I am one lucky woman!
Besides being able to call Florence home, having a fabulous husband and teaching cooking in one of the best food centers of the world; now my friend Stefano and his sister Patrizia have opened a Vino Sfuso shop on my street.
BYOB has a new meaning in Florence.
Bring your own bottle and fill it up with fabulous wines at a fraction of the cost of bottled bottles.
Vino Sfuso, or bulk wine, is how locals used do buy wine when I first moved to Florence over 20 years ago. One would load up the car with a 50 liter demijohn and head out on a quest. Find a wine producing farm that sells their wine in bulk. By buying in bulk, you aren’t paying for the bottles, labels, cork and advertising it takes to sell wine with distributors and save all that money!
Local wine, meant to be drunk the year it is made, runs under 2 Euro a liter.
When wine is cheaper than a Coke.. I know I have found home.
an old Tuscan saying:
Bread of the day
Wine of the year
with friends of a lifetime
Stefano Poggesi was born on Via Taddea and his family has had the Civaiolo shop there in what was the stables of the Ginori family villa, forever.
Some of my favorite house treasures have come from their shop when they were cleaning out the storerooms. Old clay foot-warmers; pots where coal was put and then a wire cover was slipped over the handle to create a resting place for your feet; fabulous straw shopping baskets for the market, all my wooden spoons for the kitchen as well as dried herbs, spices and cooking pots, both in clay and in aluminum not to mention a vast assortment of dried beans and rice which are essential to the Mediterranean diet. Need seeds, he has those too!
Now he as taken over a shop across the street and opened a Vino Sfuso shop.
Now the trend is back, but no going to the countryside, lugging huge demijohns up and down the stairs to your apartment in Florence. Vino sfuso is sold by the liter or by the bottle right here downtown Florence. There are several shops around town now.
The fun part of getting the wine with the demijohns was filling the bottles.
My husband Andrea and I had our rituals and we always ended up rolling on the floor, having drunk too much wine in the filling process, making sure the bottles were filled evenly.
But that is another story.
If you don’t have your own bottles Stefano sells 750ml bottles, liter bottles, 5 liter jugs to fill or even wine in the box!
He also carries some nice Chianti gadgets from my friend Oreste’s shop in Greve.
A selection of wines are available so let the party begin!
Di Vino
Via Taddea, 8
Next door to the Botticelli hotel
Hello, I am an IACP member taking my 9 year old daughter on a trip to Italy with one night in Florence, and three in the Cinque Terre, we will also spend three nights in Paris…any places we should stop to eat or other IACPers we should meet? Thank you!
email me!
get uot your IACP book…there are lots of us around!
I have a dining guide for FLorencea and Chianti on my site
https://www.divinacucina.com
Hallo Judy, What a surprise to see a familiar face here!
Stefano’s “civaiolo” shop is one of my regular stops for herbs, spices and beans and seeds (and…) when work leaves me some spare time to wander around San Lorenzo. Once I even made christmas baskets with his counless varieties of beans and rices and lentils. I’ll sure try the wine shop, next time!
Oh, and by the way, did you know that here in Florence, the fun and inebriating process of transferring wine from the demijohns to the bottles is called “trombare il vino”? You nasty Florentine, you!