Greetings from Montepulciano

Ciao all--especially Dan Z. from Koehler winery in the Santa Ynez Valley-my daughter Diana will be visiting you shortly with her boyfriend Andrew!

Dan, hope you and the grapes are surviving the fires! We actually brought a bottle of your Magia Nera with us for our hosts. But Veronica and I drank it with our hosts as well as a couple of Canadians who helped pick grapes with us on the day of the harvest. So, since my last update, we spent a day or two around the vineyard. Transferred the red juice into the its final resting place for the next year -- stainless barrel vice oak. Then steralized all the plastic jugs, barrels, etc. for next year's juice. Tasted the stuff before going into the final barrels. Wow! It was really nice grape juice!!! Too bad we won't get to tast the final product...

So yesterday we went on a 12 km hike with Barbara and two of their clients from Australia. A little more walking that I would have liked, but we wound up at a hot spring that has been flowing for some 1300 years or so... Went in the pool, and enjoyed the scenery -- hilltop castles overlooking the olive gardens and vineyards while we we're floating in the steaming sulfur waters. What a wonderful experience. We may have to sneak back there before we go...

A couple of more days and we're off to the south of Italy, and hopefully somewhat warmer temperatures. Hasn't been too cool, but we're starting to miss the socal warmth, or from what we see in the papers, the socal smoke and ash as it burns!!! Not concerned about home, but it is funny to see Malibu and San Diego on the front page of La Republica, the Italian national paper...

Anyway, so Veronica has loaded all our pictures onto a CD, and as fate would have it, we had to rush out of the house today to coordinate cars and pick ups for various guests, etc. Soooooo, I can't load the photos today... We really do have them, but they will have to wait till our next visit. I PROMISE we'll load them before we head south as I don't know what we'll be looking at once we hit the road as far as the internet goes...

So ciao for now; we'll be out of Tuscany in a few days and heading south to the Italian equivalent of, well, let's say Mississippi or Alabama. Sorry to anyone reading this from the South. But that's where I lived 20-something years ago, and from what we read, it's finally moving into the 21st century and becoming somewhat of a tourist destination itself. We'll hit Arbarobello and the Trulli houses, and take a quick photo of my old house and what used to be the base where I was assigned, back when I was 20 years young...

Cheers to all that bother to check us out!

Ray & V.