Every Day in Tuscany (17 page)

C
ROSTATA DI
M
ORE DI
I
VAN
Ivan’s Blackberry Crostata

We once wondered why you see so many jars of fruit preserves in Italy, a country, unlike England, that doesn’t have a toast-and-jam breakfast culture. We soon found out. The contents of the jars—apricot, blackberry, raspberry, quince, fig, and plum—are for the famous and ubiquitous
crostata
.

Ivan—pronounced E-vahn—and his mother, Domenica, make the most wonderful
crostate
, the default dessert of Tuscany. They gather wild blackberries in early September and Domenica makes the jam. We serve their fig jams with cheeses and their quince with roasts. Like the jars of tomatoes lining their pantry, the jams seem to contain summer. Grab a jar and roll out the pastry—there’s Sunday dessert.

Serves 8

1½ cups flour

3 eggs (2 egg yolks and 1 whole)

10 tablespoons sugar

10 tablespoons butter, at room temperature

Grated zest of 1 lemon

½ glass red wine

¼ teaspoon salt

2 cups blackberry jam

Mound the flour on a
spianatoia
, a pastry board. Make a well, and put the eggs in the center, along with the sugar. Start to work the mixture with your fingers or a fork, then add the small pieces of soft butter, the lemon zest, the wine, and salt, blending everything. Roll the pastry in a ball and allow to rest, covered with a cloth, for about an hour.

While the pastry is resting, butter and flour a baking dish and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Roll out ¾ of the pastry and fit it into the dish. Spread the blackberry jam on the pastry, then roll out the rest of the pastry, cut it into ½-inch strips, and make a lattice over the jam. Bake for 30 minutes. The pastry will look toasty.

Vine Yard

IN PIAZZA SIGNORELLI, ED PAUSES ONLY LONG
enough to signal Marco that we’ve arrived. Melva and I are in the backseat like good wives, but really it’s because Jim and Ed both get carsick unless they’re in the front seat. Marco and two expats lead the way out of town and onto Marco’s secret back road to the Brunello countryside.

A benefit of being friends
and
good wine customers of Marco is that he invites us to vineyards for lunch and tastings with winemakers. Today, we are going to Fonterutoli in Montalcino with a few other Americans and the Pantes, good San Francisco friends who have a home here and entertain magnificently with the best of Tuscan wines. I’m always telling Melva that she should write a tabletop book. Her flowers and china perfectly set the mood for dinners overlooking olive groves and the silhouette of Cortona. I would just as soon admire her arrangements of white hydrangeas, roses, and lilies, as devour whatever delectable dinner she has prepared.

As we wind downhill and across the valley, I remember another friend’s wine-tasting trip with Marco. Secondo, a Tampa friend who has an apartment in Cortona, was with a larger group, going to two vineyards in a small bus. After the first stop, five wines, and a long boozy buffet of Tuscan specialties, the eight or so imbibers boarded the bus again, heading for the next stop. An Italian man sitting behind a proper English woman became ill and had a spasm of projectile vomiting that quite covered the blond chignon in front of him. Bus stopped, bottled water was thrown over all, Kleenex appeared from handbags, windows were opened. An American, also vomit-spattered on his polo shirt, stepped out of the bus, facing traffic, and moaned, “Kill me now.”

As the bus pulled off, the mortified Italian man fell asleep, but he roused at the next stop and proceeded with the tasting, while the English woman retired to the bathroom to sop her blouse and hair. The vineyard owner graciously served an elaborate lunch.

Secondo, telling this story, kept bending over with laughter as it got worse. Reboarding the bus, the Italian man in his stylish Armani sport coat and pressed pants, along with his wife, sat in back. Everyone was stunned with the heat, the lunch, and the curvy road. Not far into the trip home, Secondo and the others heard a tremendous barf, and the bus filled with the sour smell. When Secondo saw a stream of vomit running down the aisle, he lifted his feet. Everyone on the bus was groaning, leaning out the windows, shouting “For Christ’s sake,” or laughing. Secondo shouted out, “I’m so glad that at least he’s not an American!” Back at the parking lot, the Italian man looked at no one from behind his sunglasses as he stepped down, balled up his Armani jacket, and threw it in a ditch. Secondo said at that moment he never wanted another glass of wine in his life.

And these trips are usually so sedate. We will try to be sedate.

F
ONTERUTOLI PRODUCES A
million bottles of wine a year. “That’s gigunta,” I remark, but Ed shrugs. We usually seek the smaller vineyards for the sense of discovery that comes from a
vellutato
, velvety, Nero d’Avola syrah from Sicily, or even the homemade wine from the shepherd down the road.

“It’s only one bottle a year for a million people. One bottle,” he says. “That doesn’t seem like so much.”

Fonterutoli turns out to be not just a vineyard but a pale stone
borgo
, completely owned by the Mazzei family and inhabited by employees. We meet the Marchesi Mazzei, a slim man in a mustard-colored suit who welcomes us, then turns us over to Silvio Ariani, who looks as though he could be mounting a horse or pulling the crossbow in a Piero della Francesca painting. He takes us on a tour of the
borgo
, into the courtyard of the family villa (I would love to see the inside), into old cellars and into the family wine library, where all the vintages are stored for their own celebrations. We meander downhill to the shockingly modern facility where the wine is now made. En route, Silvio shows us how the vines are planted close together. I love it that he pronounces
vineyard
“vine yard.” “If they are close, the plants sense each other,” he tells us. “They go deeper instead of spreading out close to the surface. That’s better—in drought they reach water; in time of much rain, they are not soaked.” As metaphor and philosophy, this sets me reeling. They let the weeds and wildflowers flourish in the aisles, which helps force the vines downward for their nutrients.

In an association test, in response to the word
landscape
, this quintessential Tuscan vineyard would always come to mind for me—undulating hills, the cross-hatched patterns of planting juxtaposed from one field to another, a distant hill fringed with cypress trees, and a clean sky skittered with clouds. The day is unsurpassable, especially after weeks of continuous rain.

Seen one, seen them all, or so I thought, of damp stone cellars full of oak barrels. But this super-techno facility fascinates everyone. What I took for lights in the vast courtyard actually are openings for crushed grapes to fall through big tubes into stainless steel vats on the subterranean floor below. This immediate transfer keeps the just-crushed grapes from getting “stressed.”

Silvio explains that the skins are used to make grappa. “What’s left,” he says, “goes off to pharmaceutical companies to make alcohol.” Ah, so that’s why Italian rubbing alcohol is pink. The flat cone-shaped vats look like gigantic medical equipment or, as Melva says, “That thing that left Apollo when they walked on the moon.” In the warehouse-sized room of small barrels where “we sleep the wine,” I feel as though I’m inside an immense tomb where strange burial rites were practiced. The floor frequently is doused with water to keep the humidity at around 70 percent. One wall of exposed rock weeps water constantly. In three years, little calcium stalactites have formed, prompting Silvio to remark, “See, wine is better for you to drink than water.”

T
HE COOLLY MINIMALIST
tasting room allows all our attention to go to the wine and to the view of the distant Chianti hills. It’s noon. Silvio pours first their Serrata, a light-hearted rosé that catapults me to a long-ago picnic in the South of France. Sometimes as my lips are just wet with wine, a flood of images overtakes my mind just as the taste of the wine overtakes my mouth. So that now as I’m given the lissome, faintly flowery wine and the expansive view of distant Siena, I simultaneously receive a rough, shell-crusted Bandol beach, sausages and baguette, salt wind and the Englishman’s sweater with his aroma of sandalwood around my shoulders. Rosé in a paper cup. A memory more distant than Siena. Then Silvio tells us that the rosé is made in their Maremma vineyards near the Tuscan coast. Running through the wine must be refractions of Mediterranean light, mysteriously acting on memory.

The blond Englishman with the mesmerizing lips disappears as we try the big-mouthed, juicy Tenuta Belguardo, the Zisola made from mostly Nero d’Avola in Sicily, and the Castello di Fonterutoli, made from Sangiovese grapes with a hit of cabernet. Here’s the
vino dei sassi
, rock wine of the local hills, fruit-basket rich with a potent balance of mineral.

Downhill in the
enoteca
, the chef serves ten or so antipasti—not the usual prosciutto and
crostini
, but instead, chickpeas with lemon peel, chopped radicchio with cubes of pecorino, bruschetta with arugula pesto, rice salad with chopped vegetables, a platter of fennel topped with local salami with fennel seeds echoing the taste. No pasta, which would cause imminent collapse.

As the Siepe wine is poured, platters of chicken and rabbit with roasted potatoes circulate around the table. Fonterutoli’s top wine, Siepe, comes from their lower hills, a Sangiovese with a judicious dollop of merlot. Best for last—but, really, others to me were just as fine. Or maybe after so much sun, food, and wine, we’ve all just mellowed into total enthusiasm.

F
ORTUNATELY, ON THE
road back to Cortona, we all feel terrific. Sedate, we were, but a thousand images and tastes whirl through my brain all the way home. We’ve arranged to meet Silvio in Florence at a restaurant we both admire. A new friend, new tastes, a memory of toast-colored stone houses where people have poured out a daily wine for five hundred years. Secondo should have been with us rather than on the bus.