San Casciano in Val di Pesa

After a few days exploring the Tuscan region, we had a staycation in our villa today and made use of the included extras with our Airbnb!

We started with our included tour of the main castle/villa where we explored and learnt about the facility which had been producing wine and olive oil for over 600 years. We picked up a few fun facts along the way:
- It takes approximately 20kg of olives to make 1L of olive oil!!
- The villa's land was bought in 1300s - the main building was built in the 1500s and it is heritage protected so cannot be touched. There is also one of the oldest archives of Italian records at this site.
- They only use French oak for the winr barrels. They don't use American oak as this gives an undesirable smokey flavour to the wines.
- There are different types of vats used to develop different flavours in the wine. We saw different types including oak, wood, steel, concrete and terracotta. It was very cool seeing some of these very old vats in the original cellars from the 1300s.
- Interestingly, they had to have vats custom made for their main area as that area used to be a stable for horses and it has unusually shaped doors. Because its heritage listed, the doors can't be changed so they had unusually shaped vats created so they could fit through the doors.
- The number of olive oil held in terracotta jars used to be a mark of how wealthy the family was as it was always an expensive commodity. There are still 39 terracotta jars in storage which are no longer used for storage of olive oil but show the prosperity of the Corsini family.

We also saw numbers written on the walls of the area where olive oil is kept. These numbers were the old "accounting system" used whereby the olive pickers calculated how much olive they had picked. We also saw information about how olive oil was previously produced - they previously used a cow to go around in circles and mush down the olives but, now luckily for the cows, they do this with very high tech machines!

We then concluded our trip with a complementary wine tasting of some delicious organic wines (the villa is 100% organic) whilst we enjoyed what was probably the best lunch of the entire trip! As well as the included olive oil tasting (with Tuscan bread), we had zucchini flowers and a gnocchi for an entree which was delicious. We then shared a florentine style steak for main which had pecorino and truffle over it - absolutely to die for!

We had no room for dessert and so we went for a (very hot) walk around the vineyard before opting to chill by the pool for the rest of the day and have a quiet night in.Read more