We started our last week of the program off right with a field trip. We went to the Fanti estate. When we arrived at the estate, we were taken on a tour of the facility. The tour started in the room where all the fermentation tanks were.  As someone who has worked on a winery before, I love seeing how each winery differs. It makes sense that the tanks they have are larger than the ones I am used to as they do a lot more production than we did, but it still always amazes me when I walk in to a room filled with these large tanks. Our guide talked to us about how on the floor above the tanks there are conveyor belts where the grapes are hand sorted. The tanks themselves have the mechanisms to do the pump over process and keep the temperature regulated. Following this we moved into their barrel cellar. At this estate they use three different sized barrels. Each barrel does something different for the wine. I am used to a standard 55 gallon barrels. They had barrels that were taller than me. The next room was the wine cellar with all the bottles. There were cages upon cages of wine. All of the bottles were one their sides, which prevents the cork from drying out and tainting the wine. A really interesting fact, at least to me, was they do not label the wine until it is ordered because different countries require different information on their labels. The wall of labels to accommodate this was very impressive.

Finally, after the tour, we got to have a lunch and wine tasting. The food the served us, outside of the one liver pate bruschetta, was amazing. I think my favorite course was the pasta course. And the wines they served were wonderful by themselves and paired perfectly with the food. I ended up order a bottle of each of the reds they served us.