Bottles and bottles of wine, oh my!

Last week was quite entertaining and filled with sleep depravation. :-)

We started on Monday night going to a local vineyard with our favorite restaurant owners (the Rossi family). We were treated to a tour and a 5 course meal, complete with 5 different wines. 

I am trying very hard to hold true to my "more people in pictures" rules. I listen to you guys and amend my posts appropriately. :-) I welcome the feedback!

This is Kate, Lindsey, Lauren, Me, and Olivia (Olivia is an incredibly awesome girl from the UK, so you know I am super jealous of her accent!).

At the end of each row of grapes they have rose bushes. The rose bushes are not just for aesthetics, they actually serve a very neat purpose. Farmers use the roses to monitor the health of the grapes. Since roses are so delicate, they will react to things much more quickly than the grapevines will, so if a rose dies, or gets infected, they can either do something to protect the grapevines, or they can get rid of those vines so that disease does not spread! Smart Italians.

Here is the nice outdoor dining area. This picture does not do it justice. It's like a movie set, complete with twinkling lights overhead. This is not a restaurant, it is just the vineyard owners home. They do not typically have large parties, so this is just their porch.

Here are some of the photos of the area where they actually make the wine (these are for you Mr. Mann).

The bottles of wine pre-filling.

Vats o' wine. They were empty. :-(

This is the owner of the vineyard showing us how they fill, label and cork the bottles.

The wife of the owner painted these on the wall and...

the boar was turned into the label for their red.

Wine heaven! SO MUCH WINE!! :-)

Lindsey, Lauren and I with what we wish was a real bottle of wine. ;-)

And now for some photos of dinner: miso fritto! Translation... fried stuff. This fried stuff included: rosemary, sage leaves, onions, stuffed pepper, and a zucchini flower.

This is eggplant parmesan... AMAZING!!! Something worth noting, in Italy it is not breaded.

Starting at the top: wild boar sausage, beef and liver, beef, and potato. (yes, I sorta had to start eating beef... no I did not eat the liver. I am expanding my eating horizons, but not that far).

I took this for my uncle, but then realized that everyone would appreciate it. :-)

We ended up being at the Vineyard until 2am... and then we had to get home... and ready for bed... and in bed by 3am, only to wake up at 7am. It was TOTALLY worth it!

The next day we had a horrible storm!

This is my very unsuccessful attempt to show you the pebbles of hail that were hitting my windows. The worst thing about storms is that if they are really bad you have to close your windows, and that leads to things being very steamy in your apartment.

After the storm (on Tuesday) we went to Punto DiVino (which is the restaurant that coordinated our vineyard trip) for Catherine's dinner. I didn't get pictures at dinner, but I wanted to show you how pretty it was!

Ok, that's all for now. I must stop procrastinating and work on my presentation for tomorrow. I miss you all and will update you on our 4th of July party later! :-)

Ciao ciao (which I find to be less odd, now that I realize it literally means "bye bye")