Wine X Staff
Wine X Online Edition
I’ll be honest, I’d never been outside the United States before I went to Tuscany a few years ago. Sure, I went to Mexico once for Spring Break in college and stayed in the resort area the whole time, but that doesn’t really count. Nor does the Canadian side of Niagara Falls count (even though I did stop at a Tim Horton’s). So going to Tuscany as a wine industry professional was a big step for me; I had tastings booked at famous wineries in Chianti and Brunello, and visions of well-aged vintages of delicious Italian reds at every restaurant we went to danced in my head as we flew over.
Did my visions come true? Yes and no. The tastings were fun, and delicious, and my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I shipped a couple cases of wine back home. They weren’t all that different from tastings at wineries around here though, in Napa and Sonoma. Maybe a little cheaper, a little more fun with an Italian pouring the wine, and a little tastier with breadsticks and olive oil that was pressed only a few weeks prior. And the restaurants, wine bars, and stores did have some really cool old vintages of wine that I pined for, and even convinced my girlfriend to buy a couple times. Though it wasn’t anything I couldn’t have found at home for a little bit more money.
But where did the magic of Tuscany really come into play for me? Where did my most cherished memories of that trip come from? When I learned that the whole “when in Rome” phrase was legit. In planning the trip, I thought I’d be searching for incredible wine experiences, old vintages and expensive bottles. And you probably could pack a trip full of just that if you badly wanted to. I think that would be a mistake though, one I almost made.
I remember exactly when I had my moment of realization that cool old bottles of wine aren’t really what going to Tuscany is about. We had gone into a wine store and I was looking for interesting bottles of wine. I didn’t really find much, but I found an older Amarone at a decent price. I wanted to get it, and my girlfriend (who had studied abroad in Tuscany) said “Why? Why don’t we just go get some charcuterie and a bottle of house red next door?” This was a conversation we’d had multiple times already on the trip, in different iterations and locations, but this time I realized she was right.
House reds in Italy are a little different than house reds here. And in Tuscany, they pride themselves on their local wine, and they exclusively serve that as the house red. Want Brunello at the cheapest price you’ll ever find it? Go to Montalcino and get a bottle of house red at a restaurant. Usually, it’s Brunello. Same goes for the rest of Tuscany, and all of their other famous wines. This was the learning experience for me. I had gotten so used to house reds being garbage wine (like they are in the USA) that I didn’t understand why you would ever order one. I always was looking for a cooler, older, more interesting wine on the bottle list.
That changed after we left that wine store. I had already had a few house reds that I had liked (in Rome, where we initially landed), but after that I decided to do…well, do as the Romans do. Or in this case, the Tuscans. And that was where the trip went from fun to life changing. Letting yourself fall into a culture and trying, at the very least, to order food the way they order it (if not immersing yourself in other ways) is a very different experience than trying to impose your historical patterns (whether with eating at a restaurant or with anything else) onto another culture. And in Tuscany, the experience is immensely better if you treat wine as they treat it: a delicious necessity, to be on the table at every meal. And if you’re drinking it at every meal, you better believe they aren’t paying more than ten or fifteen Euros per bottle.
While I haven’t personally experienced other European wine regions in France, Germany, Spain, etc., I have been told that the wine culture is similar. And that makes me very excited to have learned this valuable lesson so early in my travels. It is a lesson that can easily be applied to many other facets of life as well. If you go to a place where they are best known for seafood, why would you get anything else? If the locals have beautiful cloth that they use to make amazing scarves, why wouldn’t you buy a scarf? When in Rome, do as the Romans do isn’t just a cute phrase. It can be adapted into a way of life, and that way of life gives you deeper experiences and broadens your cultural horizons, something that all of us could use more of.
