In my last post we told you all about the beautiful town of Castell’Arquato. Now, in the second part of my post I’ll tell you about the second reason we visited, which was the Monterosso Val d’Arda Wine Festival!
The Festival
Everytime I have been to a wine festival in Italy so far, you pay a small fee of a few euros. In return you get a card which allows you six different tastings of the wines available.
However, when we arrived at this festival we soon realised that restriction didn’t apply here. There were 32 different vineyards at the festival. So for an “entrance fee” of €10 you could taste over 70 different wines. You were also given vouchers to take part in the “secret” tastings.
You also kept your wine glass at the end. This was an added bonus as I have a habit of breaking them when washing up!
Bearing that in mind, and also that the stalls were all on a hill which lead to the castle at the top, Lisa took the very sensible decision that we should start at the top and work our way down!
So many to choose from!
Each stall had a selection of the wines that I have tasted lots of times such as Guttornio and Ortrugo.
However each stall also had their own version of the local wine Monterossi Val d’Arda, a semi-dry sparkling white wine. I hadn’t tasted this before, but it has now become a favourite! We have already arranged to visit some of the vineyards near us. Luckily we can reach them by bus, so we be able to sample all of their delicious wines!
We decided to call it a day about two thirds of the way down the hill, as we’d had more than enough by that time. However we had to laugh as we saw increasingly drunk people struggling up the hill!
There are many other festivals in the coming months in this beautiful village. We have put all of them in our diary!
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