Art and Wine

On Wednesday the students went on their first Italian Life and Culture (ILC) field trip. Each week, on either Wednesday or Thursday, students will visit a famous place in Florence, where they will be given a professionally guided tour. Yesterday two groups of students visited the Uffizi, and I joined the 3:00 group. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take pictures inside, but I did capture a few moments as students waited to enter, including one who was getting fortified for the experience with a little gelato!

Once inside, my group joined our guide, the wonderfully knowledgeable and witty Angela, for a tour of the Uffizi’s highlights.

The word uffici means “offices” in Italian, and that’s exactly the original purpose of this massive structure. It was built in the late 1500s as offices for Duke Cosimo I’s new administration (yes, Cosimo was a Medici). The architect Vasari made this building unique in that he constructed the upper story an almost continuous wall of glass, allowing spectacular views over Florence and the Arno. Cosimo himself must have appreciated the design as he began displaying the Medici family’s art treasures here beginning in 1581, making it essentially the oldest art gallery in the world.

And Angela led us through this remarkable gallery, explaining in detail many of the most important pieces, including Giotto’s The Ognissanti Madonna, Piero della Francesca’s portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Annunciation, and Boticelli’s Primavera and The Birth of Venus, the latter being a work of art I’ve long desired to see. Angela even stepped back as we were admiring The Birth of Venus to let one of our students, Ben (yes, Pauline, your Ben!), take over as lecturer. Ben had written a detailed paper about this painting for an art history class and was eager to share his ideas and perspectives. We all agreed that he did a fantastic job!

After walking around the Uffizi for about two-and-a-half hours, our feet hurt and we were ready for our next event: wine tasting! Several of us walked back to the school for this cultural event. Our instructor was Todd Bolton, who owns a company called Tuscan Trails, which takes groups into the Tuscan countryside for wine tasting and traditional Tuscan cuisine. Although Todd is an American, he moved permanently to Florence many years ago and is now extremely knowledgeable about Tuscan wines and wine production. During our two-and-a-half hour class, Todd covered so much: the history of Italian wine production, the important wine-producing zones in Italy, Italian wine classifications, grape structure, and the basic compounds in wine. He then began to focus specifically on Chiantis and Chianti Classicos, leading to the moment we had been waiting for: tasting!

During the evening we tasted three Chiantis: a Cantina Leonardo and two Selvapianas. Todd walked us through visual analysis of the wine, where we learned to look for color, limpidity, and consistency. We then moved on to the olfactory analysis, which included determining intensity, complexity, quality using just our noses. We also learned how to distinguish aromas in wines, such as flowers, fruit, herbs, and spices. Finally we got to actually taste the wine, as Todd led us through the gustative analysis. We learned how to determine the amounts of sugars, alcohols, poly-alcohols, acids, tannins, and mineral salts, all in a sip or two. We also learned how to taste for balance, intensity, and persistence. The wines got progressively better as we went along, which of course was Todd’s plan. And the students became more and more knowledgeable about wine as the night went on as well. We had a fantastic time, and my guess is that the students in this class will never look at (or smell or taste) wine in the same way again.