An Idyllic Trip to the Wine Country: France and Italy

Eve Kecskes is the founder of Nutrition by Eve. Eve and her husband are avid travelers who carefully researched and created an exciting trip to Europe this summer.

Besides traveling, my main love is food. I’m a Registered Dietitian, and I love writing about food on my blog. My husband loves Italy, Italian food, and wine – not necessarily in that order. We had two weeks allotted for our vacation, and we went back and forth about where to go.

We had gone to French Polynesia for our honeymoon not too long ago, so we decided to stay a bit closer to home this time. We really had our eye on Europe, having done a trip to Paris, Rome, and Florence in 2006. In that vacation, we mainly stayed in the cities. I had done some countryside trips, but my husband hadn’t. So we said, why not rent a car and see the wine country in France and Italy?

We flew into Paris, where we spent two days – one of them in Versailles – and flew home from Rome after a final two days there. In between, we created a really interesting itinerary. From Paris, we started driving south. We spent our first night in the Burgundy region, in a tiny town called Chagny. Then we visited the Rhone region, staying in Grignan. Then we went on to the Riveria; we stopped in Cannes for lunch, and stayed overnight in Monte Carlo, Monaco, that night.

The next morning we crossed into Northern Italy. We spent the day in the town of Valpolicella – where the Amarone wines are produced. We then drove to Venice for an overnight, then on to Florence for another full day, and then spent three days in Tuscany before heading on to Rome.

With a rental car armed with GPS, and my husband ready to do the driving for us, we had a wonderful time. Driving is such an amazing way to see things; we were really able to immerse ourselves in the areas we visited. It was a lot of “get up and go” each day, but we never would have been able to see so much, and so exactly what we were interested in, if we had not customized this trip ourselves. This was truly more about the “destinations” rather than being a totally relaxing vacation.

That being said, one of our biggest splurges was a night at the Banfi Wines estate in Tuscany. This winery is the largest producer of wines in all of Europe. It is so huge – literally thousands of acres of grapes. They have a very intimate resort – literally less than ten rooms – on the property, called Costello Banfi Il Borgo, which is everything you would imagine a luxurious resort to be. We spent some time relaxing by the pool, which was a wonderful break in the middle of all of the sightseeing.

One thing we learned about driving in Europe is that it is very easy to get from city to city, but getting around in the cities themselves is a challenge. We learned that it’s really important to have specific instructions on how to get to the hotels by car. The GPS doesn’t register the tiny little streets in these old cities. In Florence, for example, with the odd street directions, the GPS kept saying “we’re calculating…we’re calculating.” It’s definitely a good idea to get a local map to use while navigating around the city. But the GPS was awesome for finding our way outside the metro areas.

We had a bit of a sticky situation in Montalcino. This area of Tuscany is famous for its wines, producing some of the most expensive labels in Italy. The region is comprised of a lot of hilltop towns. Our car was a front-wheel drive stick shift, and one day while we were driving around one of these little towns, looking for a place to park, we suddenly found ourselves outside of the main part of the town, where we began to see warning signs stating we were getting to a 25-degree angle!

Then the road turned to gravel, and we knew we had to turn around. The wheels were spinning because of the gravel and the angle of the road – and I should mention also that there was a cliff on one side of this narrow mountain road. Luckily, a local saw our plight and managed to make us understand, in his broken English, that we should use very low gas. That was definitely an experience! Thankfully that was the only really “challenging” experience during the trip.

All in all it was an amazing trip. The food was amazing, and I took so many wonderful pictures for my blog. When you travel abroad, you can’t – sadly – bring food back (we had to eat our fill of our favorites, like the truffles we had in a tiny vineyard near Rome).

Thankfully, we were able to ship some wine back. We shipped half of what we bought and brought the rest in our checked baggage. They have some really ingenious products to help with this, like wine carriers to check with your luggage. They are lined with Styrofoam, to keep the bottles secure and safe. They even have Styrofoam inserts for luggage, also. My husband is a real fan of Brunello wine. It’s hard to get in the US – and very expensive – so we stocked up on those. They made up most of the 44 bottles we brought back, and every time we open one, we are transported back to memories of this incredible journey.