Cavallotto Vineyard & Barolo Wine Museum

On Tuesday, the Economics class had a field trip to the Cavallotto Vineyard and Barolo Wine Museum. Even though I'm not taking the economics class, all 21 of us in the program get to go to all excursions for any and all of the classes, which is pretty cool I guess. To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to this trip all that much because a) I got a cold over the weekend somehow, b) the last museum trip lasted three hours since we had to hear the tour twice, once in Italian, and then translated in English, and c) when we woke up that morning it was rainy and cold. Who would want to go traipsing around a vineyard when it was cold and rainy and muddy?

Regardless, we hauled ourselves out of bed and got to the Campus Center, ready to depart at 830am as scheduled. We took the bus up to the Cavallotto vineyard and thankfully did not have to traipse around a muddy vineyard. Instead, we were quickly ushered into the winery building, where we got a little bit of a tour and explanation on how the wine is made and stored.

After the little tour of the wine cellar, we got to sample the wine! They gave us breadsticks to curb some of the effects of the alcohol, but with the generous samples he gave us of four different types of wine, we all still got pretty tipsy (and it wasn't even 11am yet!), haha. First we sampled a Chardonnay from 2009, and then three different red wines - two from 2006 and one from 2004. I couldn't really taste the difference between the three red ones except for maybe an increase in bitterness the older the wine was. It was still pretty cool though to see and taste what changes as they get older.

Roomies enjoying a sampling of red wine

The four wines that we sampled, in order from right to left

After finishing our four generous samples, we were feeling pretty loopy and ready to take on the next part of our day. We stepped outside, where the weather had taken another turn for the better. We took some pictures of the beautiful landscape that we could now experience and fully appreciate without being under the shade of an umbrella, and then headed back onto the bus for our next stop.

 

 

Now the Barolo Wine Museum is definitely what I'd call a treat, especially after getting all loopy from our wine samplings. This museum was hard to describe.. it's definitely not what you'd expect out of a museum; it was more like Ripley's Believe it or Not meets Harry Potter meets the Twilight Zone. The rooms & exhibits were very colorful, there were a lot of projections and trick mirrors, and a lot of it we really didn't understand how they pertained to wine, but regardless, we were highly amused. The tour guide for this one actually spoke perfect English, but since there was such a big group of us following her through these small spaces, a bunch of us didn't really catch anything she said and were left to decipher the exhibits on our own. Unfortunately we went through the museum fairly quickly, but from my glancing around I personally found it all incredibly fascinating, even after the loopiness wore off, haha.

The tour started at the top of the building, where there were more majestic vistas and hilly landscapes surrounding us.

First room's exhibit. I think this was supposed to portray something about different religions' deities liking wine. There was even a cardboard cutout of Jesus. Definitely an intriguing start to the tour.

The next room was dark with hanging lamps and ticking metronomes with wings. This was supposed to convey something about time.

Third room was brightly lit, having something to do with light. This was also the first room with mirrors, both on the ceiling and the floor. :P

Another little alcove surrounded by mirrors in another room. Trippy trippy! Can you see why we thought this was the coolest museum ever?? Haha.

Later on in the museum, they had these little curtained off sections with displays like this where you had to push a lever or turn a crank to see some kind of exhibit that had something to do with the history of wine. Here's Sasha demonstrating one of these self-operated exhibits.

More trick mirrors. None of these barrels are real; there were about 16 real barrels in a nook completely surrounded by mirrors. All of these are reflections, & if you look closely, you can see my reflection taking the picture in the ceiling mirror.

In yet another room, we found ourselves surrounded by these cardboard cutouts of people, some of which had little tv screens showing a mouth that would move occasionally. I think I glanced at the sign for this room and it said something about people gossiping about a banquet that was to take place.

The tour ended at the wine shop, shown here.

Basically, this turned out to be one awesome field trip. :P