wine travel

Touring and tasting your way through the vineyards of Europe is one of the highlights for any visitor to the continent. You only need to glance through the top ranked activities on TripAdvisor or Winerist to realise just how potent a tourist magnet anything wine or vineyard related is! After all, a glass of wine screams holiday and relaxation, especially in the picture perfect settings some European vineyards call home.

Yet, thanks to the rise of the budget airline (and those sneaky extra fees incurred for checked luggage), along with a wad of misinformation about just how much wine you can take home with you on a plane, it’s perhaps more rare that any wine is purchased directly at the vineyard. Which is a real shame, since there is more than one good reason to buy more at the cellar door. In fact, here at Lazenne we’ve come up with the five best!

This week we are talking Italy, and more specifically the Italian northwest region of Piedmont. We've asked expat and local resident Valerie Quintanilla why Piedmont is a must for wine lovers thinking about visiting Italy.

The first time I heard about the Piedmont wine region (Piemonte in Italian) was during a business dinner with an Italian colleague in the United States. I had a trip to Italy planned with wine as my focus. I gushed about visiting the Valpolicella to experience Amarone and of course Tuscany — because back then I thought wine travel in Italy was not complete without a trip to Tuscany.

As she shook her head a disapproving click-click came from her mouth. “No, no. If you want Italian wine, you go to Piemonte,” she said.

I had never heard of the region. My eyes widened as she described a rural wine mecca in the hills of Northern Italy, surrounded by the Alps and steeped in wine making traditions. I knew I had to go there.