Tuscany is famous for its vineyards and wineries, with wine tasting tours being a very popular thing to do while in the area. The holiday park, Norcenni Girasole, organised weekly wine tours with a bus driver, travelling to all the nearby wineries in the area. However, neither Braino or myself are big fans of wine, so we were thrilled when we found a family friendly winery experience.
Palagina, a nearby winery that is also home to a restaurant, accommodation and event space, was holding their annual grape harvesting festival, where families could come out for the morning, help harvest grapes and learn about the wine making process.
This was such a fun, unique hands on learning experience for the whole family, it’ll definitely be remembers as one of the highlights of the trip. The girls loved being able to cut the grapes off the vines, taste them and then learn about how to squeeze the juice out with their own hands.
After about an hour of harvesting the grapes in the vineyard, we went down to the shed where we saw all the grapes that had been harvest get put into a machine that separated all the grapes from the stems and leaves. We were able to have a look at all the vats and all the other equipment used to make wine.
All the kids in the group were able to design their own winery labels, where they could then fill up a bottle of wine from a barrel, cork it and then stick the label on. We got just the one bottle and girls shared the task of designing the label.
Probably one of the most memorable parts of the day was chatting to another family in our group who were from Chicago and who were doing three months abroad in Italy. Their kids, 2 boys and a girl, were slightly older in age to our girls, their youngest daughter was probably Farley or Hallies age. They were incredibly chatty and it was great to discuss travel plans with a like minded family. But it was somewhat strange to just part ways without exchanging details or making plans to meet up again.
In an ironic turn of events, I drank some the wine for dinner, maybe only a glass and a half and woke to the next day with a shocking headache. I’m guessing the winery didn’t use their top quality wine in the bottles the harvest festival guests purchased for cheap.