Dreamscapes Travel & Lifestyle Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dreamscapes.ca/i/739845
In the Ultimate Italy trip from Insight Vacations Luxury Gold guests enjoy wine pairings with Luxury Gold Signa- ture dinners and experience wine tastings in Tuscany with fabulous sur- prises. We engaged in a new Signature experience consisting of a winery tour- cooking class combination at the Villa Dianella in Vinci led by a third-genera- tion winemaker who escorts personal tours of the Fattoria Dianella, a restored wine cellar producing Chianti wine for over three centuries, and sampled some of his favourite Chiantis. On another day we departed our posh historic hotel, the Villa le Maschere, which is a grand late-Renais- sance country estate from the 16 th century, and conveniently walked next door to a family restaurant, the truffle- rich Ristorante le Maschere Enoteca, which specializes in Tuscan dishes. The Luxury Gold experience was an unfor- gettable wine-tasting lunch on the patio amid olive groves and ancient oak trees overlooking the Tuscan hills and Lake Bilancino in the heart of the majestic Mugello. A WINE LOVER'S DELIGHT experience from Luxury Gold Insight Vaca- tions, where priceless portraits flank the Medici's secret passageway over the Arno River by the gold shop havens along the Ponte Vecchio. Afterward we return to our historic luxury hotel, the Villa Maschere, hidden in the bucolic Mugello and resume our Tuscan epicurean adventure at a family-run restau- rant. Rivasud, a slow-food movement establishment big on the one-kilometre diet, is fuelled by local products and helmed by a chef and his brother. We relax in this rustic farmhouse with its wood-burning oven that bakes pizza to perfection and dine on plates of roasted meats like sublime bis- tecca alla Fiorentina, homemade pappardelle with tender slivers of duck, and raise our Chianti glasses yet again. La dolce vita indeed. DS