The Days of Wine and Bourbon

One of the disadvantages of caring about the welfare of the rest of your group is that occasionally it can lead to mistakes, however well-intentioned.

On the second morning after coming together with the group, we trickled into the breakfast dining room and struck up a bit of a conversation among those of us who were already there about an older couple in the group whose wake-up call had failed to come through on day 1 and, given their absence here on day 2, probably failed to do so again, or so we concluded.

So two of the ladies among those of us who did get down to breakfast decided to get onto the front desk to rouse the tardy couple who, we assumed, had still not received their wake-up call.

A quick phone call to the front desk returned a commitment that someone would immediately be dispatched to the room in question and rouse the couple with a firm door-knocking. Not five minutes later, the older couple in question came cheerfully into the breakfast dining room and told us they had indeed received their wake-up call as requested. Then, in response to a couple follow-up questions, it turned out they were not, in fact, in the room to which our two well-intentioned group members had dispatched the someone from the front desk.

Later, we discovered that the room to which the front desk person had been sent had been occupied by a Back-Roads employee who was also in our company by way of familiarizing herself with that particular tour and she, to put it bluntly, had not intended to wake quite that early on that particular day.

(Someone was banging on your door early this morning, Nellie? Really? Woke you up? Nope… I have no idea at all who that might have been. Or why. *Cough*)

= = =

Our first visit on this day was to one of the most incredible summer homes one is ever likely to see.

In the late 1700s, it seems that Charles VII, one of the Bourbon Kings of Naples, was suffering from Versailles envy and decided to recreate a passable version of the renowned French palace in southern Italy, as a refuge to which the Bourbons, their relatives and friends could retire to escape the scorching summer heat of Naples. The Bourbon palace at Caserta is the result.

It counts an astonishing 1200 rooms within its considerable walls and its layout, which captures four huge courtyards, makes it the single largest royal palace in the world. Not bad for a building constructed to serve as what most of us call a “cottage”.

It is, in a word, stunning. Pick your highlight: architecture, furniture, artworks, ceiling frescoes, patterned marble floors. All of them draw your jaw farther and farther downward with each succeeding room you enter.

Outside, the gardens are no less gorgeous and go on forever when you step out the back door (an entrance no less imposing than the front, incidentally).

Here are several photos, which will give you a feel for this spectacular architectural statement that hammers home the message, “Yes, we are royals, and let us remind you of several ways that makes us different from you.”

On the landing halfway up just one Caserta staircase that takes you from the first to the second floor.

The ceiling in one of the 1200 rooms. This is typical of the overhead work in pretty much every single room in the palace!

This is the dome over the altar in Caserta’s family chapel. Clearly, it would not be out of place in most of the country’s cathedrals.

I’m trying to imagine whether sleep would come easily or only with great difficulty when one has a griffon staring with an eternally unblinking gaze back at you from each of your bed’s four corners, not to mention the human figures looking over your shoulder from the top corners of your headboard.

I don’t ever want to encounter any of the descendants of the guard who wore this Etruscan helmet, located just outside the entrance to the family chapel.

Always the artists, Italians have been known to stray some distance from the facts, or even commonly accepted fiction, when it comes to portraying history, whether theirs or other people’s. This is just one portion of Caserta’s massive representation of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem as this particular diorama’s builders saw it. Italian nativity representations are known as “cribs” and the country’s most elaborate are found in the Naples area. Caserta’s presentation of the newborn Christ and his parents places the Holy Family almost incidentally into a scene that includes literally thousands of people engaged in what amounts to one big party.

The Holy Family is framed by the arch of the grotto just left of centre. (You can see Joseph’s halo.) Around behind this view of the crib is at least the same number of people. And even at that, the thousands of figures in this crib are just a portion of the original work, which several years ago suffered the obviously very well-planned theft of many thousands of the figures. Apparently the crib room has only recently been re-opened for public view, despite being somewhat under-populated in comparison to its glory days when Christ’s birth was represented as having occurred – based on the mob of attending party-goers – in a medium to large city.

The palace’s back yard, and this is less than a quarter of the way along the path that bisects Caserta’s gardens from the palace’s back door – visible in the centre of the photo – to a distant waterfall that was the source of its water supply. In Caserta’s Bourbon heyday, the huge fountains and pools supported a generous supply of fish that frequently found their way to the evening dinner tables.

The waterfall, visible as a cascade on the distant hill, is still about a kilometre from this spot, and this spot is about the same distance from the palace’s back door. (The lawn-mowing contract alone must keep more than one local landscaping company busy full-time!) Meanwhile, the gardens splay out a considerable distant to the left and right on either side of this central path.

One final, slightly more modern Caserta note. As the inexorable march of the Allied armies north through Italy late in WWII recaptured more and more of the country from the retreating Germans, Allied high command adopted the Bourbon palace as its Supreme Headquarters / Italy. (No faulting them for their taste!) It was there, in late April and early May, 1945 – after Hitler’s suicide in Berlin sapped the last feelings among the German high command of needing to maintain any “personal loyalty” oath to their Fuhrer – that the pretty straightforward terms (Sign or else!) of the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Italy were finally accepted.

= = =

Back aboard the bus, we were told we were on our way to a tour and tasting at a nearby winery.

OK, now throw out whatever pops into your head when you hear “a tour and tasting at a nearby winery”. (I can say that because I’m pretty sure that just about everyone on my reading list here is a New World resident where winery tour tastings are fairly similar across the continent. With maybe some minor variations, “wine” and “winery” likely mean something whose age is expressed in two digits, maybe even just one, and “tasting” likely means an ounce-and-a-bit in a glass, which, if you’re lucky, is also an appropriate match for the style of wine you’re tasting.)

No, in this case, the winery was located in the ancient town of Sant’ Agata dei Goti, whose history goes back well over 2,000 years where it began life as a town known as Saticula founded by the Samnites, in approximately 350 B.C.

Meanwhile, the winery itself is an outstanding ambassador for several wines that characterize the Campania region of Italy, where it is located. The Mustilli family has been producing wine for an astonishing 700 years, and the winery today is presently run by two daughters of the family line, Paola and Anna Chiara (Paola was our hostess on this day).

About 50 years ago, then patriarch Leonardo Mustilli made the decision to re-introduce grapes that had been native to Campania for centuries but were abandoned in favour of more “international” varietals. Now, Italian connoisseurs – and a small group of incredibly fortunate Back-Roads of Britain tourers – can once more savour some truly unique wines with a pedigree dating back hundreds of years. The region even has its own appellation now: DOC Sant’Agata dei Gota, created especially for its native grape varieties: Falanghina, Greco, Aglianico, Piedirosso, Rosato, Rosso and Passito.

Quick sidebar note: As you might already have inferred, “DOC” is an honourably acquired designation established in the 1960s for Italian wines, “Vino a Denominazione di Origine Controllata”, that places them in a specific region, produced under very specific traditional rules and wine-making practices.

And you know how most North American winery tastings will graciously lay out some complimentary flavour-neutral snacks aimed at keeping your palate somewhat clean? Maybe some cheese and crackers, cubes of bread…? Well, brace yourself; this was what we were served at a sit-down luncheon in a lavishly appointed dining room:

1. Antipasto Casa Rainone, a sea of platters placed on each table containing Mozzarella di bufala (which you will recall from the previous update), ricottina di pecora, sopressata (a wonderfully seasoned salami), arancini al limone, arancini al salame, calzoncini golosi, focaccia della nonna, ‘nfrennule.

(Just for fun, I ran that array through the Bing virtual translator, and here’s what came back – punctuation obviously is irrelevant: “Buffalo Mozzarella, sheep, sopressata ricottina, lemon arancini, balls to salami, sweet bloomers, Grandma's cake, 'nfrennule”.) I assure you our anti-pasto platters were waaaaay more appetizing than “sheep” or “balls to salami” would suggest.

Wines were served for each course in as many repeating bottles as were required until being replaced by the subsequent course. For the antipasto, it was Falanghina del sannio doc.

2. Minestra di stagione, Pacche e fagiole. Here’s Bing again: “Seasonal soup, Pats and fagiole”. Pats? “Pacche” may be a typo if they started with the English word, “pasta”, because even an official translation renders it as “slaps”. And there is a universally popular Italian soup known as “pasta e fagiole” (with pasta and beans). But I digress.

The wines were Fiano doc sannio and Piedirosso doc sannio.

3. The “dulce” ("sweets")course: Macedonia di frutta, Delizia di crema e amarene, Biscotti di nocciole. And Bing actually seems to grab it this time: “Fruit, cream and cherry delight, hazelnut cookies”. The wine? Phileno passito.

And here’s the experience in photos.

First of all, because I was badly positioned on the bus as we rolled into the town to grab this shot myself, here’s someone else’s photo of why it’s considered so picturesque, and why, if you live in one of the cliff-edge homes, you do NOT want to be diagnosed as a somnambulist. (Photo source: bandierearancioni.it/comune/28)

The Mustilli’s dining room during our exclusive luncheon. I almost felt a little guilty treading on those wonderful Persian carpets.

Sadly, our driver, Luigi (left) was unable to share the many glasses of wine we were served with lunch – note the bottle of mineral water beside him – but we were delighted that company policy at least allowed for staff to share in the magnificent lunch. By trip’s end, Luigi seemed as much a part of our merry band as any (more so, in fact, given the number of women in our group who swore they were going to find a way to take him home with them!) In the centre is our hostess, Paola and on the right, Back-Roads employee Nellie (she of the pounded-awake-way-too-early episode reported at the start of this update). Nellie, we were told, was solely responsible for finding the Mustilli winery and recommending its permanent inclusion on the tour. Not a whisper of dissent was heard from any of us.

Optimum cellaring conditions for wine include a constant, cool temperature, low light and minimal disturbance. About 50 feet underground in a cavern hollowed out of the region’s tufa rock has filled the bill nicely for Mustilli for hundreds of years.

Though no longer used for most of its production, Mustilli’s old cellar still stores several bottles of each year’s production of all of their wines for uncorking on those occasions when they hold a specialized tasting called a “vertical” tasting – sampling several different years of the same wine to enable one to understand why some years are considered so-so, and some are considered vintage. (As opposed to a “horizontal” tasting – no, not swilling the stuff in bed, but rather tasting the same style made in the same year from several different regional wineries.) Every day’s a school day on the Internet!

Mustilli’s products are available in North America, if a narrow distribution in downtown San Francisco, as we were told, can be called “available in North America”. Their amazing Falanghina is the rightmost bottle in this shot. A locally produced tasting guide characterizes it as “intense, fruity, long and rich with overtones of red-skin fruit or Annurca apples…” Yep.

And finally for the Mustilli photos in this update, this is our charming and thoroughly knowledgeable hostess Paola back at street level in the old cellar’s tasting bar where we concluded our tour with a glass of whichever of their products we wanted to try. I opted for the Aglianico (pronounced al-YAN-ee-co), which hadn’t been among the wines we were served with our luncheon. A light, friendly and delicious red, it would be perfectly at home at any table with the pasta course.

It was somewhere around this point close to the end of our tour that Mustilli’s unofficial mascot, a purebred and rock-solid Wiemaraner named Nana decided to bolt out the cellar’s front door while one of our tour group members was leaving.

Asked casually if Nana were allowed to roam about the streets of Sant ‘Agata-di-Goti, Paola yelled, “Aieee! No!”, which promptly sent the rest of us flying out the door in hot pursuit. Fortunately, two of our tour members have a sheep farm in Australia and whether it was through their direction or the simple expedient of having eight to ten people all loudly trying to steer Nana with obviously unfamiliar English commands (my memory – you might understand – was someone wine-hazed by this point), she decided that familiar turf was preferable to the streets and after a quick whirl around the block, bolted back in the door as quickly as she had left, leaving us all in Paola’s good books for our Wiemaraner recovery efforts.

Not Nana, but darned close. If an adult version of one of these ever were to smack into you at anything faster than a slow walk, you’d be flat on your butt and wondering when they started making dogs out of brick. (Photo: wiemaranerdog.org. What a surprise!)