The next trip that we have planned is longer than most but broken up four segments.

• Week 1 Tuscany home exchange in Monte San Savino.
• Week 2 Road trip from Tuscany to Lyon through Emilio Romano & Piedmont Italy.
• Week 3 River cruise on the Rhone with Richard Sanford.
• Week 4 & 5 Road trip in the South of France with some time in Grasse, Fr.

 

Driving out to the Santa Rita Hills to Alma Rosa ranch house we were struck by the similarity of the terrain to some of the grape growing regions in Italy and France.  Close your eyes and you are in Europe without the jet lag. One of the first Winemakers in this region was Richard Sanford back when the only possible use for the land was cattle and sheep.  Sanford had a vision which would result in a maturing wine region with over a hundred wineries, millions of vines and little livestock today.  He tells a story of the wine region that we will be visiting in France as being very similar in size to Santa Rita, full of small family producers that you will never taste beyond the sight of their vines.  And by the way with the DNA technology of today, some of these vines have been identified as over a thousand years old.  Talk about drinking old vine this is the juice of long past generations.

We spent a couple hours at Alma Rosa with Capitain & Winemaker Richard Sanford, wife and navigator, Thekla Sanford, and our shipmates that will be on the Lyon to Avignon river cruise. The crew appears able-bodied especially after a couple of glasses of wine. As the shadows lengthened the jokes got funnier, the laughter got louder, and the camaraderie got stronger. We all decided that we will bring a bottle of some kind of favorite alcohol from a recent destination to share in the early days on the boat. One of the group plans to bring blind tasting bags to add to the drama. Do you think will be able to tell the Grappa from the Sangiovese if it’s bagged? We are about 40 out the full contingent of 150 hearty souls on the boat. Hopefully, we won’t overwhelm the other unsuspecting voyagers.

Read more about Sanford’s journey in the wine business.

https://www.independent.com/news/2014/jan/15/richard-sanford-ditches-debt/