First sleepover

So we spent out first night in the house after an exhausted snack tea with two fires blazing. Strange gusts in the night blew the shutters open and our once spacious bed seemed rather small. The fire in our room dwindled and smoked but we slept in deep fits and starts.

The day dawned cold and the rain had gone. We cracked on with it all, sometimes a bit aimlessly and at other times full of focus and purpose.

By evening the cold was falling fast after a snow flurry and I popped into Poppi to get meat to cook on the fire and wine. The shops are pretty good and the butcher was very friendly - he comes from an 100 year line of butchers and cattle intermediaries. He set me straight on the corruption of the traditional Tuscan cow - the Chianina - which in his opinion has become little more than a brand. Italian beef is very tender but to my mind lacks taste and bite.

I bought a thin slice of beef from Piemontese cattle, a bit of chicken and two fat and salty Tuscan sausages.  A nice loaf from stoneground flour and breadsticks from a baker and then a long chat about local wines with a very knowledgeable guy, Mauro, in a local organic shop.

He reckons that the Casentino makes some of the best Pinot Noir in Italy. At an alt. of 400-600m it shares a climate not dissimilar from Burgundy (although with a bigger day-might temperature range, if you will) and a noted winemaker has set up a small Pinto Noir vineyard.

It was selling at €39 a bottle so I skipped it and bought some traditional prosecco and a local bottle of San Giovese. And a kilo of organic clementines from Calabria.

I skedaddled back home up in in our hilly retreat with ideas of wine-making. I cooked the meat and par-boiled potatoes, peppers and onions on a grill stuck over the coals in the log burner. It was pretty good, to be honest.

By bedtime it was plunging down to -4C and the stars were brilliant - Orion rising from the east. And The Boss summoned me upstairs to see that through the trees at night we could see the distant castle at Poppi.

This cloud and valley scape caught my eye from the terrace of the house as the snow fell on the higher mountains. You could have thought we were looking up Glen Shee. The 'Monarch of the Vallico' and all that.