Eat Your Wine- Mangia Bevi

September is Wine month.

There have been festivals all month long. I don’t go to them all, but have been to them all. The harvest is starting, first the white wine grapes for white wine. They also harvest the grapes to be hung and dried to make the dessert wine Vin Santo. Then the red wine grapes, waiting as long as possible to build up the sugars in the grapes which then turn into alcohol in the wine.

My favorite passtime is watching the grapes ripen. Small tight green clusters start to get fat and slowly change color with the heat of the sun, veraison.
Each stage has a purpose and a recipe! When the grapes are still green, we make Agresto or Verjus.  When they turn ripe, I always make the schiacciata con l’uva .

 

Renzo Marinai

To taste the wines, you buy a tasting glass which comes with a “holder” and you can taste all the wines from all the producers. I think there were 27 wineries with at least 3 wine a piece. The Festival was for three days, so you can stretch out your tastings over the three days!

During the show, there is also a small market with local artists.

My friend Antonio, is standing in front of one of the large panels by Luca Carfagna. You will see this local artist’s work all over Chianti, sometimes like a tiny graffiti on a wall or the larger panels on canvas. He was hired to decorate outside of Dario’s butcher shop as well. Luca has a shop in Panzano and also an Etsy store online.

I also ran into an old friend, David Gardner. He began with restaurants in Florence and now has a fabulous hotel in Chianti and recently opened a small bisto and wine tasting room, which is the official enoteca for the local wineries. Great idea.

 

That saying ” A day without wine is like a day without sunshine” for Italians is so true.  Wine is an everyday part of most families lives. Until recently, wine was had at lunch and dinner as the liquid of choice. If you didn’t want to “drink” alot, you would add water to the wine to make it lighter, my husband calls this “Acquarello”.

Today I am sharing a classic ending to a meal with the family.

 

This is sort of a sangria for dessert, called Mangia e Bevi.
Fruit is the classic ending to a meal.

Slice the fruit into your wine glass, which in an Italian family is a tumbler often called a gottino.

Sprinkle the fruit with sugar to taste, this will also bring the juice out of the fruit.

Fill the glass with wine.

Sit and talk while the sugar is dissolving in the glass.

First you eat the fruit and then you drink the sweetened wine.

Often strawberries are in red wine, peaches in white wine.

I wonder if this is also where the Bellini cocktail came from, white peach puree in Prosecco.

A classic dessert is called Macedonia, and is all types of ripe fruit into tiny pieces and then sugar and wine added.

In a trattoria if you order ananas, pineapple, they may offer it with splashed with grappa.

Today we had a really nice Cabernet at lunch, but any table wine is fine.

The other really simple snack with wine, which I adore is to simply sprinkle a slice of a bread with sugar ( be generous) and then lightly pour wine on top! Pane e Vino..

Growing up I had bread with butter and cinnamon sugar. This is quite the kick.

If you are coming to Chianti, the area between Florence and Siena, don’t forget to download my free app. TASTE CHIANTI. Look for a Sagra, festival, mostly held on weekends. If they are serving food, often they start after lunch.