Friday 30 June 2023
Breakfast for the second time at a pasticceria on the main square. I’m a bit addicted to the little buns here – the dough is a bit like hot-cross bun dough, but there’s no dried fruit and they are full of a tangy apricot marmalade.
Prosecco is grown in another set of Alpine foothills, further east than Soave. They’re extremely pretty hills, centred on Cartizze – a special hill about one kilometer square where the very best glera grapes grow. Glera is the grape variety used in Prosecco, another extremely local variety like the garganega used in Soave.
Our wine tasting in Prosecco followed the usual template amazingly well: starting with a big maker, then a friendly smaller producer that turned out very well, then a more exclusive recommendation that was excellent but expensive. These were: Ruggeri, Le Colture and Adami in that order. We definitely liked Le Colture the best; the wine maker who looked after us was friendly and full of interesting info, so of course we bought lots of her wine.
I can see that Prosecco can be a lot better than the bottomless brunch plonk back in England, but it’s never going to be among my favourite wines.
Unlike Soave, the small town at the centre of Prosecco – Valdobbiadene – isn’t exceptionally pretty or historic. We schlepped around it for all of fifteen minutes before settling on lunch at a friendly local osteria to fuel us for the afternoon’s wine tasting.
I must admit, I’m finding Google Maps invaluable for picking places to eat. We use it as a sort of safety filter: we can pick a random place to eat, but we want to make sure its review score is at least about 4.2 on Google. Nothing more fancy than that, and we certainly don’t slavishly aim for the highest review in the area. It just reduces the chance of having a yucky meal. And of course, in a quiet town like Valdobbiadene it helps you find the small handful of eateries and has a good go at identifying which are even open.
We drive back to Vicenza via Castelfranco – which looks like a good place to visit some other time – and spot the musk rats we first saw yesterday, still swimming about and browsing in the river in the middle of town.
For the first time in our whole trip, rain falls from the sky and the streets of Vicenza are wet. So are we, because it’s still raining when we head out for dinner. It’s a cucina tipica place, with a classic Italian friendly-bossy waiter, and the food is pretty good but nothing special.
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