Degustazione di vini, danze e di polizia, oh my!

Wine tasting, dancing and police, oh my!

Cheers from Verona!

We went wine tasting tonight! It was phenomenal. We first went to the piazza and walked to the upstairs of a bar. When we got to the top it was a tiny room with tables set and wine glasses everywhere. There were meat and cheese platters and dishes of sundried tomatoes on the tables. It was here that we met Lisi.

The table of delicious goodness. Italian food and wine are amazing.

Lisi was our wine server and a student at the university in Verona. He speaks Albanian, Italian, Spanish and English. His English was quite good and let’s just say he wasn’t too hard on the eyes either. I’m still so impressed with people who are fluent in multiple languages. I am pretty decent at Spanish and have used it a lot to help me get by while I’ve been over here, but I could not imagine learning a third language.

Our new amico, Lisi

Richard, our American guide, told us about each wine we tasted, and taught us the proper wine tasting technique. I felt like a true Italiano as I swirled each glass and smelled the different fruity scents every wine had to offer. We had to then identify the fruit, nut or plant that was grown near the vineyard from which the wine came. Apparently wine will have scents of the crops grown near the grapes. Therefore, some of the wines had a hint of lemon, walnut, apple, etc. smells to them. It was interesting to learn that tid-bit.

After we used our sense of smell, we moved on to the sense of taste. We took a sip and tilted our heads back and forth so the wine could roll from the front of our tongue to the back. That way we could detect if it was a sweet wine (pleasing to the front taste buds) or a more mature, bitter wine (pleasing to the back taste buds). It was incredible to be able to tell the difference.

So we used the sense of smell and taste. Now onto the others—the sense of touch came from physically holding the wine glass in your hand. The sense of sight was being able to distinguish the colors of the wine (which depends on whether the skin of the grape was left on: red or peeled: white). Finally the sense of sound was the clinking of the glasses as you say, “Cheers!”

As we sipped our wines, we ate delicious lasagna. I don’t know how Italians keep their figures. My favorite wine was a really nice white wine known as “Soave” Gini. It’s named after a town here. Wonderful wine. Wonderful friends. Wonderful meal. Wonderful.

Chris, Jared, Natalie, Patrick and I after wine-tasting

After dinner we went down to the bar with our new friend Lisi and met his brother and friends. We finally got to meet Italians our own age. We all hung out, and Lisi’s brother and I salsa danced. Ha! It was great because since they knew Spanish, I could better communicate with them, and the language barrier almost disappeared. We were all having so much fun dancing and relaxing that we didn’t realize just how loud we were being…. until the polizia showed up. Apparently our group of 14 and our 5 new friends had caused a noise disturbance in the piazza and the polizia were called. No worries, no one got in trouble. The polizia didn’t even talk to us. It was such an incredible night. I am so happy to be here and so in awe of all the wonderful times I’m already experiencing.

...Ciao!