European Wine Tours

Relaxing on the back porch of your house and enjoying a glass of your favorite Italian red or white you look down at the bottle from where the wine was poured. Noticing the label and the picture of the beautiful estate from which the wine was produced with its flowing hillside of grapevines and sloping mountainous terrain a natural curiosity grows. After admiring the bottle you gaze out from your back porch and while it still looks attractive with its various arrays of flowers you cannot help but feel as if you are missing out on something. As a wine fanatic you make your trips to the local wineries, however, now, you want to see more.

What better time than the present to see the stunning countryside proudly displayed on the bottles of wine you drink and visit the various regions famous for their vino.

Depending on whatever your knowledge of wine, your favorite type or favorite region there is a tour suited for your personal taste. And three choices to turn your wine dream into a reality are La Dolce Vita, Luxury Wine Tours and Insider Wine Tours all offering their own unique spin on the world of travel and wine.

Cellar Tours is a Luxury Wine Tours company, offering exclusive chauffeured food and wine vacations in Spain, Portugal and Italy for English speakers. They specialize in custom designed vacations, events and incentives related to food and wine. Cellar Tours is run by Genevieve McCarthy and her husband Des.

"From the time I started working in wine, I was instantly enamored." said McCarthy who got her start at Oddbins in Ireland. Oddbins is a UK chain of wine merchants that heavily promotes the wine education of its staff. McCarthy did the wine courses and ran corporate wine tastings. Her next job was at the Wine Development Board running wine courses, followed by Findlaters, the leading importer of fine wines at the time. There she was organizing corporate wine tasting events and managing the shop in the historic Vaults.

"Oddbins exposed me to wines from all over the world, from Greece to Australia and Lebanon to Oregon. I became fascinated by the different terroirs, the history of winemaking in each country and also to traveling to wine country. Learning languages was another hobby and crossing over into a wine and travel business based in Continental Europe was the perfect fit. I had lived in Spain before and we saw a hole in the market in organized wine tours for English speakers there, and so we set up the travel agency in 2003 in Madrid."

La Dolce Vita Wine Tours is one of the leading specialists in Italian wine tours and is run by another husband and wife, Pat Thomson and Claudio Bisio who believe the best way to enjoy and learn about wine is on location, close to the land and the people who produced it.

"Our Italian wine tours provide full immersion in Italy's wine culture, offering an enjoyable learning experience for wine enthusiasts of all types, from the casual imbiber to the serious connoisseur," Thomson said. Thomson began traveling to Italy 25 years ago, when she spent time in Florence studying Italian Renaissance art. After getting her Masters in art history, she subsequently moved into journalism, and now writes about Italian wine, food, and travel for Tastes of Italia, Gastronomica and other magazines. Pat's interest in wine also began with that fateful college trip to Italy. It was subsequently nurtured with excursions to wine country in California, Washington, and New York, as well as formalized studies through the London-based Wine & Spirits Education Trust. Pat and Claudio met while biking in Piedmont and now divide their time between New York and Italy. A member of the Society of Wine Educators, Pat leads tours in Italy and directs La Dolce Vita's US operations.

"We were looking for something to get us back and forth between Italy and New York and we met biking and it was a common interest but there many adventure travel companies out there but when I investigated there were very few wine tours. He and I both had an interest in wine and it seemed like a better idea than going against some 400 bike tour companies. “For my husband, who is from Piedmont, it’s his natural birthright to enjoy great wine. Growing up his family owned a small vineyard and his uncle, who owned a trattoria allowed Claudio to assist him selecting wines to sell. We come at wine from different angles but it makes for a nice combination on the tour."

A third option, Insider Wine Tours is based in Washington, D.C and is run by Sabrina Moriconi, Alfio Moriconi and John Giebler. Alfio lives in DC while Sabrina and John (a certified sommelier) live in different parts of Italy so they can be closer to the tour and wine regions. In the mid eighties Giebler left his job as Head Produce Buyer for Whole Foods Market in Boston, with an around-the-world air ticket. He ended up in France and found work on a couple of farms.

"It was a great experience to get my French up to speed, learn a lot about French culture, and see another side of the whole cycle of where our food comes from. For the couple of years I did that, I also went to Burgundy each year to help with the harvest. It was incredible, hard physical work, but so interesting to see the whole winemaking process. I was hooked!"

For the next several years though, he worked for an active travel company organizing and leading bike tours in France, Italy, and Spain. That’s how he met Sabrina, who was working for the same company. The best bicycling is often near vineyards according to Giebler, so he was able to feed that passion as well, taking advantage of the opportunities to learn about and taste the wines in the great European wine regions.

"Living in France for several years I have been able to get to know a lot of the country. I know it better than my native United States at this point, since I’ve lived here so many years,” said Giebler. “In order to do the best job possible, we decided to limit our tours to France and Italy, and most of our tours are in the better-known regions there. But I’m always excited when somebody asks to visit a lesser-known region, like Emilia-Romagna in Italy. There are so many places we could do wonderful tours, but the most popular destinations are Bordeaux and Tuscany."

Alfio Moriconi came up with the idea for Insider Wine Tours. He has dedicated his life to finding great wines and to creating meaningful relationships with the people that make them. With Insider Wine Tours, his experience in the wine industry complements his daughter's vast experience in tourism. Alfio has led countless wine tours in France, Italy and Spain and hosted TV’s “Wine and Cooking Center”. In 1972 the French Government awarded him "Croix de Chevalier du Mérite Agricole" for his academic work in wine.

"If you’d like to talk to Alfio and to me, you will get two different views of the company," said Giebler. Alfio is of retirement age, and has been in the wine world most of his life: buying and teaching wine, organizing tours with people, and building strong relationships with producers. His daughter, Sabrina, and I come from a tourism background. We are all passionate about wine. Sabrina and Alfio have a natural, organic approach, while I’m fascinated with all the details about wine and winemaking. I guess I’m the wine geek here.

"Between Alfio’s vast experience and contacts, Sabrina’s organization, and my passion for bringing people to the wines they love, our young company is developing a growing community of happy customers."

For McCarthy and Luxury wine tours their first tours were orientated towards scheduled departures and mixed groups but they soon found that clients wanted to travel on their own dates, and on their own, so they began to specialize in private chauffeured wine tours. Their clientele pushed them more and more up-market and so by the beginning of 2004 they were offering ultra luxury wine tours. As they started to get repeat business, they needed to launch new destinations so they expanded slowly but surely into Portugal (Alentejo, Douro, etc), Italy (Piedmont, Tuscany, and Veneto to begin and over time they incorporated Sicily, Campania, Friuli, Marche, Umbria and France (Champagne). They are on site inspection monthly, visiting new wineries, restaurants and hotels and their next regions to offer tours will include Puglia in Italy and Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rhone and Alsace in France. Eventually they will offer non European destinations and they like the idea of South Africa and New Zealand.

"We are high end and small volume," said McCarthy, "which allows us to have a very personal touch with all clients. I am involved in every way for the tours from admin to sales to organizing to logistics and follow up. Myself or my colleagues call clients during the tours, to make sure all is going well, say hello, etc. The tours are completely tailor made for guests depending on their interests, level of wine knowledge (enthusiast, collector, expert, etc), and desired pace (some people like to begin the day´s activities at 9AM and others at noon). We look after clients from the moment their planes lands until they take off, and guests have a private chauffeur throughout the whole tour. We organize all kinds of things related to food and wine from vineyard walks and vertical tastings to truffle hunts, private cooking classes in city lofts and gastronomic societies, to private walking tours in cities (Siena, Barcelona, Lisbon, etc) with professional art historian guides. The tours last as long as the clients like, from day tours to three week long Grand Tours."

At La Dolce Vita, according to Thomson, their trips are soup to nuts. The tours run six days for the regular tours and seven days for the hiking tours. They are relatively short and focus on one region of Italy per tour but within the region they will divide into two subgroups. In Tuscany they have a tour that starts in the Northern half and ends in the southern half. The price of our tours includes everything they do during the day plus the hotels as well as dinners. They have a little free time, but not too much because At Dolce Vita they are trying to fill their guests time with things they couldn’t find on their own.

"It's not the kind of bus tour where it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium. But rather honing in on one particular area but at the same time covering a lot of turf."

La Dolce Vita normally tries to steer away from the tourist traps. Most that travel to Italy only travel to the cities such as Rome, Florence and Venice while never seeing the countryside and of course when you’re doing a wine tour you’re in the countryside because that is where the vineyards are. When Thomson and her husband set up the tours they were determined to run the majority of the tours themselves.

"Ours is a business like any other and we have to tend to it like a business but the best part of it is going back and forth to Italy and building the relationships with the winemakers."

One thing Thomson wanted to express about the trip is doing wine tours in Europe is completely different from doing tours in Napa Valley or Sonoma. "In Europe they don’t have walk in tasting rooms, they may have a room to taste the wine but there isn’t staff. So you cannot expect to just drive up and have someone speak English to you." One thing one of our clients said is our tours are for people who don’t do tours. There are a lot of people, like us, who wouldn’t go on tours, but it’s smart in certain circumstances. We spend a lot of time scouting wineries not only looking for great wine of course, but also important history, like where Chianti was created, and places with nice people who aren’t bothered by being your host.

One similarity each company has is the variety of people who attend the tours. According to McCarthy the thing that all of their clients have in common is they love wine and want a luxurious private tour. The similarities stop there. They have had winemakers from California, politicians from Malaysia, car moguls from Europe, economists, stock brokers, and celebrities- truly all walks of life. The majority of our clients come from the USA, but we have had guests from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Japanese, Korean, Indian and from all over Europe from Finland and Estonia to Poland and Croatia.

"The most important part of the tour for us is the feedback and we use this as a constant way to monitor suppliers, see where we could have improved, what new ideas we can incorporate.” said McCarthy. “Client satisfaction is the most important thing for us as over half of our business is repeat." (For some feedback from their tours visit http://www.cellartours.com/testimonials.html)

The one thing everyone has in common with Inside Wine Tours is that they love wine. While they do have some people who have studied a lot and want to know every little detail of the winemaking processes most of their customers simply love wine and food and are looking for a fun, enjoyable vacation, where they can learn something new as well.

"It’s fantastic to make the connection between the wines we drink, and the people and places they come from,” said Giebler. “When I was the produce buyer for Whole Foods Market, one of the things I enjoyed most was sitting down to dinner every day. Usually I knew the person who had grown a lot of what was on my plate, and I could always picture the places where it all came from. Leading wine tours is similar for me, and I love helping people learn more about wine, and getting to know the people and places that produce them.

Inside Wine Tours also thrives on the feedback they get and people are especially impressed with the genuine, warm family welcomes we get from the wine makers and owners. "My favorite comments are from the people who say they’ve been on other wine tours, but that this is the one where they really understood the techniques, and got to know these little places that make such great wines and the people who make them.," said Giebler.

At La Dolce Vita the tours are 95% American but as far as the level of wine interest it varies from person to person. There are those who like to drink wine and those who don’t know much about it to those who are intense collectors and educators and everything in between.

"Often they come as mixed couples," said Thomson. "You may have one person who is very into wine and a spouse who is just happy to be there and drink wine so during our tour we keep in mind both types of clients and navigate between them to keep them both happy."