 2023

Lake fish, beans, and Umbria’s other red wine

Even a seasoned traveler may skirt past the shores of Lake Trasimeno to discover the better-known wine regions of Umbria, like Montefalco (home to the Sagrantino grape) and Orvieto (known for their historic white blends). However, the land around Lake Trasimeno, located in the northwest pocket of the “green heart of Italy,” offers charming discoveries of a grape and wine curiously called Gamay del Trasimeno, a bean saved from extinction, and a bounty of lake fish prepared like game. As…

July 31, 2023July 31, 2023

Biondi-Santi: The wonderment and beauty of wine

The long and picturesque row of towering trees that line the driveway at Biondi-Santi’s Tenuta Greppo estate is a welcome unlike any other. The slow approach down the drive provides time to ponder this moment, this month (June 2023), and to imagine what it must be like for wine producers of Montalcino. Certainly, it was atypical. Moderately warm, the summer was constantly mingling with the threat of rainfall that ranged from light showers to lightning strikes and torrential downpours. Now…

September 14, 2022September 15, 2022

Life with Mateja Gravner & friends

Mateja Gravner met us for dinner at the cozy Ristorante Laite in the postage-stamp-sized mountain village of Sappada, Italy. I have written about Gravner in the past and was always intrigued by the mystery surrounding this biodynamic wine producer located on the far edge of Oslavia, just a stone’s throw from Slovenia. But today was the first time I would meet Mateja in person. Her disposition is kind and casual but gracefully confident. Her wholesome beauty is carried by her…

January 19, 2022January 20, 2022

FERNET-BRANCA, THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF DRINKS

It’s the kaleidoscope of drinks. Made from bits of roots, herbs, flowers, and spices, it offers an endless variety of multi-sensorial personalities, emotionally-colorful synesthesia, ever-changing, and reflective. An amaro can be citrusy, herbaceous, floral, vegetal, medicinal, earthy, savory – a continuous showing of some or all. These flavors are imparted through the process of maceration of botanicals in a grain spirit, often followed by blending and resting to harmonize all the flavors. One of my early illuminating moments into amaro…

August 21, 2021August 21, 2021

Sunday Sip Trip: Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot Noir

Apple Park sits low in the distance – a ring tossed in a sea of technology. But unplug. How fortunate for the three million people of Silicon Valley to be so near to wine country. Those familiar deep green hills to the west are so close but so untraveled, and continue to be one of the most over-looked wine appellations of the world. Those who are aware of Santa Cruz Mountain wines have fully engaged palates. They know and appreciate…

July 18, 2021July 22, 2021

Sunday Sip Trip: Elevated Italian Bubbles

This enchanting landscape is resplendent with ever-changing hues of green and earth. Its extraordinary beauty is formed in mounds upon mounds of conical hills tightly packed with vines as they sit in the foreground of the Alps. Captivating and incredibly suitable as a backdrop for a film (but no, don’t come here to make a movie), it’s the place to unplug altogether, and I mean pop open the corks and sip the bubbly beauties that come from Conegliano-Valdobbiadene. This wonderland…

June 27, 2021June 27, 2021

Sunday Sip Trip: High Altitude Cabernet Franc

A dream would be to have acreage high above picturesque Tuscan villages overlooking the vast blue Tyrrhenian Sea while enjoying morning coffee. Surrounded by a dense forest of hardwood trees, the land is wild, the terrain pristine, isolated, and private, where wild boar hunting and riding bareback are the only activities before dinner. Nearby is the famous Bolgheri appellation – the area known mainly for deeply colored age-worthy wines usually based on the Bordeaux grape varieties. Up until the 1970s,…

June 14, 2021June 14, 2021

SUNDAY SIP TRIP: The Valtellina

Located in Italy’s northernmost part of the Lombardy region near the Swiss border, Valtellina is known for its extreme vineyards and is the home of Chiavennasca, a local Nebbiolo biotype. The only valley in Italy to run east to west, Valtellina was formed during the last ice age by glaciers that carved out the granite mountains. The Adda River flows from the Swiss Alps toward Lake Como, and along this path, there are more than 25 miles of interconnected vineyards…

April 7, 2021April 7, 2021

Sip Trip through Italy: Vermentino, Fiano, Chianti Classico

Situated in the Mediterranean Sea about 115 miles off mainland Italy, Sardinia is rich with charming beauty and eccentricities. It’s the place of sugar-fine sandy beaches, near-Alpine forests, scenic roads, and breathtaking hikes that bring you deeper into the lush and silent interior. Sardinia is also like a pebble polished by waves of history and tradition. Scattered with thousands of nuraghi, Bronze Age settlements, these prehistory remnants are waiting to be solved like the most intricate game of Clue. VERMENTINOA…