6th and final day in Tuscany. 😢 Our pick up time today was 10:15 for a visit to Montalcino, world famous for its Brunello wine and honey.  It’s about an hour drive and then we have just over an hour to wander around the medieval streets, do some shopping or grab a gelato.

Taken from the car so a bit blurry.

Another from the car

And one more. 

The fortress on top of the hill. Built in the 13th century. 

Beautiful Italian pottery 

Very narrow streets

Typical Tuscan scene

We arrive at Villa i Cipressi, just outside Montalcino, for a lesson in honey making and tasting of the famous Brunello wine.

Bee hives

This is Dario. If you watched Bobby & Giada go to Italy (food network) you might recognize him as one of the brothers who operate the farm they visited on the show. 

Tasting the grapes. Will be ready to harvest in another few days. 

Only Sangiovese grapes are used to make the brunello wine. 

The farm started to produce honey of various flavors about 30 years ago. Later in the nineties they began to plant vineyards and some olive trees. The farm now produces Brunello di Montalcino, Rosso di Montalcino, Grappa di Brunello, extra virgin olive oil and honey. Their passion for nature and a strong ecological mind has pushed them to use only the photovoltaic (solar) energy, and to produce only with the principles of organic agriculture.

Some of the equipment. 

Barrels storing the wine

The wine stays in the barrels for 3-4 years. 

Dario’s mother and a friend painted this painting which is used on their reserve wine label. 

You can see the label here. 

This beehive was sitting by our table. 

Our table for the wine tasting. 

Fresh vegetables from the garden

Spinach rice with rosemary and olive oil 

Chickens by the beehives

The honey we tasted. 

They have many varieties. 

Dario us showing us how they extract the honey from the honeycomb. 

They put the slats of honey in the stainless steel vat in the back and it spins, releasing the honey. 

Saying goodbye to the farm. 

Such a beautiful place

Loading up to head back to the inn

Unloading at the inn. We have about an hour and a half for the afternoon siesta. I spent the time doing all the online checks for our flight tomorrow. Ugh! But we’re finally cleared and checked in. 

Back at the birds nest for our last cooking lesson. 

The weather has changed and a storm seems to be blowing in so they’ve set us up in the dining room. We’ve also been given a little thank you gift. It’s a beeswax wrap and cutting wheel for pasta making. Another of the many special touches from Flo. 

We’re making pizza tonight and have placed our yeast in warm water with a touch of olive oil. 

Then it’s just a matter of mixing in the flour and kneading a bit. 

This dough has been out since this morning and is nicely risen and ready to go. 

Chef Oli has built a fire in the pizza oven and has been keeping it stoked so that the temperature is now almost 700 deg where the pizza will be placed. 

Demonstrating the process for shaping the dough. 

A choice of ingredients that we normally wouldn’t see in the states. 

Checking the oven temp

Chef Oli s pizza goes in. 

He made a traditional margherita pizza and it was, well I’ve run out of adjectives to describe the food, so what do you think? 😋

I’m up next. Nothing like being the first and having the whole group watch to see if you were listening 🥴. It’s a bit of a tricky move to twist the pizza around and onto the pizza peel but we all managed it just fine. 

And I got it on the plate without dropping it so well done me 🤣. 

Kim was last and you can see night has fallen by the time we have all made pizzas. 

He won the award for best pizza dough shape. 

There was also a really nice salad (there you go Jo Anne). 

And of course the meal wouldn’t be complete without a sweet, so here we have chef Oli’s homemade peach ice cream atop a bed of fruit salad (to make us feel better about eating the ice cream I suppose.) 🤣

Last night in Tuscany 

Internet has been really bad today (storm maybe?). So, here I sit at 3 am in the floor (only place I can get a signal) working on the blog. We had a 2.5 earthquake yesterday just after midnight. Then the thunderstorm last night. So interesting weather for our final day. It certainly didn’t hamper our activities or enjoyment though. 

We said goodbye to the group last night 😢 since we will be the first to leave today. We have a few connections to make (car, two trains and two planes) so praying all goes smoothly with all the COVID checks and such. 

I have so many pictures from our sojourn in Tuscany that I didn’t post, due to time and boring you, but I think you can see that this past week has definitely been the journey of a lifetime. 

If you’ve ever wanted to go on a food tour of Tuscany and learn how to make Italian food, this one is 5*. Flo and Oli are the most amazing hosts and make everything so fun. They have found incredible people, who are good stewards of the land and gifts with which they’ve been blessed. They continue to find new places to go and experience a part of Italy that most never see. “Cook.Eat.Discover” truly describes what they do. Here’s a link if you want to check them out:  https://www.cookeatdiscover.com

It’s now on to Greece, so for the last time, ciao!