A drive along a narrow road south of Bevagna passing well cultivated vineyards brings you in less than ten kilometers to Montefalco, the home of the Sagrantino di Montefalco, Umbria’s rich, deep, intense and utterly divine red wine.
How I adore Sagrantino, since moving to Umbria it has become one of my very favourite red wines, and where better to taste than its home town.
The streets of Montefalco are littered with Enotecas (wine shops) each offering a different selection of the locally grown DOC wines. Different cantinas make wines of differing styles, and this is born out too in the style of the various enotecas;
So on we trekked past wine whop after wine shop, the picturesque streets equally littered with a smattering of restaurants, but then we caught sight of Pardi’s store.
Pardi is a wonderful store selling their own traditional brand of linens and cotton mixes made in their mill at the delightful sounding town of Bastardo close by Montefalco. I was on the hunt for linens to make table mats for our dining room here at Bellaugello Gay Guest House, and fabric to cover a bedroom chair in one of the suites. Luckily in their store opposite the church of S Francesco, they had just what I was looking for, a mint/sage green linen with embroidered bees. An added bonus was that the utterly charming owner of the mill was in the store and she told me about how her late father and uncle first started the business in 1948 using traditional skills and designs that carry on to this day.
By now it was dusk and as we headed back through the main piazza just above the town hall we saw in the inky blackness the moon and venus
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All in all a great outing, easily done in a day from Bellaugello Gay B&B and having refreshed our research we can now offer wine tours and tastings, but to finish this post on choice items I just have to include this picture of the new Range Rover Evoque parked up in one of the Sagrantino wine trail towns, it too kinda took my fancy…