▷S1E12 The Raw Rush of Survival: Wine Tour Driving with Rose Thomas

On the road for Modo di Bere, Rose Thomas records the story of how she overcame her trepidation about driving in Italy and Spain and embraced the thrill of the wine tour driving that brings her such adventures as meeting mules at midnight on a mountaintop in the Sierra Nevadas. She shares the elements of winery tours, lessons learned when renting cars overseas, and how falling in love with wine is to fall in love with the landscape.

Ascolta in italiano / Listen in Italian

Towards the end, Rose Thomas shares the story behind the name "modo di bere," literally, way of drinking, a pun on the Italian word for a saying.

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Here are the wineries Rose Thomas mentions visiting in Andalucía:
Purulio
Los Cautivos
Bodega Cauzón
García de Verdevique
Barranco Oscuro
Alqueria de Morayma
F. Schatz

Maurizio Anfosso and Roberta Repaci drive down the mountainside from their winery and up the next mountain to tend their ancient vines in the Dolceacqua area of Liguria in Italy: Ka*Manciné

• Expand for auto-generated transcript. (Please excuse errors.)

  absolutely breathtaking, and lots of narrow tight squeezes through little towns on tiny roads, lots of really sharp turns, and really really steep long tunnels. I found actually that I get a little bit of a rush out of it. Welcome to Modo di Bere podcast about local drinks and local sayings. I'm your host, Rose Thomas Bannister. I'm recording this episode from Granada in southern Spain and this is a special episode of Modo di Bere. I'm on the road and I'm going to share some of my travel experiences. You might remember episode six where I shared some wine fair wisdom. This episode I'm going to be talking about wine tours. I am here in Spain visiting several different wineries around the areas of the Sierra Nevadas all within about two to two or three hours driving distance from Granada. There's a few different pockets of local wine that I find really really interesting. I'm also exploring the local drinks of the city of Granada. I'm also going to be in the other part of Andalusia, on the west side, where they make fortified wines in a number of different styles. And I'm going to be sharing a lot of information with listeners in the coming weeks. And I want to make sure that you know that it's not just the podcast for ModoDB. There's also a YouTube channel, also articles on the ModoDB website. There's also social media on Instagram. And all of this is unique educational content about local drinks and local sayings presented as much as possible in English and Italian and also a little bit in Spanish, especially after this adventure that I've been on. So stay tuned for all of that. If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel, for instance, if you haven't followed Mododibere on Instagram, it's all under Mododibere and we're on TikTok as well and on Facebook. And you can get on there and follow us. You can also go to the Modo di Bere website at mododberry .com. That's m -o -d -o -d -i -b -e -r -e .com. And sign up for the Modo di Bere newsletter. And I will be able to update you when I've published some of the videos and some of the interviews from this wine trip that I'm doing. But since I'm on the road today, I thought that I would share with you some adventures that I've been having specifically while driving in Italy and Spain on a wine tour. This is the story about why it was worth it to do something that scared me a little bit to have to access this adventure, to take the trouble, to find out how to do it. Most recently it was worth it here in the Sierra Nevadas. I wanted to give you a little list of the winemakers that I visited. I'm gonna be sharing more content about their work as soon as possible, but they are from the region of Guadix, about a two -hour drive to the slightly north east of the town of Granada, Purulio, Los Cartivos, and bodegas calzón. Those were the winemakers I visited in that little pocket of Andalucía. Then to the southeast of Granada I was able to visit in the Alpujadas, García de Verdevique, Barranco Oscuro, and Alquería de Moriama. I also went over to the southwest about two hours from Granada again as my hub on these adventures to a region outside of Malaga in the Sierras de Malaga and I visited there a wonderful biodynamic producer called F. Schatz, which is a German name but with a history that runs through southern Spain and into Germany and back into coming back around again to Italy, all to Wadi Jay, interesting story of his family. And I visited four winemakers in one day, which is a little ambitious. You've got to be really organized to make that work out. And we ended up having such a great time with the three prior winemakers. This was in the Guadix area around the town of Guadix. I ended up driving then down towards the Alpujadas, this was up into these beautiful steep mountains, these massive massive panoramas opening up at every turn. The curves and curves and curves as I as I twisted up the mountain, my suitcase sliding back and forth in the trunk, I ended up arriving kind of late at about 10 o 'clock. The sun had gone down and I was taking the final road up the mountain. It was a pretty nice paved road but small. No real guardrails and in the dark it was kind of physically intimidating to be in this space that was just winding. It reminded me of if you've ever played the video game Mario Kart about the rainbow road where there's just a road and nothing else, especially as this experience went on over time and it just seemed to be this endless mountain, so quiet, so dark, no other cars around, thank goodness, and I think I saw one car on that mountain. I slowly had this kind of transformative psychedelic driving experience made it to the top of the hill and visited this lovely family, Alberto the son, Antonio the father, winemakers from from many generations, highest elevation in Alpujara, I believe, who are making wine from really interesting indigenous grapes like Vihiriaga. Farming with mules, they're 130 year old vines. So cool. I didn't get to visit because it was very dark. The road changed into a dirt road and was very bumpy. I thought, "Oh my goodness, I'm really, really earning this. I was enjoying it because I've now come to the point where I actually find this to be quite thrilling. I enjoy these driving experiences." But yeah, we ended up meeting, it ended up tasted all their wines, spitting of course, which I just want to make sure it doesn't go without saying. If you're driving on a wine tour, oh my god, there's wine tours where you can take public transportation and get tipsy, and if you want to do your wine tours that way, you might not learn as much, but if you want to do that for a form of enjoyment, I don't judge you, but you must absolutely spit. Driving at these kinds of tours, of course. You can hear more about spitting and wine tasting in episode six. Now, what do I mean by a wine tour? There are different types of winery tours which are available to anybody who loves wine, you can go and visit the winery and taste the wines. There are a lot of small farmers all over the world who welcome visits from wine industry people but also from wine lovers. Some of them have places to stay but a lot of them will offer tours if you just get in touch. You don't have to be a sommelier, you don't have to be an importer. A lot of people really want to give tours of their winery and just to spread the word about what they do. And it's a very fun way to travel. I've really, really enjoyed it. Doing this kind of agricultural adventure, viticultural adventure, I should say. There are some different types of winery tours in places where wine tourism is a big thing. Places like Napa, California, the region of Andalusia in Pez, San Nicar de Guatemala, where they make those fortified wines known collectively by English speakers at least as sherry, but those places in Tuscany as well, you will sometimes have to pay to go on the winery tour. It's usually nothing crazy. Just covers the cost of the tour and the taste of the wines that you get. And so those are options, but a lot of times the benefit to the person, especially smaller farmers, in giving a tour is for spreading the word about their products and also you can buy some bottles of wine to take with you at the end of the tour. You might have to pay, you might not have to pay, some are more commercial, some are more casual, but usually whatever the wine tour there are three different elements. Sometimes you won't do all three, but the three elements are the winery tour. So you go into the winery, you see the barrels where they aged the wine, you see the vessels where they aged the wine. They talk to you about the process. If you're really lucky, they might let you taste some of the wine directly from the tank that's still in development, which is very educational and fun to do. You can just learn a lot and see where the wine is made. Then you'd usually proceed into the tasting room or sometimes if it's a small place you'll just swirl a glass while you're standing up in the air talking to this the small farmer and tasting their wines and they might have a little tiny table in there and it's just very casual and some people have a really beautiful tasting room where they can bring guests and in a scenic scenic setting to taste the wines and enjoy maybe some local snacks. Sometimes people give you snacks, sometimes they don't. The third element which you do sometimes is to visit the vineyards, which is really fun. I love visiting vineyards. I think it's so interesting. I love seeing the different types of grapes. I love seeing the different kinds of training systems of trellising the grapes and the different of rocks. I like to to touch those rocks and see what they're all about and to see the winemakers in their fields where really a lot of winemakers say that's where the wine is made. It's in the way that the grapes are grown before anything happens in the cellar. So a lot of times those will be kind of rough roads and so you'll you'll ride perhaps with the winemaker if it's not right by the winery and they'll take you with them to, you know, see the winery, you'll be in their car, they'll do their truck, their Jeep, whatever, and they'll drive you and show you a couple vineyards, maybe as they're driving by, and you'll usually get out, walk around a little bit, feel the air, see the vines, very fun, I love doing vineyard tours. Sometimes it's just a tour of the winery and a tasting that this whole thing kind of takes a lot of time. Some people don't really offer as much of it in your tour, but you will most likely at least taste the wine. So usually you'll do a winery tour and a tasting, but at least a tasting. So those are the elements of winery tour visits. A lot of you might know this already if that's a fun thing that you do is to visit wineries, but the reason that I'm talking about wine tours today, is I tend to take a wine tour in a more rural area with smaller farmers and try to visit several of them in one day. To do that, I was advised when I first started doing this in Italy and a little bit in Spain, that you have to rent a car. You have to rent a car and drive. And I think it's really fun in other countries to figure out public transportation. That makes me feel intrepid, but after my first winery visiting trip in Italy, I realized it's really true. While these winemakers find it worth it to give people tours, they really don't have time to come and pick you up from the bus station. We're talking about stuff that's usually in the country or in a really small town and would add an extra hour and winemakers are really busy. They're farmers, they're making wine, there's certain times of the year or two where it's really busy for them. So you really wanna just figure out how to pull up on time and drive yourself. I was hoping in some areas that I would be able to put the pieces together with taxis, but that's just too expensive in most cases. I've found in these two countries in Europe where I've done a lot of winery visits. So there you are. You're going to be, if you're not from Spain or Italy, driving around, renting a car in another country that's new to you. I have a little bit of advice for when you rent that car. I've had this happen a couple of times where they say, I don't know if it's because I'm an American and there's an assumption that I'll like big things or everybody thinks everybody likes big cars or maybe Because it's not as common to have automatic transmissions in Europe. There's a lot more manual transmissions. I haven't had trouble renting an automatic. It's usually been available to me in recent years. In the past I've heard that you really want to learn how to drive a stick. I would love to learn. I don't know how. It's been on my list for a while, partly for this reason. I haven't had any trouble running on an automatic, but I have had the experience where they where they say, "Oh, I'm gonna get you a great car. I'm gonna get you a nice car." You're jet lagged, you're picking up your car right after getting off the plane, usually from the airport, and I have forgotten to question what is meant by nice? I fill out all this paperwork, I finally get out and get my car and I see the car and I think, "Oh, nice meant big." Well, big is not what you want when you're driving in Italy in Spain because if you're visiting the kind of wineries that I tend to like to visit there can be some really narrow, really steep roads and even passageways through towns where you really have to squeeze through. It's pretty harrowing and sometimes almost nearly impossible. I've never actually gotten stuck. That's actually not true. There was one story where I turned around and went back that I'll tell you in a second. So try not to get a big car. Try to insist, tell them that you're going to be driving through some narrow tight areas and make sure that you end up with the model that you had in mind, even if you're feeling jet -legged. Make sure to remember to ask that question. I have ended up more than once with a bigger car than I really needed. And it's been more nerve racking than it needed to be. For instance, in the recent trip that I took to Veltalina in northern Italy in the Alps, right near the border with Switzerland, absolutely breathtaking and lots of narrow tight squeezes through little towns on tiny roads, lots of really sharp turns, and really really steep long tunnels, I found actually, that I get a little bit of a rush out of it. That's why this episode is called The Raw Rush of Survival. I have found that in some of these situations that I as an American driver who's new to these kinds of roads for the most part find really, really absurd and like kind of a test to be able to succeed in some of these tight squeeze situations, tight squeeze, tight turn situations. And I find this, this really big feeling of suspense. And then when I succeed to make it through without, you know, damage to the car, everybody gets through and everything's fine. I find this actual kind of burst of euphoria. And I, as companions who've traveled with me on wine, to her trips can attest. I find myself letting out a little chuckle of triumph. It's kind of a release of the tension and of the feeling of joy that I have of thinking, "Oh, I did it. I made it through. I made it around that corner. I made it around that hairpin turn. I made it around that little gap." So I have actually found, you know, if this sort of sounds intimidating to you, it certainly did to me as well, but I have actually found it really, really fun. So don't be scared, but be prepared. Another element that you're gonna wanna ask about before you ever get to the rental car that I have recently discovered after having gone to Europe and rented cars for this purpose for years, I just found out that you're actually supposed to in a lot of European countries having something called an international driving license. In addition to your regular license, will the rental car company tell you that this exists? No. You somehow just have to know about it. And when I recently figured this out, I came back and asked the rental car company and the woman who worked there said she herself had never heard of this and didn't know anything about it. It turns out that if you do get pulled over, Which of course you want to just try not to do but if you do get pulled over I learned in Spain It's this is a funny story, but I I found That they can charge you a 500 euro fine So so say you get a traffic ticket of some kind They'll add a 500 a 500 euro fee. I Found this astonishing that this would not become in knowledge. Maybe it's just not that often enforced, but I would not want to be in the position to take that risk. And it turns out that you just go to your AAA office, your local AAA office, you can also do this by mail. Within six months of your trip, you bring two passport photos and your U .S. driver's license. This is advice for American listeners. You pay $20, and then they give you this document, and then you're fine, and you're not going to have to pay 500 euros if something happens. And I now know this, so I'm sharing this knowledge in case other people don't know it. I didn't know it. It feels kind of wild that I didn't know. But there you go. If you're already traveling, it's kind of too late, because you have to send your mail -in request. You can also do the mail -in request. Do your mail -in request to this office in Florida and it might take five to seven weeks, so too bad. I guess you'll just have to be really, really, really careful, which of course you should be anyway, but who wants to take that risk? So there you go, fun fact that I just learned. I just learned it because I was visiting a winemaker late at night in Spain, which is wonderful. I love the night owl culture here. It's just fantastic. I feel like, you know, you can eat dinner, it could be midnight, you can still be eating dinner. It almost feels the afternoon doesn't turn into the evening when it gets dark, but maybe when it hits midnight, which I recently discovered, I was staying at a hotel really close to the last winery that I visited. It was pretty late. It was really dark, it was really quiet, and I just could not find the interest to this hotel. So I'm kind of driving back and forth slowly and trying to turn around. And there's some policemen there. They must have been incredibly bored in this quiet, sleepy place. And so they motioned me over and said, why are you driving like that? And I said, I'm really sorry, I'm lost. Could you help me find this thing? And they asked for my license. And then they asked for this international driving license, informed me of its existence, and said that they weren't going to give me a 500 euro fine. That was really nice to have not happen. And then they graciously showed me the entrance, the hard to find entrance in this dark place. And once I got into the hotel, right when I pulled up, the clock struck midnight, and the right billboard hotel sign on the road decided to be lit at midnight and I thought, "Oh, that would have been helpful." But it also kind of tickled me that, you know, it was like, "Oh, it's midnight, maybe we'll turn the light on." Because, you know, that's kind of when I start to think it's night because I like to stay up late. So everything was fine, but if this is helpful information to anybody, I want to make sure you know about it. But you can find out in your own country where you might be able to get this document just in case. I was going to tell you the story also about the time that I did have to turn all the way around. I was in Dulce Aqua where they make Dulce Aqua. Sorry I'm in Spain my seas changed. Dulce Aqua which is a region near the French border the Italian Riviera they make a wine called "Rossesse di Dolce Acqua" from the Rossesse grape. It's a light red. I think it's delightful. Maurizio Anfoso is the producer that I visited. I got to see a very old vineyard of his. He's just delightful. He suggested after this the steep mountain drive that we done to get to the vineyard to the winery that we visit the town of Apricale which someone else had recommended to us as well. It sounded really quite nice at the very top of this mountain. And, you know, they mentioned pretty casually, okay, it's a tight, it's a narrow road. And we said, okay, well, we've done some kind of interesting driving in Italy, it should be fine. So we, it was really a narrow road where two, it was not possible for two cars to pass. And of course, there's a drop off off the side of the mountain. So what happens? You come face to face with another car. And one of you, probably the person below, has to back down the mountain until there's a little area where you can pass. So it was just a little nerve wracking because the road was so tight. My husband was driving and trying to be kind of polite and he got a little too close to the wall. The other driver leapt out and said, "Hey, hey, you're gonna break your car, stop." And slowly directed us to slowly, slowly back down the hill. While this whole thing was happening, behind the other driver waiting, I have to say quite patiently and graciously, was an entire motorcycle club. So I love this thing in Italy where everybody runs around in a big long line of motorbikes. So there were, I don't know how many, wrapped all the way around the mountain. This motorcycle club, patiently waiting for this entire thing to happen, which felt like it took forever. It might have just been a few minutes, but it was at least like 10 minutes. At this point, we decided we would come back with a local or possibly a donkey and just, you know, forget it. So we didn't actually, we actually abandoned our plan to visit Apricoli in that day. I mean, it was a funny memory. Everything was fine. But, you know, that's the kind of situation that I found myself in. [Music] On this trip I have been driving in less narrow roads but very steep and very winding. in the Sierra Nevadas, in the mountains here, I have to tell you, I've just been really moved and feel very, very lucky that I get to see such breathtaking landscapes. There's so many things in wine that feel like a bonus. I never knew I was gonna become a geology nerd, for instance, this week just feeling so lucky as each new landscape, every bend that I would drive around, see a whole set of new colors, amazing shapes, incredible panoramic view after panoramic view. And I was thinking about this idea of getting to see these enjoyable landscapes as sort of a side effect of my wine career and my love of wine. And then it occurred to me that it's actually The point, to fall in love with the land, the wine is made from the land. And the wine, it was, everything's connected. Nothing is a side effect in wine. It's all interconnected. That's this concept of terroir and that's this concept of regionality that is really what's being expressed and explored in this podcast, both with language and with wine, which I think is all connected to so specifically the landscapes that I seem to get drawn to and before you think oh my gosh I'm never gonna do a wine tour if that's what's involved that sounds like a lot of work uh for people who aren't from Italy and Spain who aren't used to this kind of driving you don't have to go up this mountain side there's plenty of hilly a little just little hilly regions that you can visit while I had some tight kind of old town driving experiences and wish I had a smaller car in some towns in Italy, you can go to Tuscany, you can go to Piemonte, and it's just rolling hills, okay. It's nice big roads, usually rolling hills, pretty easy to navigate. But the thing that I find myself drawn to is something that in wine is sometimes referred to as heroic viticulture and these are wine regions where the wine is grown, the grapes are grown, straight up the mountain side and steep, steep terraces. It's very traditional, old tradition that people are keeping alive with an enormous amount of physical labor. Everything has to be worked by hand, but not just worked by hands, but on this really steep slope. The winemaker that I mentioned, Maurizio Hanfoso from Dolce Aqua, actually lives on one mountain side and every day when he visits his vineyards, he has to drive down the mountain and up the next mountain to tend to his vines. I figure that if all I have to deal with is a little bit of a rush when I squeeze through a tight space and manage not to scratch my rental car, that these people who devote their lives to making sure that this art of farming and these wines that we get to drink are not lost, not lost to history, all the effort and the work that and the danger that they endure to be able to continue this for the world, continue this culture for the world, the least I can do is go visit them plus I want to see it. I think it sounds cool. And In terms of what I said before, don't be scared. Be prepared. After seeing my husband who drove on, he did all the driving on our first Italian trip that we took together on our honeymoon. Actually, I spent my whole honeymoon in Italy not seeing a single museum. We just did an agricultural tour. It was a really, really fun way to travel. I was really nervous the first time that it was my turn to drive in I came here by myself and I was going to do some driving and I was quite nervous about it. The first day I had some more rental car drama. The car was small, thankfully, but was talking to me in French, which I don't speak. I was having trouble changing the settings. I was having trouble starting car, feeling very old, not understanding about it, not having a key. I live in New York City. I'm a Midwestern raised person who's done a ton of driving, including as a touring musician. I've done a lot of driving, I'm a good driver, but I was nervous about driving in Italy. It felt like every little thing went wrong, the car was out of washer fluid, the car was out of oil. I had to stop and buy those things in Italian and people didn't want to seem to, they kept passing the American off to the next mechanic and It took a lot longer than I thought I ended up having to get the washer fluid and the engine oil from the winemakers that I was visiting, which is great. They've got a lot of farm equipment there ready to help me out. I got through it, but their experience is like driving into the wrong toll gate because the signs are unfamiliar, not being able to figure out what to do or how to get to the right toll gate, hearing a crackly voice, speaking Italian in an inaudible fashion, coming through the speaker and trying to communicate with this inaudible voice until I finally break down, start crying and wail, no capito, until the arm of the toll gate goes up and just lets me through. Maybe I had to pay the whole fare at the end as if I'd driven the whole road but at least I was able to get through so thanks for raising the bar for me. So on that journey I was driving from Milan all the way to the region of Colio in northeastern Italy and Friuli which is on the Slovenian border and actually is a shared wine region cut in half by that border which is something I want to talk a lot more about on this podcast at some point soon. The interesting thing, and the reason I'm telling this story, is I wanted to tell you about the name of the podcast, Modo di Berre. You might not know that it is a pun, so Modo di Dire in Italian is the word for a saying, and it means way of saying. "Moto di bere" is my pun, my Italian pun, it means way of drinking. I hope to an Italian ear this phrase evokes a combination of these two topics, drinking, drinks, and sayings. The moment when I came up with this idea was on this long drive I had had this kind of test of my metal, as we would say, and, you know, just little things, just little things happened. Everything was fine, but it was still very stressful for me, and I was very nervous. When I was on the road and I realized I was going to get to my winemaker only a little bit late, I started to relax, the landscape really opened up and these beautiful Green Hills appeared and I, my body relaxed, I felt at ease, I felt that sense of accomplishment, that raw rush of survival. And at that moment, I knew I wanted to get into wine writing and wine education after my prior career, working in the wine business, largely in the Italian wine and business in New work for 10 years and previously in somewhat overlapping, I started in cocktails before that. So I'm hoping to talk a lot more about cocktails with this project as well. I'd worked in restaurants, I'd worked in retail, I'd worked for an importer. My favorite job in all of those fields was the times that I would get to do writing and particularly when I would get to interview the winemakers and really dig in and help to to find the words to share their stories. I was feeling like maybe I'll have a little blog. There are a lot of wine blogs out there. So why do we need another one? And what would my creative educational wine project look like? The way that I learned Italian, which I've talked about a little bit on this podcast, was through visiting with Italian wine producers, often on sales trips. So they would come and visit me when I was a sales rep. We would spend the whole day together and they would teach me, as I've explained, not just technically useful Italian like "where is the train station?" but these sayings from their local dialects. I became enchanted and fascinated and obsessed with how Italy has so many local dialects, sometimes mutually unintelligible from one town to the next. Everybody speaks Italian -Italian, but a lot of people still speak these local dialects and also share these really charming, really fun sayings in the local dialects and I was starting to make some connections as I was on this drive relaxing. I was thinking about how I'd been creating this of sayings in a different Italian dialects. Usually scribbled at the margins of my notebook, trying to commit them to memory, sharing them with people when I would meet people from that region. Oh, I know how to say this. And I realized suddenly that I could share that with people as well. Not just interview people, not just interview wine producers and wine people, but I could also talk about language. and I realized I had these two passions and that I could not just that I could bring them together because they were two things that I like and two things that I found interesting but because I do feel that they're connected I had this little flash of romantic inspiration that the local language could be considered or at least at least be compared to this thing that's called terroir, which is the expression of regionality, the communication of culture in one location where all the factors that go together, human and nature and a myriad of different factors come together in this glass of wine that could not taste like that if it was from anywhere else. And that's what's often referred to in wine with the French term terroir. I realized that I wanted to talk also about the terroir of language or about local language as part of the terroir and that the best way to talk about these things I discovered was through sayings, through sayings, proverbs, idiomatic phrases, slang, tongue twisters, greetings, that accents these kinds of little pieces of language. And I was finding the same kinds of stories about culture through these sayings as I was finding through the glass of wine. And I realized in one second, the moment when this idea was born, I said to myself out loud in the car, "Oh, it's called 'Moto de Barré.' This was March of 2022. I had come to Italy at that point with a business card that just said, "Writer, some will get." I was kind of planning my next move. And the person who had set up my visits for me after I'd handed him this business card at a dinner where we met, which is Federico Cleva, thank you Federico from Colio who invited me to come and visit the Colio region in Italy, the Berda region in Slovenia. He had told everyone. I was about to discover that I was a journalist and really I had been doing that kind of work for a lot of a long time and you know taking so many notes in my little notebook and I showed up with my little notebook to do my first interview, and the winemaker said, "Oh, Federico tells me you're a journalist." He didn't know that I had just decided to make that official ten minutes before in the car, but I said, "Yes, I am a journalist. Here's my notebook. Let's start the interview." And that was the beginning of the MotoDBerry project. I worked on it for a full year before the moment was possible to launch the project through the podcast, through articles that I'm writing on my blog, through the YouTube channel and through the social media accounts, all of these different unique pieces of content that tie together but are also unique. And I spent that entire year working on the infrastructure, doing wine trips, taking interviews and that I'm still processing and working on publishing for all of you to enjoy. And again, you don't have to be a wine professional to go and tour wineries. I'm not going to say that it doesn't open certain doors, maybe make some visits at places that really don't normally have visitors, but there are really so many options for people who are passionate about wine and taste these wines at the at the vineyard and at the winery. I have found it to just be a beautiful way to travel and again make that connection with the land. I just want to close by saying that of course there is more than one way to do this and I know in Italy for certain there are so many wonderful tour companies where they will make all the connections for for you, they will select wonderful wineries for you to visit in a range for transportation so you don't have to drive a single kilometer. You can also always take a friend or a colleague with you who like me has come to enjoy some more interesting driving experiences. I've found it to really be kind of a thrill. And at the end of the day, it opens the door. I just want to encourage anyone who is a little trepidatious like I was when I first started driving and now in Italy and now I love it. I think it's really, really fun. I think it's lovely and absurd and there's just wonderful places at the end of the road. I had such a wonderful experience the other night at Garcia del Valdivique with Alberto and Antonio, tasting these incredible wines, learning these stories about the land, and, you know, driving back down the mountain and seeing the wild boar across the road, those are experiences that I'll never forget. So if there's something in your life that you would love to do and just feels a little bit out of reach, it can just be a wonderful experience to just go for it and See what you can do. You don't know until you try. I Just have really had a lot of fun going on this kind of trip And I am going and finding things to come back and share with you wherever you go Whatever you like to drink always remember to enjoy your life and to never stop learning Follow MotoDBerry on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for even more unique and encouraging drinks and language content. If you'd love for the show to continue and grow, support MotoDBerry on Patreon and unlock bonus episodes. Find out more at MotoDBerry .com, where you can also read the blog. Music for the podcast was composed by Ercilia Prosperi and performed by the band Oh, you can purchase their recordings at oumusic .bandcamp .com.  

Music composed by Ersilia Prosperi for the band Ou: www.oumusic.bandcamp.com

Produced, recorded and edited by Rose Thomas Bannister

Audio assistance by Steve Silverstein