Let's try an Italian w(h)ine

You’ve had a guided tour of the house and your initial stroll around the village. What shall we do now? First I need to resolve a couple of issues. I’ve mentioned my son, en passant, a couple of times and one eager reader asks if he’s visited our house or was it just his lucky sister. No worries as some Australians seem to say. Son and possible heir has enjoyed the delights of our Ligurian abode on more than one occasion with a myriad variety of friends. His sister too has used mi casa as a base for sneaky forays across the border – she’s bilingual you know but responding well to treatment. Daughter has also enjoyed careering down steep, snowclad inclines both waving sticks and wearing them. She calls it skiing and indulges herself at Limone, no more than a hop, step and broken ankle from our place.

You must also have been worrying yourselves silly over the undoubtedly attractive but hideously recalcitrant ivy that completely covered the facade of our house. You may recall that it had infiltrated the sanitation piping of the property with catastrophic consequences. It had to go. For several days I attempted leaning out of various windows and attacking the ivy with saws and scissors. After slightly less than a week I had successfully removed approximately 1% of the offending foliage. It was time to hand over to a higher power. Our local mentor and all round good egg, Vittorio, promised to have solved the problem prior to our next visit. Call me naive if you will, (was it really necessary to shout out like that?), but trusting is my middle name, fortunately tempered by my double-barrelled surname, No-One. True to his word, when next we came, the ivy was gone. A little later so was most of my life’s savings. Apparently one of those extendable scaffolding contraptions that sit in the rear of custom made vehicles had to be utilised. The cost was sufficient to relieve poverty in one of East Africa’s smaller nations. I’m still in therapy but making progress.

So what shall we do today? I know, we’ll have a barbeque on the terrace. We’ll need wine and lots of it if I’m in charge of the cooking. Where shall we get it? On one of our first forays we tried a wine wholesaler in Camporosso. Now here’s a funny thing. In the UK if you buy a bottle of wine and it costs X, then a case of, say, twelve bottles, will cost less than 12 x X. It’s called quantity discount. So I asked how much the Rossesse di Dolceaqua was. Seven euros. And if I buy twelve bottles? The sales assistant didn’t understand the question. I tried again. Eventually it became clear that even if I bought the entire stock it would cost me 7 euros a bottle. (This lack of incentive to spend more seems endemic to the Italian psyche, Having stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights during an early reccee, I enquire what the rate would be if we stayed for a week on our next visit. I was greeted with a look of total bafflement. You know the answer – seven times the nightly rate. Weird or what?) We continued our wine search with a visit to Gajaudo, a wine seller to the North of Isolabona. Here, at least, we were encouraged to sample some of their wares. Having decided on some Vermentino, (‘for the ladies’ as those Aussies would say), and some Rossesse, I risked scraping the bottom of the barrel (geddit?) and grabbed a few bottles of their vino da tavola. A snip at something like 5 euros, when a euro knew its subservient role to the British pound, It was surprisingly robust and merited another trip some weeks later.

But what’s this, a Lidl has opened in Vallecrosia? Shurely shome mishtake? We checked it out. Actually its perfect for non-foods – loo rolls, kitchen foil and the like. Expect low prices but don’t expect big name brands. The wine section was really scary. Not a single bottle over 4 euros and most around 2. No local stuff but the ubiquitous Pinot Grigio and lots of Sicilian red. We’ve tried a couple and no complaints as you get what you pay for. But if you’re prepared to be disloyal to Liguria, there’s a wine seller at the Ventimiglia market who specialises in the wines of Piemonte. Barbera d’Alba is my current favourite. Which reminds me. There’s a wine bar we’ve fallen in love with that specialises in… but wait a minute we’re late for the barby and there’s food to buy. See you next week.