Bridges, circles, a window on Montalcino and tanti auguri from Il Palazzone!#in

Another year comes to an end at Il Palazzone…  Marco and the children have planted most of our vegetable garden. Jalil and Florin are at their respective homes (Tunisia and Romania) and everything has slowed down to a reasonable pace.  These last few months have been a mad scramble trying to wrap up Club 100 (our tree adoption project) and throwing myself headlong into the sea of social media following the completion of our new website in September.

                                           One evening I realised that I had spent over three hours just checking all my different accounts one after the other; there are so many of them now that in the time it takes to make a full circuit I might as well just start again at the beginning in the vain hope that something has happened in the meantime. Marco is not very impressed at this turn of events, as you can imagine.  I think of this as the Forth Bridge effect. The Forth Rail Bridge is a beautiful cantilever steel bridge built in the 1890s. It needs constant maintenance and where I grew up "Painting the Forth Bridge" is used to describe a never-ending task since it was said that as soon as the painters reached one end it was time to start again at the other.

The work on the estate is similarly circular. We are in a moment of calm: the vines are dormant and the olive trees are pruned, 2009 is safely in the cellar, 2005 and 2004 Riserva are bottled, approved and waiting for their pink strips. In a matter of weeks the growing season will kick off and the whole cycle will start up again… Our big hope for 2010 is that we can get the final approvals for the new cellar and start construction. A local young architect has designed the first solar powered cellar in Montalcino. I will admit my secret hope that my SM struggles (that’s social media, Mum, not anything else) will be rewarded by an active community of users, elbowing each other out of the way to take a look through my window on Montalcino….

In the meantime BUON ANNO and HAPPY NEW YEAR to you and your families.