Making Wine (And Friends) At AltaVita

“In Italy, we drink to eat. In other countries, they drink to get drunk,” says Alessandro, one of the founding brothers of Altavita winery, as he pours us each a glass of red wine to complement the perfectly prepared meal laid out in front of us on a warm afternoon at Rocca Malatestiana in Cesena, Italy.

While I enjoy the meal, wine, and conversation, the thing I’m most looking forward to is what comes next: going to the Altavita vineyard, learning to harvest the grapes, and watching the wine-making process.

When we arrived at the vineyard, Alessandro armed each of us with some grape clippers and a bucket before giving us some ground rules, sending us into the vineyards, and putting us to work. It was actually quite a bit of fun to find the perfect grape bunches on the vines and to harvest an entire row–filling bucket after bucket of grapes and then dumping them into the back of a tractor. Seeing our hard work in one jumbo pile felt really rewarding and satisfying.

After we were each covered in a sufficient amount of dirt and grape juice, we made our way back to the office to clean off and watch how the grapes were handled throughout the rest of the process—from being crushed to the fermentation process. Then the best part—tasting the final product.

To wrap up the day and end it in the most perfect way imaginable, Alessandro’s mother cooked and served us some delicious local dishes, including piadina (which may or may not be a new obsession for me), which was paired with a variety of different Altavita wines. The small group of us sat around the table chatting about wine, food, Italy, family, and, of course, blogging.

This post was a part of Buonvivere Blog Tour, organized by Settimana del Buonvivere in collaboration with 21grammy.