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The Adventure of '98
In the spring of 1998, just after Valerie graduated from University of Santa Barbara with a B.A. in Communication, Dan and Valerie embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. During the planning phases of what was supposed to be a simple post-graduation, wine education trip to Europe, they discovered that if they rode bicycles instead of renting a car, and camped instead of staying in hotels, they could stay for months instead of a few weeks! It didn't matter that neither of them had ever been to Europe, spoke French or Italian, or had ever toured by bicycle before. On March 17th of 1998, after months of planning, they boxed up their bikes and camping gear and boarded a plane for Paris.
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For four months they cycled from wine region to wine region, jumping on trains occasionally to cover more ground. The spring of 1998 was a particularly wet year, and El Niño had followed them across the ocean. They spent many nights in the small two-man tent, resorting to small, family owned hotels when they needed to dry out a bit and do some laundry in the hotel sink. They shopped for food at local grocery stores and open markets, and ate in small restaurants with the local residents. They met hundreds of people whose name they never knew, but who helped them figure out where to find food, lodging, and the wineries that they had appointments with. A few "angels" helped them above and beyond normal courtesy, walking with them to find lodging in a town with no open campground or hotel rooms, helping them lift their bikes and gear into the trains (not an easy task when the bikes weigh 90 pounds), and one very special Frenchman who drove them to a larger city when they had nowhere to stay and not enough daylight to cycle another 20 kilometers. They experienced firsthand the terroir of the Loire Valley, Cognac, Bordeaux, Côtes du Rhône, Champagne and Alsace in France, and Tuscany, Sardinia, Piedmont and the Alto Adige in Italy, stopping to visit some of the most famous wine houses, and some incredibly small ones that most will never hear of. They met winery owners and winemakers, and tasted wines in caves, wineries and even the vintners’ homes. They even spent a week in Verona at the Vin Italia wine tasting, testing the limits of their internal organs as they tried to taste as many of the wines as they could from the thousands of producers during the day, and feasted on winery dinners and more wine at night.
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Since then Valerie and Dan have returned to Europe to explore some of the regions they missed, and revisit their favorites. They went back to France with the bikes in 2000 and experienced their first Michelin 3-star restaurant in Champagne (Les Crayeres in Reims), then continued down to Burgundy, tasting in the cellars of Domaine de la Romanée Conti and literally cycling through the vineyards of Burgundy on narrow dirt roads used for hundreds of years by the vignerons. A few years later they returned to Italy without the bikes, focusing on Asti and Alba in Piedmont and the villages of Montepulciano and Montalcino in Tuscany before heading north to Florence to experience their second Michelin 3-star restaurant, Enotecca Piniciorri. All of these travels have helped Dan and Valerie to better understand the old-world winemaking philosophies and methods, and to experience the wines of France and Italy where they were created, with the regional foods with which they were meant to be enjoyed.
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