Greve in Chianti

So I was in Tuscany at a wine bar listening to Wheatus. Yeah, I never thought I would begin any sentence that way either. We needed to get out of Florence for a bit so we took a trip out to the wine country to a place called Greve in Chianti. There is a tasting room there, and when we walked in they were playing some radio station that was playing some random music from the early 90's. That is one thing that we noticed about Italy, they always seemed to have American music on wherever we went, the 80's and early 90's were especially well represented.

Anyway, this tasting room has some reputation and it is well warranted. There are about 150 wines to taste and they are in a high tech tasting system. You can get a taste of wine by putting a card into the machine and then selecting what you want to drink.

There were several varieties of red, white, grappa, rose, and even olive oil and truffle oil you could taste. The wines are kept fresh by a system that pumps the air out of the bottles. You get a few sips of each wine, enough to taste it. Tastes are from about .80 to 8.00 for the expensive ones that cost upwards of $200 a bottle. This is much better in my opinion than going to a winery and getting a few tastes of each wine then feeling obliged to buy a bottle. We sat around and sipped on some wines we would never buy.

We didn't try the $200 a bottle ones, just because we couldn't get ourselves to spend 8 euro on a sip when we could try so many others. Our favorite was a Merlot/Pinot blend which we were like, yeah, this is really good, then we realized it was $45 US a bottle, hard to drink a bad wine when you are in that price range.

Anyway, this is a really novel idea in wine drinking, one that would really go over well anywhere it was implemented. Feeling good, we headed back to town, ready for our full on trip into the heart of Tuscany.