Le Marche - lotsa pasta, a bit more wine

So, this account is jumping around a bit, but then so did we.

Last Wednesday's pasta tour of Spinosi was great fun. We found ourselves on another hilltop, in the village of Campofilone, in more glorious sunshine, where we donned our paper outfits and toured the small factory that distributes its dried pasta around the world, and its fresh products locally.

Afterwards, we had a lunch (Spinosini with lemon and prosciutto) prepared by our host Marco Spinosi himself and after that, we did our best to the shelves of the Spinosi shop, and all piled back on the bus to commence our previously reported afternoon of pork.

Some of Spinosi's Spiritosini biscotti for afters; these ones were almond, very nice indeed.

On Thursday, we had another wine talk, from the excellent and extremely well-travelled Gianpiero Rotini, Export Director for Umani Ronchi. He showed us round their cellars, including the new one which is something of an architectural marvel, buried in the hillside, with state of the art brickwork and underground humidification controls.

He was hugely informative and interesting on the subject of wine marketing and shared a lot of great tidbits for our grateful cogitation. He cleared up one area of confusion for me as a wine consumer: the Montepulciano grape is native to Le Marche, but is often confused with a Tuscan Sangiovese product from the Tuscan village of Montepulciano.

He also told us that wine is subject to the most restrictive legislation after food, which always makes for interesting challenges when approaching new markets. He told us about the punitive taxation on alcohol that is hindering European exports to India; the difficulties in distributing to a diverse and segmented market in the US; and the inward regional focus of the Spanish market which make it a difficult one to penetrate.

Italy, he said, was the hardest country to sell wines in. A well-established culture of daily consumption is offset by difficulties in transport and distribution: there is not a good road transportation network (those mountains again!) which makes it hard both to work as a distributor and to ship your product around the country. And a lot of the consumption is local, largely by preference and tradition, so it can be hard for new wines to break in.

On the theme of profit-driven distribution, we heard that international marketing has been subject to the greed that the market economy invites: so the imported wines we often recognise as characteristic of Italy - Chianti, Lambrusco - had in the past swamped export markets simply because they are immensely profitable for export = cheap to buy and can be sold for huge mark-ups.


After tasting some wines (Verdicchio), and eating some lunch and tasting some more wines (Montepulciano), we had a whirlwind tour of the Moreno Cedroni factory, which was apparently in its afternoon clean-up mode, so we didn't actually see anything being made. Probably most factories don't need 24 shutter-happy foodies sticking their noses in production, but it was a bit disappointing to be whirled round in 20 minutes flat. Pretty jars and interesting ingredients, though. Not everyone can spin a buck from a tin of stewed monkfish tripe, or sea-snail (raguse) with tomato, garlic and wild fennel. And the fig and tangerine marmalade sounded promising, though I couldn't see any back at the shop at Umani Ronchi. So I satisfied myself with a bottle of top-flight dessert wine (Maximo) and another of Montepulciano (Cumaro, named for the small red berry that grows on Monte Conero).

Our day ended, more or less, with a fabulous shop-a-thon at Azzurra, a purveyor of all things Marchese ("vini e tipicità delle Marche") in another seaside town, Numani. Upon first arrival we pressed our noses hopefully against the windows, which were ominously dark: oh no, said someone, it's Thursday afternoon. Which of course is the giorno di chiusura we all know and love (not) in Parma, which makes those from twentyfourhoursevendayaweek retail cultures stomp their feet and wave their credit cards in rage. But of course this tale has a happy ending: somehow we managed to get in the door and buy, buy, buy. I'm still not sure if it was by special arrangement, but we think our saintly driver Franco might have had a hand in it...

Vancouver's Italian food trail

The day after the BC government announced funding for improvements for the province's transportation, I travelled from Victoria to Vancouver using only public transportation. For those not familiar with the art of getting off this island, my options were:

1. Fly: from the Inner Harbour, round-trip fares run about $275 (tax included) on a seaplane; airport to airport it's about $300, plus local travel costs. I guess it would take 2-3 hours door to door. Each direction.

2. Drive: the ferry fare would have been $47.80 in each direction, a round-trip cost of $95.60, plus gas and parking in Vancouver. To make the ferry I wanted (without incurring an extra $35 round-trip reservation fee) I would have had to allow about 4-5 hours travel time door to door, in each direction.

3. Private bus line (this company has a monopoly on direct non-stop service to and from ferry terminals on both sides): the round-trip cost would be $83.00 plus about $10 in local bus fares, and it would have taken (door to door) about 5 hours in each direction.

4. Public bus service: the round trip cost was $39.60 and it took me about 6 hours, door to door each way. Curiosities of public bus travel include: the Vancouver bus fare was a nice round $5 from Tsawwassen terminal, but they will only take coins! The Victoria bus that runs from Swartz Bay terminal to downtown costs $3 (and will take bills) but the route's publicity shouts out that they have no room for luggage: We do our best to accommodate all customers, they tell us, but oversize luggage and backpacks can be difficult to accommodate on any transit system.

So whatever you do, you lose. Though I was happy with the economies of my route - and I managed to read all of Michael Pollan's terrific new book, In Defense of Food, during the trip, which put the ferry's dismal food offerings into perspective. I was pleased to have brought my own: which was indeed food; not too much; mostly plants.

Once I arrived, I had just time to forage for a quick supper, and found some truly awful sushi on the food floor of an underground mall at Granville Station, then went on to an STC meeting to learn something about authoring documents with DITA.

The next day, to keep me from drifting too fully into the dark world of technical writing, I was whisked away to spend a delightful day touring some Italian groceries. Our first stop was the wonderful Cioffi's, which has an awesome meat counter, generous offerings of salumi, olives and cheeses. I bought some taralli! and a few pieces of their excellent pancetta for our risotto of the evening; the staff were extremely kind and charming.

Then on to Ugo & Joe's, which was very big and had lots and lots of meats and cheeses on offer, although I paused at seeing some cheese labelled as "Grana Parmigiano"... hmm; something not quite kosher there; because they were also selling cheese labelled Parmigiano-Reggiano, I wonder if the mystery cheese may have been my old friend Grana Padano, the labelling blurring some boundaries between two quite different products. Because both these cheeses are technically referred to as "Grana" cheeses, meaning they are similar styles of cheese - hard and granular - produced in much the same way (though the rules over milk quality and length of aging are the chief differences) it is technically correct to call the artisanal product Grana Parmigiano-Reggiano; what this particular shop meant by "Grana Parmigiano" will have to remain a mystery until my next visit.

After that, we were a little peckish, so we stopped at Pasticceria Italia where the pizza had been recommended to us. It looks like their bread can't get any fresher as there was a customer outside cooling his loaves on the roof of his car when we got there. We bought a giant slab of tomato & cheese pizza, which was fabulous. The lovely woman behind the counter said to us, "See you tomorrow!" and we sure understood what she meant.



Then another treasure - Renzullo Food Market was compact but well-provisioned, and the owners were delightful, knowledgeable and friendly.

We then did a swift little tour of offerings on one corner of Commercial Drive.



We stopped first at Fratelli bakery, then to the La Grotta del Formaggio (lots of cheese, yes, and a great selection of olive oils which we had to fight the crowd thronging the sandwich bar to get to). Most excitingly, I saw a familiar package on the pasta shelf: it was our old pal Spinosi from Le Marche! Very thrilling to know that his products have made it to this far outpost of the pasta eating world.



We then nipped down the block to the doors of JN & Z Deli which sadly for us were closed (winter holiday), and so we finally subsided with a giant, strong and beautiful cappuccino at Continental.



A final stop at Bosa's spacious big store, where I came away with a giant bag of beautiful fresh walnuts.