The Veneto region is home to Rob’s favorite wine – Amarone. This style of wine requires that you dry the grapes before pressing. The result is usually pretty intense but very flavorful. The perfect area to spend the last two days of his birthday trip!
First, we had to get there, we were still a bit north. After the hotel, we headed over to Trento before leaving that region completely. Almost as soon as we got out of the car, we found ourselves on the grounds of Castello del Buonconsiglio. It was still early in the morning and we had the place to ourselves!
Then we wandered around town, stopping at a “knife” store that’s been around since 1850 and has over 6,500 products (mostly knives and slicers – Rob was drooling over the Berkel slicers but no room in the car on this trip!). We enjoyed wandering around the shops and piazza’s.
Then it was time for lunch. We’d watched a video about Christmas markets in Italy since later this year both Bolzano and Trento are on our list to head to for the markets! In that video, they highlighted a common Trento dish – tortel di patate. For the markets the served it folded like a taco so you could eat it more like street food. But we found that its normally served open face like a sandwich. Basically its a large hash brown with stuff on top… And they were well worth the trip! Rob got his topped with pastrami (the house made specialty of Tastiko) while mine was topped with caramelized onions, cheese and prosciutto. Yeah they were fantastic. Rob wants me to learn to make them, I think we’ll just pop back up to Trento and have them again!
Now we’re finally into Veneto which means we’re overdue for a stop for wine! Our first stop was a fairly good sized producer but family owned called Brunelli. While there I definitely found some bottles that would be big enough for any occasion (I think maybe even too big for us which says something)! You could get bottles in the standard 750 ml or… 1.5 L, 3 L up to 5L!
We had such a great time at Brunelli we decided to make one more stop before going to the hotel. This was an even smaller winery called FlaTio. Our guide was the daughter/granddaughter of the founder depending on how you count their origin. The grandfather planted most of the grapes but largely was making wine for the family and only really selling a little. Her father expanded their acreage and really started selling to the public. The first two bottles of our tasting were clear dedications to her mother and her favorite types of wines (the daily drinking type) while they honored their father later in the series with the riserva Amarone!
It was still fairly early in the day but we decided to head back to our new hotel that would be our home for the next two nights. We were early enough to get to spend a couple of hours in the outdoor pool and laying out before we cleaned up for happy hour and dinner. The hotel was beautiful and had both an outdoor pool and indoor lap pools and mineral pools (with jets like a hot tub you could activate for specific area massages in the mineral water). Definitely where we’ll stay when we go back to the Verona area!
Our hotel (Villa Quaranta) is owned by the same family who owned the next winery we visited (shout out to our financial advisor for the tip!) The Tommasi family is a very large umbrella, they own multiple wineries in different regions in addition to the one we visited. At this facility they actually have the worlds largest wine barrel – its ENORMOUS (I think you’ll spot it in the pics but it has the sign on it). They have a beautiful facility and amazing wine! They even filmed scenes from a Netflix movie “Love at the Villa” there. We’re going to watch it just to check out the views! What was supposed to be a 3 wine tasting turned into a 3 hour visit!
For our last stop we went to another smaller family winery – Speri. Another great stop. Fantastic wine, lovely staff – everything you’d want from a wine tasting! Their tasting even ended with grappa and whiskey! They’re making the grappa but the whiskey was made by a distiller aging in their used wine barrels!
All in all a great week! We got to explore a region we really hadn’t been to and then continue to explore one of our favorite wine regions around Verona. Good first birthday trip! See how we end this trip in part 2!
