Fizzy Friday
Prosecco is on the doorstep and I'm keen to buy a bottle for after the day's ride.
Your Next Adventure Awaits!
Thanks for joining me on the serialized journey of North to Norway! If you enjoyed the extracts from my 2022 ride to Tarifa, the full book is available now on Amazon (paperback and e-book) and in select bookshops. Want a signed copy? Just drop me a comment!
This summer, Ralph and I are off to Spain and Portugal – tackling the Picos mountains, exploring Galicia, then heading to Portugal's coast, aiming for Cabo da Roca and eventually Malaga, where the bikes ship home. As you know from the blog, plans can always change!
Look out for posts on our Iberian adventures soon. But first, get ready for a taste of Italy! I'll be sharing a hopefully entertaining series about my 2024 trip to the land of opera, gelato, and pizza over the coming months.
In last week’s episode ‘Hidden History’ I stumbled across a moving tribute to Nazi atrocities in Trieste. I need something to lift my spirits.
Having a home in Spain means I am inevitably drawn to Iberian wines – rioja, albariño, tempranillo. I confess no expertise, but I know what I like, and it’s hard to beat that straw-coloured, bubbly glass of delight that is cava on a hot day or simply when it’s time to kick back. Italian wines rather fall outside my oenosphere. I’m a willing student, however, and when I realized that Prosecco wasn’t only a glass of fizz but was actually a village in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region a short hop outside of Trieste – and more or less directly on the way to Verona – I had to visit it.
I wonder how many summer-dressed girls in heels and shades sipping their glass of fizz are aware that their tipple is named after prosek, which means a ‘path cut through the woods’. It’s of Slovene origin, and the village of Prosecco lies a very short distance from the border with Slovenia. In fact, the local population is mainly Slovenian, as was Maya Kristina, whom I met at the Kante vineyard, which lay at the end of a long dirt track a little distance off the A4 motorway.
Pigs were rustling in the undergrowth as I pulled up in front of what looked like a rustic restaurant, with a pizza oven, a few mismatched chairs, a large slicing machine, and weighing scales (presumably for the pigs, post mortem). A rough, sail-like cover was draped over the front terrace. Bollinger and Freixenet inhabit very different worlds. Hard to imagine, then, that the wines produced here still count amongst the top 10% in the world.
I have written before about my golden rule of not riding and taking any alcohol. Fortunately, in my professional career as a brewer, I have learned the skills of tasting without drinking, aka spitting out. I know it’s akin to the withdrawal method of birth control, missing out on the moment of maximum enjoyment, but I wasn’t going to start breaking my rule here.
Maya lined up several bottles of their finest. They were already opened but stoppered, so I felt slightly less guilty at what I was about to do. She explained about the Malvasia and Chardonnay grapes but particularly about the Karst limestone rocks, which made the terroir such a difficult place to grow vines but which makes an especially pure prosecco. Looking out at where the pigs were scrabbling around in the stony ground, it seemed to me a miracle that they could grow grapes at all. But they did, and the bubbles burst with flavour as I sipped my sample before jettisoning it into a glass. Maya looked at me quizzically. I suppose she gets few visitors who don’t fully partake of the product, but it probably enhanced my (false) credentials as an oenophile.
I bought a bottle of the Brut KK metodo classico, tucked it away in a pannier, and made a mental note to let it rest a good while after its impending shaking-up. She offered me a slice of prosciutto crudo on a bit of bread, which I nibbled gratefully while watching the porker sniffing around my rear wheel before pissing on it. Any sense of vegan remorse vanished rapidly as I grabbed another chunk of toothsome ham.
But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun.’
Inspired by conversation with the girls in Trieste last night, I decided to point the bike, its porcine wheels now dried to a sheen in the sun, in the general direction of the west, where Juliet’s balcony lay in wait. Verona is a good two-and-a-half hours fast ride from the Prosecco region, but the Italians – perhaps influenced by the Germans – have built a series of cracking autostrada around the major cities in the north, where all the money in Italy is. Not for the first time on the trip would I have to make some agonizing decisions about places to miss, and I clung to the E70 as signs for Venezia and Padua (another Shakespearean setting) shot past in a blur.
The speed limit is 130 kph, in theory, but little Fiats, their drivers grimly gripping the steering wheel as the vehicle shook from side to side, would breeze past me, pushed along by a big Mercedes hanging a metre or so off its rear bumper. These toll roads, more haphazardly managed than their Teutonic counterparts, would sometimes take only cash, sometimes only cards, and – on one occasion – the automated booth seemed to want to take neither from me. A big queue built up behind with the expected cacophony of horns blaring, as I found myself going blush pink. I pressed the ‘assistenza’ button, which brought forward none of the kind. Cue more blaring. Suddenly, a hairy arm in a leather jacket reached across me and thumped the speakerphone button hard, where I had merely tickled it. The driver (I presumed from the blacked-out BMW behind) shouted something unintelligible but evidently to the point, and the disembodied voice squeaked a reply before the barrier swung open.
‘Now you can fuck off,’ said Mr. BMW. I wasn’t sure if that was a permissive statement or an exhortation, but I gunned the throttle and disappeared towards Verona faster than strictly allowed, not wishing to find myself surrounded by a swarm of angry drivers intent on running me off the road. Italy was continuing to surprise.
© 2025 Stephen Oliver
You can find my book North to Norway in paperback and Kindle format on Amazon.