Sessions Italy tour 2013 - Montepulciano and Montelacino Day Two

April 8th, 2013

This morning we ate breakfast at our hotel and chatted with a nice couple from Philadelphia. We went to the city center to get a map and recommendations for where to go wine tasting. Our first stop was Del Ricco, very cool and old cellar with huge Croatian barrels! It was built right into the hillside.  

Then we left Montepulciano in our car and on our way to Montelacino, we went to the Sarceto winery.

Sarceto was at the bottom of the hill and had a great view looking up at the town. We were the only people at the winery so we had great service! We ordered the "typical Tuscan lunch"or "brunch Toscano". It consisted of amazing bread, a platter of salame di cinta senese, from Fontanelle, a pig farm Chianciano Treme, and delicious cheese from Pienza, a small town we drove through later that day.

Our first Tuscan town was everything I could have imagined and we couldn't wait to see where our next adventure would be. 

Pretty ribbons hung outside of the winery.

The next town we went to was Montelacino. Montelacino was very similar to Montepulciano, but not as interesting. We had scheduled a wine tasting at Bondi Santi winery before we left for our trip, so I was really excited to tour their famous facility, but it turned out that Mr. Bondi Santi who was in his 90's and still running the winery, passed away the week that we were there, so the winery was closed. We ended up going to a different winery called Carpazo. We got a private tour of the facility and tasted their delicious vintages. 

 Caparzo wine was featured in the movie Letters to Juliet.

By the end of the day we were actually getting tired of the Sangiovese wine that was at each winery and Montelacino was so similar to Montepulciano that we decided to keep driving to our next stop, a bigger town, Sienna!