I am the curious sort of wine lover. The kind who opens a bottle expecting to travel, into the character of a place, and into the work of the men and women who made it.
My name is Luca Galli, and I designed the wine tastings at Hotel Flora exactly as I would want to experience them myself: open to people who are not experts; unhurried enough that nobody worries about saying the wrong thing over a glass; long enough to enjoy the subject properly.
Each tasting is its own route, and each one grew out of long conversations, and a few glasses, with Andrea Cairoli, the sommelier who works alongside me and who looks after everything to do with wine at both Hotel Flora and Hotel Galli.
Everything at Hotel Flora is built around a single decision: to slow down.
People who come here are almost always trying to remove something: noise, urgency, notifications.
A wine tasting is no exception. Tasting wine with real attention is an exercise in listening, and very nearly a meditative one. You sit still, you breathe it in, you wait for the glass to open. And you discover that a single scent, given ten minutes, turns out to hold far more than you first thought.
Wine is in no hurry. Neither, as a rule, are the people who choose Hotel Flora.
Each route covers a different distance. Some guests want to understand the valley they have just driven through; others want to travel a great deal further without leaving the table.
For anyone approaching Valtellina wine for the first time
This is the one I recommend to people who assume tastings are for connoisseurs. My answer is always the same: all you need in order to understand wine is the desire to. Scent and flavour speak to everyone.
Four glasses, in ascending order. You begin with the freshness of a sparkling wine or a white from the Alpi Retiche, move through Rosso di Valtellina, climb to Valtellina Superiore, and arrive at Sforzato, the most structured and contemplative wine this valley knows how to make.
By the end you will have crossed the entire wine identity of a region, one mouthful at a time.
The tasting includes:
For those who already know the region and want the complete picture
If you have drunk Valtellina before and been left wondering how far this landscape can actually go, this is your route.
Five wines rather than four, and, more to the point, a different ending: it closes, unexpectedly, with a Valtellina passito, a sweet wine made from dried grapes.
After the weight of Sforzato, that sweetness puts everything back into balance.
The tasting includes:
For those who don't recognise borders
We are in Livigno, in the middle of the Alps. That is no reason not to travel a very long way from the table.
Four wines from four different parts of Italy: a sparkling, a white and two reds, chosen to take you somewhere else entirely.
This is the tasting we enjoy most, because it is never the same twice. The selection changes with what we have available, which gives us the chance to pour what we genuinely like a label we have discovered recently, or a bottle I happen to be particularly attached to.
Think of it as a way of getting to know our own taste.
The tasting includes:
For those who want to go all the way in
This route is designed for people who already know Nebbiolo delle Alpi well and want to get properly inside it. There are two ways to do it.
A vertical tasting: the same label across different vintages. You taste how one wine changes over the years, what time has done to it, and what each season did.
A horizontal tasting: the same vintage, different producers or sub-zones. Here you understand how much depends on the hand that works the vineyard, and on the precise point of the slope where the grapes grew.
Soil, altitude, patience: it is all in there, and you can taste it.
The tasting includes:
For those who arrive with something specific in mind
Talking about wine with guests at Hotel Flora, I have often been told: Luca, I would love to go deeper into one grape, or one producer. So I decided that one of the tastings ought to be genuinely made to measure.
Our cellar is what makes it possible, enough range to build almost any tasting you can think of: a vertical of a great Valtellina red, a run through French champagnes, a journey among the sparkling wines of Franciacorta.
Tell us what you enjoy and how far you want to go. The price is set according to the wines selected.
You can add the tasting you prefer when you reserve your stay, or get in touch straight away.
Then we sit down, open the first bottle, and let it do the talking.
Hotel Flora
Via Taglieda 98
23041 Livigno (SO)
Italy
+39 0342 996034
+39 0342 996034
info@hotelfloralivigno.it
CF GLLLCU84E08L175S
CIR 014037
ALB 00128
CIN IT014037A1W3325GX9
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