Italian lifestyle travels cooking wines

Day by day I’m impressed by our Carthusian cat. Every day we discover new features of its character and its attitudes. In this short thought about Matisse, I want to show you its position during Illy’s house cleaning (I help Illy too, I swear it). The cat searches a safe place to stay during this chaotic moment and it often hides in strange places. For examples this:

I want to continue my description of Valpolicella Wine with a Valpolicella Superiore produced in Valpantena. It is a valley in the region of Valpolicella but outside the border of Valpolicella Classica, the authentic region. We can distinguish it from the label, the word “Classico” is not mentioned.
This wine is so good, the smell is fruit flavoured and the taste too. I’ll compare this wine, in a future post, with the same nomination of the Valpolicella Classica region. I’m expecting a totally different wine. In fact Valpantena is another valley at north of Verona and the sun, the structure of the hills and the ground produce a microclimate very different than Valpolicella Classica region.
In conclusion, many types of Valpolicella are produced here in Verona and in each valley they are very different to the others.

In Valpantena valley there are many wineries, the most important are Bertani and Pasqua.

A very ancient and popular food of our Venetian region is “polenta”. It looks like a kind of porridge and it’s obtained from cornmeal cooked in salted boiling water.
Usually polenta is yellow, made from yellow cornmeal, but in some parts of our region (especially Venice, Padua and Treviso) it can be also white, obtained from a more uncommon and prestigious kind of white cornmeal. As I was born in Padua, I can still remember this delicious white polenta, which is on the contrary very rare to find here in Verona, where it’s always yellow.
But, what is polenta and how do we eat it?
First of all, this is an ancient peasant dish, a basic food in a poor kitchen, when people lived from the products of their land. Cornmeal fields were very common in our countryside and this explains the habit to make polenta.
Polenta is cooked in boiling water just with some salt (maybe once they didn’t even add any salt) and is served warm and can accompany meat, fish, mushrooms, salami, sausages… It’s like bread, it goes well with almost anything.
The versatility of polenta is given by the fact that you can eat it immediately after cooking, but also in the next days, when it becomes more solid and can be warmed up on the grill or in the pan. Believe me: with its crispy crust, grilled polenta is really delicious!
Traditionally polenta is cooked in a copper pot, but in a modern way we cook it in normal inox pans and it’s delicious anyway.
When it’s ready, it can be transferred in a flat dish or also on a wooden board, it depends also on its consistency. Personally I like when polenta is quite solid, not too liquid.
In my experience, when foreigners eat polenta, their first reaction is not very enthusiastic… But I’m sure they could learn appreciate and love it, if combined with the right food during a typical Venetian dinner!

The people who live in a wine region are very lucky, because it is possible to buy wine, Valpolicella wine in our case, without label, without marketing but however good. Twice a year I make a wine tour with my friends and the goal is to discover a small or new producer who produces Valpolicella selling it also without label. We taste the wine and if we like it, we take it. Essentially, the difference is in the presentation: with a label the bottle looks better, but if we forget this small detail, we find in our glasses the same wine, with the same colour and the same smell. Furthermore, we have an economic saving.

Yes I know, for the experts this could seem a bad thing, but I appreciate first of all the wine…not only its packaging.