As a wine holiday, the Burgundian-Florentine axis is a tasting, buying and educational success

And finally, to the wine.

If there's one element that tied this whole trip together, that was it.  From Chablis to Chianti, Maconnais to Montepulciano, Cote d'Or to SuperTuscans.  We built sightseeing days around it.  We chose restaurants as much for the wine lists as the menus.  We drove, lured by the idea of filling the boot in order to fill the cellar at home.  We may have dipped into high culture in Italy, sunk into the luxurious chateau in France, but what we'll no doubt remember (and drink) in years to come is the oenological adventures.

Some general observations.

The Italians don't have the marketing savvy, or sophistication, of the French.  Granted, the French pretty much invented both the concept of terroir and the idea of essentially trademarking region-specific food and wine.  But the Italians taught them how to make the wine in the first place.  You'd think the Italians would be better at wine tourism.  Sadly, they have a long way to go.  Expect better tasting venues in France, and a far better ability of hosts to take you through flavours, varieties, growing techniques, etc.  We should have done more research in advance of the Tuscan leg, and picked out specific winemakers in the Chianti hills to visit.

You're more likely to discover inexpensive gems in Italy.  Precisely because it's less sophisticated.  The French have their hierarchy of Grand Cru, Premiere Cru, Village, etc.  In Burgundy, certain fields have carried these labels for more than a century and you know exactly what you're going to get.  The Italians have something somewhat similar, in DOCG, DOC and IGT.  Problem is, these labels seem to be given out liberally and they're not dependable.  We had some deeply average DOCG (supposedly the best) while the finest wine we had in Italy ... Bombereto, from La Rampa di Fugnano; a delectable, robust yet mellow red from near San Gimignano ... was just an IGT.  That's the equivalent of a French village wine and, in theory, not that special.  And yet, it's the regret of our trip that we didn't bring a case of this home, as it's unavailable in the UK.  Going to pass along details to our regular wine shop and see what they can do.

Drink with dinner for less in Tuscany, but with more sophistication in Burgundy.  It pains me to say this, as I was raised from the womb to believe that Italian food is the best in the world.  But I have to admit, they just don't get food and wine matching the way the French do.  Only in one restaurant (Dorando in San Gimignano) did we encounter any serious consideration of the pairings.  Whereas most Burgundian restaurants were obsessive about it, and served up wines of sophistication and complexity that enhanced the meal.  The Italians seem to be more limited to "these are nice reds", and "these are nice whites".  The flip side to this is that the Italian restaurant wines were generally half the price of the French, or less.  Agreeable, gluggable, wonderful wines that might not have been memorable, but were perfectly good and moderately-priced companions to good food.

The result of all of this?  We probably drank more in Italy, but bought more in France.  If you want to do some tasting yourself, here are our highlights.

BEST PLACES TO TASTE AND LEARN
La Cave du Connaisseur, Chablis - Chablis is a ghost town on Mondays, with most restaurants and caves closed.  We could have stopped into the omnipresent William Fevre, where I'd tasted on my last trip, but we were hoping for something smaller and lesser known.  On a hunch, we ducked down steps into the stone cellars of La Cave du Connaisseur, and struck gold.  Yes, the wine is good.  And, like any place in Burgundy, you can experience the miracle of terroir here.  Inevitably, you're tasting over a map, so you can see the precise field the grapes in the bottle came from.  Then compare the bottle made from the grapes over the road, or down the hill.  And yes, they're different.  But our real luck here was with Rachel, the manager of the cave who grew up in San Francisco, so can take you through the full range in glorious English detail.  Because tasting is good.  But tasting with someone who can explain the details, discuss flavours, recommend what to drink now and what to lay down ... that's magic.  We bought a mixed case of premier crus that need to lay down for two to five years to be their best.

L'Imaginarium, Nuits-Saint-Georges - Back in Beaune, we'd bought the combo ticket for both the

hospital and the wine museum.  The latter is a bit sad.  The highlight isn't the collection, but the fact that it's housed in what was the palace of the Dukes of Burgundy.  (Bitterly cold in the off season.)  What's here is museum circa 1950: rows of objects behind glass with dry descriptions.  What it should be, if the city fathers were clever, is what you can find half an hour north in the Imaginarium.  No worthy museum here; it's actually a very clever marketing facility created by big sparkling wine maker Louis Bouillot.

But they keep things subtle, never pushing their brand too hard in the displays and offering plenty of other vignerons in their tastings and shop.  You start with the story of the vine, a multi-media show that walks you through several large rooms to illustrate the history of wine and wine making.  Many of the objects on display are the same as those in the cases in Beaune, but here you're getting lights, music and a bit of narrative.  A sister facility on the other side of the building is the story of bubbles, where you learn about the sparkling wine process.  Here, the displays are more hands-on.  There are electronic quizzes, blind scent-sniffing machines to test your nose, and a riddling game that kept us amused for longer than it should have.  (Riddling is the process of regularly turning sparkling wine bottles as the yeast is developing the flavours.  This game let you test how long it took you to spin every bottle on the board.)  At the end, you come out into a big shop where you taste six wines, mostly premier crus or village wines.  Because we were obviously so interested, our hostess took us over to the premium area and let us taste six more of the Grand Crus.  Admission cost 7 euro each, which was a steal when you combine the education, the fun and the tasting.  We didn't buy here, though.  Prices seemed a bit high and we thought we could do better when dealing direct with producers.  Which we did just up the road , where we found our favourite Burgundian red, Clos Napoleon, at Domaine Pierre Gelin a Fixin.

Le Caveau Puligny Montrachet - One of the challenges of tasting along the Cote d'Or is that, outside of restaurants, you rarely get the opportunity to try wines by a variety of makers.  Usually, you're in the cave of a single producer, tasting his range.  Julian Wallerand, the son of a famous Burgundian sommelier, has turned that idea on its head with his chic little wine bar in the centre of one of the world's greatest white wine villages.  Pop in and you can taste whatever range of reds and whites he has open that day, probably options from little-known producers that he knows well.  An example:  We told him one of our favourite wines was Patrick Javillier's Mersault "Les Tillets".  We'd driven by his winery but he'd been closed.  An excellent wine, Julian agreed, but overpriced now that he was exporting regularly to the UK.  If we liked that, why not try Michel Bouzereau's Mersault.  Very similar but much cheaper, as he didn't have the reputation.  Perfect.  Julian's wine knowledge combines with all the gossip he picks up as his place is the watering hole for the vignerons as well as the tourists.  We'll make him our primary source for Cote d'Or wines on any future trip.

Le Volpi e l'Uva, Florence -  The Italians tend not to do wine by the glass beyond a restaurant's house
brand.   This little wine bar tucked away in a side street on the Pitti Palace side of the Arno, therefore, is a treasure.  They have 15 or 20 different wines by the glass, covering all of Italy but majoring on Tuscany.  It's not a restaurant, but they'll put together platters of bread, charcuterie and cheese to balance your tasting.  Their English is good enough to diagnose your needs and have a good chat about the characteristics of the wines.  Our new friend Leonardo took us through four interesting glasses each, listening to what we liked and didn't like in wines and then producing samples that worked to our tastes.  (We knew he was good when we loved our own selections, but weren't so crazy about each others'.)  The bar runs regular tastings and even has a week long wine school, something I'm keeping in mind for the future.

Enoteca Italiana, Siena - A very curious place with a lot of undeveloped potential.  Not worth going out of your way for now, but it could turn into a hot spot in the future.  We ended up here mostly because my old favourite, Le Cantine Greve in Chianti, was closed for the off season.  (And didn't bother to say so on their website, thus seeing us standing in the rain in front of a locked door.  Most irritating.)  Le Cantine, written about here in the past, offers a vast range of Italian wines in serve yourself tasting kiosks, activated by a card you charge up when you enter.  Whilst there's not much expertise amongst the staff, the ability to try so much is great, and they have a library of books available for reference.  Disappointed by the closure, we pushed on to nearby Siena for some sightseeing, and while parking in the lot below the old Medici Castle saw a sign for the Enoteca, offering tastings and hundreds of wines.  I had hopes this would be something similar to Greve.  On the tasting front, no.  They had perhaps 10 bottles open for tasting, served by a stylish barman whose knowledge of hair gel and precision shaving techniques seemed far better than his wine expertise.  In fact, the main floor ... though empty at 4pm on a Tuesday ... seemed much more like a trendy nightclub and restaurant than a serious wine enterprise.  Go down the broad, gently sloping, winding stairwell (clearly designed for horses to traverse) and you end up in a cavernous network of high cellars.  Here, where we'd hoped for Cantine-style kiosks, we found a strange museum of wine, with room after room of glass shelves with bottles arranged as if an art installation.  A wonderful testimony to the Italian label-designers' skill, but we could see no logic to the arrangement and learned nothing about the wine.  Might be worth trying at mealtime in the regular tourist season, but for now it's still worth the trip to Greve.  Assuming they're open.

And that's the end of the story, for now.  Our collection of acquired bottles now slumber peacefully in the wine fridges.  Most will be at their best around 2017, though there's one very special bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin the owner told me is going to be superb in 25 years.  That one now has a little "drink for retirement party" sign on it.  As for drinking today?  If only I could find some of that Bombereto...