During this pandemic, the Chiesa del Carmine winery has grappled with the challenges of having to close their doors for wine tastings and tours of the farm, while still being open for direct sales. In an effort to combat this, we have been shipping wine directly and providing zoom tastings upon the wine’s arrival. This is a great way to bring our vineyard and tastings rooms straight into people’s homes through virtual tastings. These tastings have ranged from overseas distributors, sommeliers and restauranteurs looking for new wines to add to their portfolios, to friends and family groups interested in trying new vintages of our wines from the comfort of their homes. This year we were also obliged to organise our annual meeting to confirm the blends of our new wines with the owners of the Carmine Estate via zoom as they were unable to travel to Umbria. We are pleased to announce the results are very exciting and plan to start bottling these wines in the coming months.
For anyone not acquainted with the concept, a zoom tasting works like this. We ship the wines to people’s homes or offices wherever they are in the world, then we set up a time and provide suggestions of nibbles or actual meals to accompany our wines. The size of the group involved often determines how many bottles people open and this can range from three to six bottles. Some people like to keep it simple and prepare a cheese board or make grissini prior to their tasting whereas others like to go all out. One example of this was a chef from Eataly in New York who prepared an amazing menu of four different pizzas, each with different toppings to match our rose wines. Interestingly, the conclusion was that rose and pizza can be a great combination.
Then we will join you via Zoom and talk you through the wines, just as we would if you were here sitting in our cellar door in our beautiful valley in Umbria. During this tasting we try and answer everyone’s questions and provide an update on what is currently happening in the winery and vineyard as well as locally in Umbria. It has proven to be a great way to re-connect with people who have visited in the past and transport people from their living rooms or offices to Umbria, if only for an hour or two.
Although these are challenging times for Italy present, we look forward to when we can welcome visitors back to our cellar door, winery and beautiful valley so they can experience themselves why our wines are so special. We are particularly excited to hear about past guests plans to return to Umbria and we can’t wait to show them the changes since they were last with us. In the meantime, if anyone would like to give this experience a try, we look forward to hearing from you and will do our best to make sure it is informative, interesting and fun.

