There’s a special kind of confidence in arriving at a winery gate at 1:15 pm, glass-ready and smiling, and finding the whole estate has gone to lunch. Here in Italy, lunch is not negotiable. If you want to buy wine directly from Italian wineries, that’s lesson one. Lesson two is…
The first time you book a wine tasting in Italy, there are questions nobody seems to answer. Do you just walk in? How many wines are you actually going to get? Are you supposed to finish every glass, and do you have to buy a bottle afterward? What if you…
Sit down at a café in Piazza San Marco with the orchestra playing, and a single glass of wine can run you €20 or more, plus a €6 per person charge just for the music. Walk two streets back from the square, and locals are paying €2 to €4 for…
Most guides to this day trip start with the same assumption: you have a rental car waiting. You don’t. You’re in Venice. Nobody drives in Venice. Renting a car just to sit in it for a day, on roads full of hairpin turns, sounds like a strange way to spend…
Here’s a scene playing out at wineries across Italy most weekends now. You arrive, and the first thing that happens isn’t a pour, it’s a photo of the vineyard rows. Then a second photo, because the first one didn’t quite capture the sun drenched Tuscan mood you were chasing, even…
Two nights, two great wineries, Lake Iseo and plenty of Franciacorta. Here’s how I’d plan a wine weekend without turning it into a tasting marathon.
I’ve now written about four completely different ways to spend a wine vacation in the Veneto, and every single time, without fail, someone messages me asking the exact same thing. Okay, Kelly, but which one do I actually book? Fair. Genuinely fair. I’ve spent this entire series describing a castle,…
There’s a castle at the southern tip of Lake Garda that you can only reach on foot, across a drawbridge, over water on every side. Cars stop outside the gate. You walk in like everyone has for the last seven hundred years. The Scaligero Castle in Sirmione has stood since…
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
Manage your cookie preferences below:
Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.
These cookies are needed for adding comments on this website.
Google's current Sign in with Google client library. It renders the Google sign-in button, or the One Tap prompt, so visitors can log in to your site with their Google account. It replaces the older Google Sign-In platform library.
Service URL: policies.google.com (opens in a new window)
Google reCAPTCHA helps protect websites from spam and abuse by verifying user interactions through challenges.
Google Tag Manager simplifies the management of marketing tags on your website without code changes.
Statistics cookies collect information anonymously. This information helps us understand how visitors use our website.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyzes website traffic for informed marketing decisions.
Service URL: policies.google.com (opens in a new window)
Jetpack's built-in visitor analytics. It records page views, referring sites, search terms, and outbound link clicks, and also carries the shared visitor-tracking library used by Jetpack Instant Search and WooCommerce Analytics.
Service URL: automattic.com (opens in a new window)
Google reCAPTCHA helps protect websites from spam and abuse by verifying user interactions through challenges.
You can find more information about our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.