Greve and the Passignano road deliver the dream of Chianti

Regular readers will know they can find plenty of wine tourism in these pages. While those articles often go deep into specifics of the wines themselves, you don't have to be an aficionado to enjoy rambling around vineyard-draped locations. Wine routes offer some of the best Tuscan sightseeing, whether you're a connoisseur or don't know your Sangiovese from your Vermentino.

Tuscany is Italy's third most vine-covered region (after Sicily and Apulia), mostly because of its extremely hilly terrain. Which is also, of course, what makes the whole region so picturesque, given how many of those hilltops are crowned with walled towns, historic abbeys or impressive villas. You could easily dedicate a whole holiday to wine tourism here. Many do. But if that's not your thing, there are two day trips in different wine regions sure to delight anyone. Here, I'll talk about a classic route through Chianti. In the next article, I'll move south to Montalcino and Montepulciano.

Greve in Chianti

Greve is the largest town in the Chianti wine region. Unlike so many other prime destinations here, it's in a valley ... though you'll twist up and down plenty of steep roads to get here, whichever direction you come from. The appeal for residents has always been the river Greve. It will be a key landmark as you find the Parcheggio Piazza Resistenza to leave your car. It boasts a convenient pay-to-park app, an underground area to keep your car in the shade, a very short walk to the historic centre of town and an Instagrammable sculpture of Chianti's trademark gallo nero (black rooster). After the requisite photo stop, cross the river and head for the Piazza Matteotti, the hub for all sightseeing here.

This roughly-triangular space has the unique (in my experience) advantage of covered loggias on its two longest sides, meaning you can shop and dine protected from the weather. Not only is that a rare blessing beneath the brutal summer sun; it makes for a beautiful urban space. Tenants are a mix of wine shops, restaurants and souvenir spots. The last skew more towards high-end craft than tourist tat, with plenty of the usual ceramics, luxury linens and leather products to tempt you. Even the tee shirts seem unusually upscale here, including a delightful range of the region's iconic wild boars in cartoon form getting up to all manner of human hijinx. Everything is a bit more wine-themed, unsurprisingly, than in Florence or Siena.

The most distinctive shop on the piazza, and the one that's worth a trip to Greve all on its own, is Antica Macelleria Falorni. This is a palace of the pig, an Aladdin's cave of whole prosciutto hanging to dry, stacks of salami and other preserved meats in a staggering variety of forms and flavours, and a full butcher's counter with fresh local cuts carved to your specifications. There's a whole section devoted exclusively to wild boar products. If I could only bring one item home from a trip to Tuscany, it would be a package of their wild boar prosciutto. They also have a variety of meat-related accessories, including long, thin, flexible ham knives. One of these has been a prized possession in my knife block for more than a decade; nothing I have allows a thinner slice. 

Falorni has been here since 1806, and much of the shop looks as if it hasn't changed since. But time moves on, and their fame has expanded thanks to global travel reports and social media. Their footprint has grown, too, with a whole new section for wine, take-away food and dining on site. The loggia outside their storefront is now crowded with tables of happy visitors eating what they may not be able to bring home with them.

Food & drink

We opted for lunch instead at the Cafe Lepanto, on the short side of the triangle next to the town hall. Our choice was mainly made on the triple play that it had the first nice loo we'd encountered since the car park and some people were desperate, their covered patio had an impressive network of misters cooling the space, and we were travelling with a teenager who hadn't had pizza yet in Italy and the menu was full of it. Necessity turned out to be the mother of a fine lunch, with large yet delicate pizzas packed with local flavours, excellent service and cold drinks. All consumed while enjoying a view across the piazza, overlooked by a swashbuckling statue of local boy Giovanni da Varrazzano, an explorer and navigator whose fame is now defined by the bridge named after him in New York.

If you want to get serious about local wines, follow the signs across the main road, back towards the river to the Enoteca Falorni. Yes, they've expanded again. This place was once known as Le Cantine di Greve in Chianti. You'll find many glowing reviews of it under that name, thanks to the fact that nobody ever takes anything down on the internet, and then a recent silence that suggests the place went out of business. It is still here, simply under new ownership.

It's under the old name, and before this blog launched, that a legendary girls' trip spent many hours in serious, note-taking tasting of a range of local bottles staggered from affordable table wines to eye-wateringly expensive "Super Tuscans". We could do this because the place has scores of bottles set up in automatic dispensers. You load up a card with credit and serve yourself, with the per-taste price escalating with the quality of the wine. Back then, our studied approach found that we hit a sweet spot of taste and price at around €30 a bottle, with the biggest gulf between €10 and €20. Though the Sassicaia and Antinori Solaia were a giddy pleasure to drink, the difference in taste didn't justify the almost 10x increase over the €30 choices. This was 20 years ago, so you can probably add 20% to those prices, but I suspect the quality ratio is still roughly the same.

Since the Falorni rebrand the place has become a restaurant, not just a wine drinking venue. Though there appear to be fewer bottles on sample than in the old days, the company web site says more than 100 bottles on sample, so I think this is still one of the best places to do a wine tasting if you wanted to get serious on a variety of comparisons. 

If we'd wanted to go to a winery, we would have headed to the Antinori estate about half an hour away and conveniently located for the tourist trade just off the main Florence-to-Siena highway. One of the most historic vintners in Tuscany, they invested in a high-tech, Architectural Digest-worthy new winery a decade ago that's a tourist attraction in itself. There's an art collection, a restaurant and a variety of tours and sampling experiences you can pre-book, but at a starting point of €46 per person this is for more serious wine tourists.

The dreamy drive

We opted, instead, for a picturesque drive back to the highway. Head north through Greve (towards Florence) and look for signs to Montefioralle. Follow them on a white-knuckle drive up hairpin bends through an olive grove to get to the walled medieval "borgo" at the top. La Castellana, just before you come to the walls, is another great restaurant choice in this area and you can enjoy a magnificent dinner on their outdoor terrace overlooking the valleys of Chianti. Just remember that someone is going to have to drive back down after your relaxing meal. You can park outside the walls and have a wander through the picture-postcard lanes (it's much like Monteriggioni, the walled town I described in my last article) or continue on, waiting for the one-way light system that lets cars creep around the narrow track below the base of the walls. 

That sets a precedent. For the next 10 kilometres you'll rarely encounter any stretch of road that could be considered two full lanes. There are crazy turns and a lot of stretches where rough stone walls are uncomfortably close. It's not a route for hesitant drivers. But those who take it will be rewarded with spectacular views, and plenty of places to pull off the road from which to appreciate them. About two thirds of the way along the route you come to Badia a Passignano, though the ancient walled monastery will have been dominating your view for many miles before. It's another place you could get out and have a poke around, making a full day of your sightseeing. From there the road starts to slope downwards and eventually comes to a dead end in an industrial valley. Turn right for the nearest highway entrance, not left to Sambuca. You might imagine a storied alcoholic tradition and flaming shots in that direction, but the Tuscan village has nothing to do with the drink, which was developed in the late 19th century near Rome. Sambuca is simply a name for the elderberry.

The industrial estate you end up driving through seems a let-down after the gorgeous countryside you've just traversed, but Tuscany has one more delight on offer for the summer visitor. Just before the motorway you come to long fields of sunflowers in full bloom, one of the quintessential glamour shots of this area. This scene was made even better by a collapsing ruin of a farmhouse amidst the blooms. 

You'll have to take my word for that. I have no photos, I was driving. And I enjoyed several very nice glasses of wine to reward my efforts when we got home from that adventure.