I had been anticipating the roast pigeon as the bus pulled into Badia a Passignano, a hallowed wine estate in Tuscany that boasts a Michelin-star restaurant on the property. What I didn't expect was the bat.
Pigeon is a signature of Matia Barciulli, the Osteria di Passignano's chef. I'd led two busloads of Globe readers to the restaurant as part of a shore excursion during the recent Globe and Mail Mediterranean Odyssey cruise. We'd already had a week of sybaritic dining on the ship, so we were expecting a certain standard of gluttonous decadence.
Mr. Barciulli did not disappoint. In his hands the nuisance bird of every Italian piazza was a glory of tenderness, delicate and lean the way you expect a bird to be but with a depth of flavour and juiciness closer to sirloin. (Great eating and less piazza clutter - that's killing two birds with one stone if you ask me.) Served with a glass of earthy Tignanello 2006, it drew a chorus of raves.
But then any winged creature not resembling a bat would have been all right with us. We had just finished a tour of the Badia, a fourth-century monastery that sits on land owned by the Antinori family. While the Antinoris have access to the cellars for storage, the castle-like building, where Galileo once lived and taught math, remains in the hands of monks, a few of whom still live inside.
As our group filed into a stone cellar for export manager Stefano Leone's treatise on the influence of French oak on the sangiovese grape, the echolocating insectivore made its appearance, flapping about in the darkness overhead, in the process scaring the bejeezus out of us (okay, me).
To me the pigeon, the bat and the ghost of Galileo were vivid reminders of why it can be magical to visit a winery in Italy. My travel advice: If you want to see Italy's past, by all means line up at a museum, cathedral or ancient ruin; if you want to experience its living, breathing present and participate in its evolving culture, get out into the country and into a winery.
And if you just want to taste great food, stay the heck out of Florence. I remain weak-kneed over the first-course combination of our lunch at the Osteria di Passignano. It was a pecorino flan on balsamic-vinegar reduction paired with Antinori's Cervaro della Sala 2007. The wine is a chardonnay-grechetto blend from Umbria that has all the voluptuous flesh of a big California chardonnay but is usually better tuned than most similarly priced Californians - more lively acidity and less cloying oak and residual sugar. I pretended I was Galileo as I sipped. Fruit is the centre of gravity, I thought, oak is the Earth; oak should revolve around wine, not the other way around.
Two other Tuscan stops on our tours were as different as they were impressive, both located in the coastal zone of Bolgheri. Axel Heinz, the winemaker at Tenuta dell'Ornellaia, the secluded estate known for an eponymous $200 red, showed us his 2006 vintage. Exceptionally concentrated, it offered lots of fruit flavour in a solid, complex frame that suggested a bright future.
Down the road, the little-known estate of Michele Satta was so happy to see foreign visitors that sales manager Fabio Motta let us get up close and personal with the whirring buzz of the merlot crush. Most boutique producers of fine wine in California would have kept us a kilometre away.
Though fine wine can be synonymous with pretentiousness, somebody forgot to tell the people at Murgo, an estate on the lower slopes of Mount Etna in eastern Sicily. Etna is the largest active volcano in Europe, and its hardened-lava soil does wonders for wine grapes. We were invited to taste for ourselves - the incoming grape bunches, that is, not just the wine.
If your experience with grape eating is limited to the table varieties, you will have scant idea what a well-grown bunch of ripened merlot berries taste like. All skin and syrupy, sloppy juice, with very little pulp, it's so intensely sweet that you could almost climb a wall, Spider-Man style, with the thick film of sticky sugar left on your hands. The Murgo Etna Bianco, at about $13 in some provinces, is a dynamite value if you like crisp, minerally whites.
When our ship docked near Naples, I accompanied a small busload into the hills of the Campania region to drop in on what I believe are two of the greatest wineries of southern Italy: Mastroberardino and Feudi di San Gregorio.
Mastroberardino has long been a champion of previously unsung local grapes such as aglianico and fiano, now trendy in bars from New York to Vancouver. Its wines are available sporadically on shelves in this country. The flagship Radici Taurasi 2003 is $54.99 in British Columbia, while the killer crisp white Greco di Tufo is $29.99, available in small quantities. A new, high-end red called Mastroberardino Naturalis Historia Taurasi 2003 is available in Ontario for $65 as an online exclusive through Vintages ( http://www.vintagesshoponline.com).
It's emblematic of Italy's bred-in-the-bone belief that wine should be served only in the company of food that even when you're not formally dining at a winery, you often get antipasti to nibble away at. The affettati, or cold cuts, at Mastroberardino were probably the best pieces of cured pork flesh I'd ever eaten. The meat was sliced gossamer thin and arranged like petals of a giant flower. Origami salami, I thought.
Speaking of things Japanese, we then headed to the nearby town of Sorbo Serpico to a winery called Feudi di San Gregorio.
On the bus I had primed my tour group by mentioning the $25-million Japanese-designed structure that greets visitors with madrigal vocal recordings in what's billed as the longest barrel cellar in Italy. I had even conveyed how an Italian chef at the Art Institute of Chicago recently presented Barack and Michelle Obama with a bottle of falanghina from this very winery when they ate at the institute's celebrated new restaurant. But I had not prepared the group for Feudi's own restaurant.
This one, too, boasts a Michelin star. Chef Paolo Barrale applies "molecular-cuisine" conceits such as foams and gels to his food but in a deft, subtle way that respects the Italian compass and does not stray far from the seasonal imperative of Campania's bounty. Mussels in a cappuccino foam sound wretched, but they were sublime. Veal shank cooked for 19 hours at 70 F was a triumph of tenderness and depth of meaty flavour. Ricotta-stuffed tortelli on a cloud of foamed milk topped with truffle shavings is the plate you'll get when you order comfort food in Heaven.
And the wines? Unbelievable. Just ask the Obamas.