For years after World War II the Italian nation was it ruins. As the allies pushed the Germans ever northward with brutal battles and bombings, the collateral damage to Italian towns, and people, was devastating. What does that have to do with wine? A lot. With their post-war infrastructure in shambles, people were simply trying to find enough food to live on while they rebuilt their homes and towns. Picking up the pieces. The art of fine wine making necessarily took a back seat. Eventually, as towns rebuilt and people found productive jobs, things slowly began to return to normal, which allowed for the timid revival of wine production. The volumes increased, but the “art,” the fineness of the wines of central Italy, was still lacking, the same way Japanese cars were a joke in the 1960’s. I can remember in the 1960’s and 1970’s, even the word “Chianti” was a kind of code for drinkable, but not at all “good” wine -- while the wicker covered bottles became gaudy, wax-coated candle holders in every Italian restaurant in America. Then in 2001 a huge spotlight was focused on the small hill town of Montalcino in central Tuscany, when Wine Spectator (the international publication that rates all major wines) announced that the newly released 1997 Brunello di Montalcino was, literally, the best red wine in the world – beating out the usually dominant French reds which the world had come to accept as the standard by which all other wines were measured. Not so any more.
The lively complexity, depth of color, mouth feel, broadly nuanced Brunello di Montalcino had won the grand prize from the best wine tasters on the planet. Everyone who dealt in wine would have to rethink the stature of Italy as master wine maker.Little Montalcino! Suddenly people began talking, once again, about Italian wines. What had happened? The old candlestick-bottle Chianti had suddenly become Chianti Classico, also winning new collectors and awards, and in demand everywhere. Then new mixes of Sangiovese and other Italian grapes began winning acclaim as the “Super-Tuscans.” You might say the lexicon of wine making had changed to include these new giants. More importantly, the art of making fine wines had been recovered in Italy, in the same way Brunalleschi recovered the art and craft of making a great dome (his, the Duomo of Florence) after being lost to the world of architecture for a thousand years.
Romeo took us to the La Fortuna winery just below the city of Montalcino, where the grapes were now off the vines and the massive process of turning their juice into wine was well underway in huge stainless steel vats of roiling red. Again the wine making family was happy to see Romeo and treated him like a cousin. They wanted us to try their “mosto” (known as “must” in English) – the grape juice as it exists in the early days after being forced from the skins of the grapes. It was like drinking a lollypop - - heavenly! The fact was explained that once the juice is removed from the skins, it is separated from what will eventually make it a Brunello. The SKINS are where the flavors begin. These large vats had tons of skins floating on the surface above the denser grape juice below, and the process underway was power-siphoning the “mosto” from a bottom port and redelivering it to the top so it could, over and over again, shower and pass through the grape skins, eventually stripping them of their flavors and color. I bought a bottle of the La Fortuna Brunello for the equivalent of $30 U.S. – a bottle that will cost up to $150 in about 4 years when it’s released to the market en masse. In the meantime, once finished in oak barrels and properly balanced and bottled, it will “sleep” in the cool La Fortuna cellars. They quietly let us see where the 2008 is now sleeping, and the 2007 and 2006 – massive cages filled with stacks of dark, unlabeled bottles lying on their sides, awaiting their day of liberation. We didn’t want to wake them.
Pienza was our afternoon stop, not far to the east from Montalcino. Pienza is known as “the perfect Tuscan hill town,” not just because the locals like to think of it that way, but because Pope Pius II spent a huge chunk of church money on making it that way. It had been his childhood home, and I guess he had a vision from God on how to give it a long needed makeover so all those other hill towns that surround it would no longer look down their noses. He did well. Pienza today is like a Tuscan hill town designed by Walt Disney Studios. Cute as a bug in every nook and cranny. Its product is cheese … pecorino cheese to be exact. 
Made of sheep milk, this world famous cheese was originally the product of the sheep farms of Sardinia. After World War II, many of those shepherd families moved, with their herds, to the mainland of Italy, settling in southern and central Tuscany. The fine art of pecorino cheese making was their gift to their mainland Italian cousins. 
Pecorino comes in three ages or levels of maturity, from “fresco” to “stagionato” (aged). I bought a one-kilo wheel of the stagionato, which Romeo’s favorite cheese vendor in Pienza was happy to vacuum pack for the long trip back to the states. No refrigeration required. It’s not a “smelly” cheese at all, but the vacuum wrap will help confine it. If you saw this round wheel of cheese on the side of the road, you’d think nothing of it. It looks like a dirty, blackened rock. That’s because the Pienza stagionato is aged in layers of dried chestnut leaves mixed with the black ash of burned chestnut leaves. When eating it with slices of pear and a good Brunello, pecorino staggionato taste sort of like … chestnuts!
