More wine?

No one slept last night.Well a couple of people did – Emmet and Joanne, and David (a doctor who learned how to sleep at the drop of a hat as a resident and who is said to be able to fall asleep between floors on an elevator) did. The rest of us, very little. Maybe I fell asleep after 1am but was awake by 5 and the sleep was fitful.

The Italians eat even later then New Yorkers. I first noticed this in Rome. If in New York on a weeknight, we are eating around 7:30 – 8, Italians seem to be sitting down to their evening meal around 9. Last night’s meal did not wrap up until nearly 10:45, and we all suffered from trying to go to bed so full of food and drink. Touring vineyards in Chianti seemed a bit of a task this morning at 8:30, but no worries, we pulled through brilliantly.

But for this reason, there will be an abbreviated blog entry today. I have to go to bed. We toured and tasted two wineries of differing production volumes – Castello of Verazzano and the Antinori vineyards at Badia di Passignano. Castello of Verazzano, a small producer, will produce less than 1 million bottles of wine this year while Antinori, a very large one, will produce more than 14 million of which a large percentage is shipped to the United States. I will tell you about them tomorrow as we have the afternoon off after we square off in a kitchen challenge preparing a lunch buffet using ingredients we find in the market town of Pistoia, but that’s domani.

Let me appease you with pictures of the pizza we ate for dinner at a fabulous local pizzeria in Lucca, Pizzeria Irma. Chef Valter ordered ahead and we sat down to mugs of beer (thank god because none of us could stomach more wine today) and pie after pie arriving to our table – procuitto and pancetta and mushrooms and anchovies and calamari and fried eggs and olives and salamis and zucchini and eggplant and peppers and cherry tomatoes -- you name it we had it on pizza tonight. It was heaven.



The last pizza was a dessert pizza made of nutella (a sweet hazelnut spread) and marscapone cheese (what is known as the Italian cream cheese).