DISCOVER HISTORY AND CULTURE OF FLORENTINE FOOD

The Grandma arrives to Il Fratellini to buy wine

Today, The Grandma and her friends are enjoying local food in Firenze. Tuscany is a land with its own traditional cuisine. It has a high quality and it is delicious. Wines are very important in Tuscany where you can find a great variety of them. The Grandma wants to share a post that she has read about wines and she also wants to talk about Tuscan cuisine.

Before tasting the most delicious dishes and wines, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 7).

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Tuscany is home to some of the world's most notable wine regions. Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano are primarily made with Sangiovese grape whereas the Vernaccia grape is the basis of the white Vernaccia di San Gimignano.

Tuscany is also known for the dessert wine Vin Santo, made from a variety of the region's grapes. Tuscany has thirty-three Denominazioni di origine controllata (DOC) and eleven Denominazioni di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG).

The history of viticulture in Tuscany dates back to its settlements by the Etruscans in the 8th century BC. Amphora remnants originate in the region show that Tuscan wine was exported to southern Italy and Gaul as early as the 7th century BC. By the 3rd century BC, there were literary references by Greek writers about the quality of Tuscan wine.

Chianti Classico, Firenze

From the fall of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages, monasteries were the main purveyors of wines in the region. As the aristocratic and merchant classes emerged, they inherited the sharecropping system of agriculture known as mezzadria. This system took its name from the arrangement whereby the landowner provides the land and resources for planting in exchange for half, mezza, of the yearly crop.

Many Tuscan landowners would turn their half of the grape harvest into wine that would be sold to merchants in Florence. The earliest reference of Florentine wine retailers’ dates to 1079 and a guild was created in 1282.

The Arte dei Vinattieri guild established strict regulations on how the Florentine wine merchants could conduct business. No wine was to be sold within 91 metres of a church. Wine merchants were also prohibited from serving children fewer than 15 or to prostitutes, ruffians and thieves. In the 14th century, an average of 30,000 cubic metres of wine was sold every year in Florence.

More information: Visit Florence

The earliest references to Vino Nobile di Montepulciano wine date to the late 14th century. The first recorded mention of wine from Chianti was by the Tuscan merchant Francesco di Marco Datini, the merchant of Prato, who described it as a light, white wine. The Vernaccia and Greco wines of San Gimignano were considered luxury items and treasured as gifts over saffron. 

During this period Tuscan winemakers began experimenting with new techniques and invented the process of governo which helped to stabilize the wines and ferment the sugar content sufficiently to make them dry. In 1685 the Tuscan author Francesco Redi wrote Bacco in Toscana, a 980-line poem describing the wines of Tuscany.

Joseph buys local food in Mercato Centrale, Firenze

The region of Tuscany includes seven coastal islands and is Italy's fifth largest region. It is bordered to the northwest by Liguria, the north by Emilia-Romagna, Umbria to the east and Lazio to the south. To the west is the Tyrrhenian Sea which gives the area a warm Mediterranean climate.

The terrain is quite hilly, over 68% of the terrain, progressing inward to the Apennine Mountains along the border with Emilia-Romagna. The hills serve as a tempering effect on the summertime heat with many vineyards planted on the higher elevations of the hillsides.

The Sangiovese grape performs better when it can receive more direct sunlight, which is a benefit of the many hillside vineyards in Tuscany. The majority of the region's vineyards are found at altitudes of 150–500 metres. The higher elevations also increase the diurnal temperature variation, helping the grapes maintain their balance of sugars and acidity as well as their aromatic qualities.

More information: The Grand Wine Tour

Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Tuscany returned to the rule of the Habsburgs. It was at this point that the statesman Bettino Ricasoli inherited his family ancestral estate in Broglio located in the heart of the Chianti Classico zone. Determined to improve the estate, Ricasoli travelled throughout Germany and France, studying the grape varieties and vinicultural practices. He imported several of the varieties back to Tuscany and experimented with different varieties in his vineyards. However, in his experiments Ricasoli discovered that three local varieties -Sangiovese, Canaiolo and Malvasia- produced the best wine.

In 1848, revolutions broke out in Italy and Ricasoli's beloved wife died, leaving him with little interest to devote to wine. In the 1850s Oidium Uncinula necator and war devastated most of Tuscany's vineyards with many peasant farmers leaving for other parts of Italy or emigrate to the Americas.

More information: The Culture Trip

The legendary culinary excesses with which medieval barons and, later, the Medici and their pals have established their table habits have not passed down through the ages.

Bistecca Fiorentina, Florentine steak

While the most of the population could rarely afford meat, and in times of bad harvests cooked dishes made of anything that came to hand, including tree bark, Florence's riches could eat up of delicacies such as beef, pheasant, peacock, pike and eel.

All of these dishes were dressed in all sorts of weird and wonderful sauces -sometimes to disguise rancidity hard to avoid in the days without refrigerators, ranging from such red sauces as savore sanguino, containing wine, raisins, meat, cinnamon, sandal and sumac, to spicy concoctions of ground almonds, cinnamon, ginger and cloves.

It was very common to cook pies very big made of all but the kitchen utensils thrown into what today might appear a strange mix: pork, dates, fruit, cured meats, eggs -you name it, they chucked it in.

More information: Visit Florence

Still today, even without such medieval extravagance, the modern tourist in Florence can appreciate a rich variety of cooking: from simple local dishes through to Tuscan and Italian regional specialities. In Tuscan cooking, tradition holds a place of big importance.

If the chefs do change and vary their recipes, generally they remain faithful to the old ways. Someone solemnly state exactly what sauce will go with which kind of pasta considering any deviation from the rules with scorn.

Pasta does not find in a place of honour in traditional Tuscan menus. It's commonly believed that the Arabs firstly introduced pasta to Sicily in the early Middle Ages. From there it was later exported to the rest of Italy. Even today pasta dishes are not considered, strictly speaking, a local product.

In many restaurants, the menu is heavily influenced by the seasonal ingredients available at the moment. It's a choice that works well and attracts important people from all over the world indeed, he's quite a success

More information: Visit Tuscany

The discovery of a wine is of greater moment than the

discovery of a constellation. The universe is too full of stars.
 

Benjamin Franklin