Montepulciano

It's a little over 3 hours drive from Rome to our home in Tuscany for the next week, and since we couldn't check in until after 4pm, we had time to stop along the way.  We decided to stop in Montepulciano, a hilltop town overlooking the Chianti region in southern Tuscany.  Yes that Chianti, a region known for its wine making.  Fortunately, the town wasn't crowded and we were able to leisurely stroll through the various narrow lanes, enjoying the stone buildings and fantastic views of the countryside.

Montepulciano is known for its Vino Nobile red wine, and we visited the Cantina Contucci to sample some of it.  The Contucci family has been making wine for over 1000 years -- 41 generations of the same family.  The coolest part of our visit was being able to visit the Contucci wine cellar and seeing the huge barrels of wine aging.  A lot of the tags on the labels indicated this particular batch of wine wouldn't be bottled until 2016.  

Because this is a hill town, the topography gets quite steep as you essentially travel switchback roads or up and down strategically placed staircases.  The wine cellar is cut into the hill beneath the building and you can tell its been used for hundreds of years.

Three of the four of us sampled the Vino Nobile (I'll let you guess who didn't) and all gave it two thumbs up.  There was a nice article in Wine Enthusiast from a few years ago that rated the wine very highly and noted it sold for $30 per bottle.  Here we can pick it up for less than $15.  Sounds like we may be stocking up for the week.

View of the Tuscan countryside from
the top of Montepulciano.