- Tour: Turin City Tour
- Tour: Piedmont Vermouth Discovery
- Accommodation:
Relais San Maurizio
- Meals: B
Turin City Tour
This morning, join your local guide for a walking tour of Turin in the historical center.
During the walk, explore the city’s wind past baroque royal palaces and stately porticos, passing by such landmarks as the Palazzo Reale and Palazzo Madama. We’ll dip into a famous 18th century café, Baratti e Milano, where you’ll find some of the most decadent hot chocolate in the world. The morning offers time to pursue your interests, such as the world-famous Egyptian Museum or fascinating Museum of Cinema, with hands-on displays of early moving pictures, or you may choose to ascend Turin’s tallest pinnacle for a spectacular view of the city and Alps.
Continue to Piazza San Carlo, one of the main Baroque style squares in the city, and home to several historic cafes. Imagine you are back in the 19th century and watch with romantic eyes what inspired some of the renowned literary works in history. If of interest we can include a visit to the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista, where the holy shroud is kept!
There will be time to enjoy lunch at a local restaurant in the city this afternoon with suggestions from your guide (to be paid directly).
Piedmont Vermouth Discovery
Following lunch, your guide will bring you on an enchanting discovery of the sweet vermouths of the region. Vermouth di Torino has been a recognized designation in the EU since the early 1990s, but stricter regulations to preserve the style went into effect in 2017, in large part thanks to the push of several producers in the region who came together to form the Vermouth di Torino Institute. Today, a bottle with “Vermouth di Torino” on the label must adhere to the following rules: 50% of the base white wine and at least three of the botanicals used must be sourced from the Piedmont region, it must be bottled between 16% and 22% ABV, and it must contain artemisia (wormwood).
We will consider visits at the following producers this afternoon during your discovery:
Giulio Cocchi Spumanti and Bava Winery
Cocchi Vermouth di Torino is a historic sweet vermouth from Italy’s Piedmont region that raises the bar for aromatized wines. Flavors of rhubarb, bitter orange, cocoa, and baking spice make it complex enough for boozy cocktails, but it’s also gentle enough to sip solo or enjoy in low-ABV drinks. Vermouth di Torino is a collective heritage of Piedmont, which sees in the royal Savoy court as first big promoter of a product which, mainly starting from the late XVIII century, generated a flourishing industry which led Piedmont to become the Kingdom of Vermouth. Storico Vermouth di Torino is still produced according to the original recipe of Giulio Cocchi. This vermouth belongs to the category of the sweet vermouths, or Italian vermouths, sweet and amber as indicated in the manuals of the late XIX century. Storico Vermouth di Torino Cocchi has been the protagonist of the international rebirth of the top-of-the-range vermouths and the renovated interest of the great barmen for the denomination Vermouth di Torino so that it is also familiarly denominated “Cocchi Torino”.
Bordiga
This classic vermouth type is based on Piedmontese white wines, including some Moscato, and infused with a wide range of different botanicals, many of them grown in the Occitan Alps near the winery. The flavor of this vermouth is complex and vivid, with an excellent balance of sweetness and bitterness. Some vermouths taste strongly of a single botanical, but the interplay of components here is distinctive and delicious.
Antica Torino
Vittorio Zoppi and Filippo Antonelli founded the Antica Torino company to produce and rediscover traditional Piedmontese aromatized wines, liqueurs and spirits, creating new recipes inspired by traditional ones. Their first product could only be a vermouth, the symbol of the city’s excellence and elegant lifestyle. Vermouth Rosso derives from constant work at the distillery and from continual experimentation and tasting, with the aim of creating an organoleptic masterpiece. Research into the recipe took many months and many versions of the product to arrive at the definitive one inspired by the most ancient Savoy recipes. The ingredients include home-grown herbs such as absinthe, rhubarb and gentian, grapefruit peel, vanilla pods, rosemary and red thyme, which country-dwellers have always used to aromatize their wines. Thirteen botanicals in all, entirely natural (with no ready-made dyes), processed individually and on a cottage-industry basis, whose complete list remains a secret according to the best Piedmontese tradition: each vermouth, in fact, has its own formula, jealously guarded within the family.
Your guide will return you to your accommodations at the end of the afternoon.