Montepulciano Winery and Horticulture in Art

BG: This week we went to the town of Montepulciano to visit easily the most amazing winery that I have ever seen, De Ricci Cantine del Redi.  For all you Twilight fans out there, this town is the location of a certain part of the second movie of the series.  I am not a twilight fan myself, but apparently it is the part when the main vampire guy walks out of some doorway to basically kill himself, crazy, and the chick that digs him decides to save him.  Anyways, back to more important matters, the winery itself is down the road from the spot where the movie took place.  The winery is underground and holds a extremely large amount of wine.  I am not sure how much exactly, but there were multiple huge barrels that each held 100 hectoliters, which is equal to 100 liters, that’s a lot of vino. The wine itself has to sit in the barrels for at least two years before it can be used. We got to walk around the winery and were shown an area that was from 1000 BC.  The tasting of the wine included three different types of red wine, the first from 2010, the second from 2008, and the third from 2006.  I know that the older the wine the better it is supposed to be, but personally I thought the 2010 was the best, not only of the three but of all the wine I have tasted this trip. Our tasting also included two different kinds of cheese, one of which was made using walnuts.  All of the food that we had was from local shops and it all tasted great.

A topic we discussed in class this week was horticulture in art.  There was one artist in particular that I found his paintings very interesting, taking horticulture in art to a whole new level.  His name was Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and the paintings we looked at you can clearly see a face as the painting, but when you closely you can see the uniqueness of the face.  Every part of the painting is some kind of fruit, vegetable, or flower.  In the attached picture you can see corn, grapes, and many other things.  He has multiple paintings like this and in all of them it is pretty amazing and impressive how he was able to do it.