Take a side road out of Montalcino and immediately the pavement ends. We are on the strade bianche, the white dirt roads of Tuscany. The slopes are steep, steeper than any grade in the States. Vineyard walls threaten to make use of the comprehensive policy I added to our car’s rental contract.
The freshly-tilled farm fields of Tuscany are an umber-hued wide-wale corduroy, velvety and rich. Vineyard leaves are just starting to turn. Asphalt roads, dusty tracks, back and forth and back again. Thirty centuries of agriculture and architecture drifts along in the dusty haze our station wagon tosses up.
We wind our way to Tolaini. It is a clear fall day and, in the distance to the left, the towers of Siena flit in and out of view. This estate is relatively new but built on a half-century of one man’s steadfast ambition. Pier Luigi Tolaini left war-rent Tuscany as a poor teenager. He found his way to Canada and grew a small trucking company to one of the biggest freight operations in North America. That success, though, was never more than a means. The goal was always to return home and make southern Chianti’s best wines. And that he did.
At the highest point of the estate is Al Passo, a copse of hardwoods gathered around an Etruscan tomb. We go there to taste wine and to feel thoroughly ancient, as, I think, we are meant to feel. It is one of those rare places where our world and all those that preceded it seem not so far apart. Back and forth, in and out, past and present. All here at once.
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Virginia Proper 