Thursday 6 July 2023
This was definitely the relaxing and indulgent day we needed after all that hiking! Okay, it started a bit odd. Rather than stopping for breakfast in Val Gardena I decided we should get going and find breakfast along the way to Bolzano and the Adige valley… only to find that there are no villages bearing anything like a cafe or pasticcheria for more than an hour along the way. We ended up having coffee and croissant around 11ish in an odd little village overshadowed by the motorway flyover and a road junction.
Okay, so then we got into Alto Adige wine country proper. The Adige valley is a huge valley bounded by mountains. And here, a bit like Champagne, they have carpeted every hectare of suitable land in vineyards (apple orchards on the rest). They also have some big wineries with proper shops and tasting rooms, open all day. We tried Manincor and Tramin. The latter is pretty nifty: it’s in the village of Tramin which is where the grape variety Gewurtztraminer actually originated.
Hoping to find some smaller wineries tomorrow, we only bought a few bottles and then headed through the outskirts of Bolzano and up a rural mountain valley, up and up a winding mountain road through pine forests, up to the end of the road and “Terra – The Magic Place”. Don’t snigger, that is the actual name of this hotel & restaurant. A name that simply would never occur in England, being so sublimely over-confident and earnest.
Happily it really is a magic place! Our room has a wonderful woodsy scent and beautiful mountain views (we were startled by the robot lawnmower called Mortimer, who sneaked up on us while we were admiring the view from our private terrace). There’s a lovely Wellness Suite where we first melted ourselves in a sauna, including a hay room with a huge basket of hay that gives the sauna a wonderful… er… hay scent. Then we went up to soak in the penthouse jacuzzi with sweeping mountain views. Before going back to laze on a day bed, with the sound of a crackling fire and the scent of woodsmoke (coming from a special box that emanated the sound and scent without actually having any fire in it!).
Best of all was the umpteen-course Michelin-star meal in the restaurant. Far too many highlights to list and we went for the wine pairing which took us all around this region and the rest of Italy. Giselle, the sommelier and sister of the chef, was really friendly and (perhaps?) appreciated that we knew a bit about wine. She promised us some more recommendations for wine tasting. The whole meal felt very much part of the place, with lots of local ingredients and an abundant use of mountain herbs right through the menu. I can honestly say it was the best meal of our trip – and that’s not always true of the big expensive splash-out meal!
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