We’ve been so busy there just has not been time to post, for which we apologize to our faithful readers. After a wonderful trip to Germany visiting Lena’s family(more posts on that shortly) we returned to Siena and Italian language school.Our sister Jane and brother in law Jim, were thereand we had a wonderful time …
Author Archives: Karl M. Rice
Rennsteig day two
Perhaps concerned that Karl had not finished his dinner, and would falter on the Rennsteig, the hotel laid out a huge spread for breakfast.The owner of the hotel also ran the local bakery, so there were plenty of rolls and pastries. Properly fortified, we boarded our taxis and returned to Oberland am Rennsteig where we …
And we’re off again!
Sunday morning, our group met at the appointed hour and we set off on the Rennsteig, which runs right through Neuhaus, the town we were in.All 12 of us were in good spirits and looked forward to our adventure.Pretty soon, we came to a Rennsteig mile marker (kilometer marker?) showing that we had 51 Kilometers …
We meet our Rennsteig family
After taking three trains, we arrived in Neuhaus am Rennweg. The trains helped revive our image of Germany as highly efficient; we had two, ten minute layovers, each of which went like clockwork. The trains arrived exactly on time, and we just strolled over to the track the next train was on, which was printed …
Update – all is well
As we were standing on line at the hotel desk, waiting to speak to the clerk, a German man got on line behind us. When it was our turn, we explained to the clerk that we had to leave to catch our train and asked if he could call Lufthansa one more time. He made …
Stuck inside of Munich with them Memphis blues again
To paraphrase Bob Dylan! We’re headed to a rather remote part of Germany to begin the first hike of our trip. We caught a flight to Munich out of Florence on Lufthansa. Got to Munich, and waited at the luggage carousel. And waited. And waited. The high tech screen kept saying our flight’s luggage was …
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Passion . . .
. . . is the only word we can think of to describe how our next winery, Azienda Agricola Villa a Tolliaapproaches wine making. The winery is located in the ancient hamlet of Villa a Tolli which goes back to the pre Roman Etruscians. Villa a Tolli was once the commercial center of Montelcino. The …
A family winery
Our second winery on our Montalcino tour was to Azienda Agricola Cava d’Onicea small, family run, winerywhere we had lunch and tasted their wine. The owner’s family had been involved in wine making for years (his father was the cellar master at a winery), but he was the first to own a vineyard. They are …
Bonsai! Throwing money (and innovation) at winemaking.
The first winery we visited on our tour was Podere le Ripi, which is owned by Francesco Illy, the oldest male in the third generation of the Illy coffee dynasty. I don’t know what Francesco is worth, but IllyCaffé S.p.A. grosses something like $460 million a year. At any rate, he seems to have thrown …
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Advanced studies: Montalcino Reds
Wanting to continue our studies of Tuscan culture, we booked a tour of the Montalcino district, which included three wineries. We’ll cover the town of Montalcino and each winery in a separate post. There were eight of us in the van, four Californians and two New Yorkers, one a native of India and the other …
ITALY, GERMANY, AND MORE! 