I see with shock that a month has gone by since the last issue. Time has slithered past and I apologize. I recently talked with Donatella Cinelli Colombini, who makes Brunello in Montalcino. She is also president of the Movimento Turismo del Vino, an organization dedicated to helping promote qualified wine travel. The first battle, she says, was getting quality producers to open their cellars to the public; few did when they launched the movement in 1993, but by now most do. Not that one can simply drop in -- I did once and found a couple of guys welding the teeth back onto the shovel of an backhoe ("clearing rocks beats the hell out of machinery") while the vintner was elsewhere -- but if you call and make an appointment the chances are you will be received. And every year cellars open throughout the land for Cantine Aperte (Open Cellars), which is a nation-wide open house where you can taste the wines and meet the vintners. This year it will take place on Sunday May 28, and if you will be in Italy you should think about taking a drive out into the country.

Taking a greater interest in wine travel has other more far reaching effects however: Wineries discover that their reputations increase as people drive out to visit them, and they gain devoted customers too -- people like knowing who made the wines that grace their tables, and also spread the word to friends. Wine producing regions benefit; people who visit wineries take an interest in what else the territory has to offer, be it foodstuffs made according to local traditions, or handcrafts and other activities. Fine restaurants gain clientele, as do hotels, because many people decide to take weekend excursions. And some even like an area so much they buy into it, thus helping to shore up the local housing industry. The third and perhaps most profound effect of qualified wine travel is that locals are forced to take stock of and reacquaint themselves with their history and tradition, and then take steps to preserve it. Travelers will go to great lengths to drink a fine wine, sample an authentic cheese, purchase a traditionally glazed platter, or stay in an agriturismo where the kitchen table still has the nicks the contadina made when she was slicing prosciutto. They won't go to a prettified commercially produced rendition of all this. Nor will they be too enthusiastic about visiting a place that looks like a warehouse out on a hill; those who work in the country are being forced to take landscape preservation into account in planning their businesses, and we're all being spared some horrid eyesores as a result.

Alas, developing this sort of awareness takes time and requires a tremendous shift in mindset, not just on the part of the vintners, but also of local politicians, industrialists and labor leaders. The mayors of the Chianti region are doing their best to preserve and reclaim, whereas Alba (Piemonte), which has a beautiful medieval center, is surrounded by huge boxy buildings and new ones are being added, creating an ugly modern gauntlet one has to run to get from the heart of town to the wineries and castles in the surrounding hills. But people are beginning to complain there too, and we can hope that future developments will take aesthetics into account as well. They may even end up relandscaping.

Doing so will make excellent economic sense. This year wine travel generated about 1.5 billion dollars (3 thousand billion lire), and it's increasing at a rate of close to 10% per year; by 2005 it will have also generated about 10,000 new jobs. Not bad for something that all began from a glass of wine in a cellar!

Quite literally; Donatella Cinelli Colombini owes her belief in the importance of wine travel to when she was a teenager, and would greet customers who came to the family estate on weekends, when nobody lese was around. In addition to making wine and promoting wine tourism, she's an accomplished cook whose recipes have appeared in a number of cookbooks, including Aldo Santini's La Cucina Maremmana. She's recently published a delightful little book called Ricettario di Monte Oliveto e Trequanda [her estate] nelle Crete Senesi (Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, Via Giambologna 5, 50132 Firenze), one of those books that's great fun to read for the recipe backgrounds too.

For example, Collo di "Locio" Ripieno, Stuffed neck of "Locio."

"Loci," she writes, "are big white geese with very long necks. They used to be the terror of small children because they'd nip at their legs with their serrated beaks. Come threshing time they'd meet their demise. The Crete Senesi [the clayey badlands south of Siena] were and are the land of grain, where the threshing was a collective ritual in which everyone participated, following the threshing machine from farm to farm. Lunch and dinner were lavish affairs and the poor loci inevitably ended up in the pot.

"Today, the recipe is done with the necks of regular geese and chickens."

Ingredients:

• The neck of a locio or two chicken necks
• A medium-sized bunch of parsley
• A clove of garlic
• A chicken liver
• A handful of midolla di pane (bread, crust removed -- you'll nead bread that has firm crumb here, for example Tuscan bread)
• 1/2 cup broth
• An egg
• 2 tablespoons grated, well seasoned Tuscan pecorino
• Salt & pepper
• A carrot
• A stick celery
• Half an onion
• A clove

Begin by flaming the locio neck to remove pinfeathers and washing it, then bone it. Tie it off at the top, where the head was.

Mince the parsley, garlic, and chicken liver and put them in a bowl. Dip the bread in the broth, squeeze out the excess liquid, and add it to the bowl, together with the egg, and cheese. Season the stuffing to taste with salt and pepper, mix it well, and use it to stuff the neck, being carful not to tamp the filling down too hard lest the skin split as the neck cooks.

Tie it shut. Prepare the cooking broth by filling a pot with water and adding the vegetables, sticking the clove into the onion. Bring the pot to a boil, add the neck, and simmer it gently for about 40 minutes. It will be done when the juices run clear if you prick it with a skewer.

Remove the neck, let it cool, and cut it into rounds. Serve it with boiled baby potatoes seasoned with salsa verde (to make it mince parsley, capers, anchovies, and hard boiled eggs, then mix the mixture with olive oil and vinegar to taste to make the sauce).

The broth will work nicely as soup.

A printer-friendly version of this recipe.

A presto,
Kyle Phillips
Webweaver, About Italian Cuisine

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