Give Us This Day

Day One of our Food & Wine tour, the first of three weeklong tours over then next five weeks, started as many do. With lunch at Simone’s le Delizie del Borgo restaurant in Bevagna. Under light gray skies we reacquainted ourselves with our native Umbria, the indecisive fall weather not sure whether to break open into glorious sunshine, or to wrap us in cool, gray melancholy. But outdoors on Simone’s small terrazza, shared with a beautiful young Italian family and their two equally beautiful twin baby daughters, and only a few paces away from the newly opened restored Roman baths, melancholy was out of the question. Despite being bone tired from weeks of hard work, too much travel and too little sleep, exacerbated by the long flight, it was impossible to be anything but content. We were back home in Umbria, eating and laughing with Simone, warmed by the sun in a piazza where we have had our share of good times.

And so it begins again.

The adventures of this next week, with its scripted and ambitiously full itinerary, will be many. But the scheduled events – the truffle hunting, the winery visits, the harvest time activities – will be as they always are. Opportunities to learn, to experience, to enjoy. But also excuses to connect, to get lost and to stumble upon something truly unexpected.

Such was our first detour, as we headed to the Cantina Dionigi after lunch, for an afternoon of wine tasting from one of Montefalco’s better producers. We have visited Dionigi many times before, their family run winery occupying a hill above the Val d’Umbria with spectacular views of Assisi and Spello below. The basement tasting room, manned by Sesto, the patriarch, and his sons Roberto and Pierluigi is always a lively scene, with locals coming to fill their jugs from great hoses, Sesto siphoning table wine from large stainless vats, bent over on the floor, sucking at the hose and spitting out the first bits before filling the jugs with gushes of red liquid. And here in the cantina the Dionigis have ingeniously converted some of the larger wooden barrels, or botte, into private tasting rooms, complete with table and benches.

But before arriving at the cantina, we make a quick detour, to the small, well kept building along the road to the cantina, a building marked “Granarium.” Here, about a year ago, a local family opened an artisinal flour mill, raising local grain and milling whole wheat flour to make bread and other confections. It is the sort of back to nature enterprise one sees all over Italy these days, in a country where they never really got so far away from nature in the first place and it is motivated additionally by a desire to abide by zero kilometri. Wheat is grown in the fields around the mill and processed after arriving by hand. Talk about your carbonless footprint.

It is Sunday, and Granarium is closed, but when we peer into the windows the owners, who live next door, emerge from their home and open up the mill and shop for us to see. A half hour later, after having taken us on a tour of discovery, having explored the mystery that sees a stalk of grain end up as a warm loaf of bread we say our goodbyes, with a couple of sacks of flour in tow, ready to similarly explore the mysteries of wine with Sesto and Roberto.