One single ingredient

How do you put a price on a piece of history?

Real balsamic vinegar - the Traditional Balsamic Vinegar of Modena - is the work of generations. Some of the maturing barrels date back to the mid-1800s, and you can buy vinegar made from grapes grown more than 50 seasons ago.

This vinegar is top quality, and is made from only one ingredient - Lambrusco grapes. There are no additives.

Can you imagine waiting decades to taste the fruits of your labour? And what about the return on investment?

These questions are actually irrelevant, because real balsamic vinegar is about sacrifice and romance, as we learnt from Marica Benatti.

Marica is from Acetaia del Cristo - a family business at San Prospero, near Modena in Italy.

Produced by Bronwyn Purvis.

Pig farmer drives a car

When we picked up our hire car in Bologna, the man in charge of the carpark stopped the traffic so we could turn safely onto the busy street.

At least, that’s what I thought had happened. Bronwyn told me later the traffic had halted behind a car waiting to come into the alley I was leaving. The car, and the bus and cars behind it, had waited while I made two failed hill-starts in front of a boom gate that went up and down and up and finally down behind us.

Before we had left the carpark I tried to write ‘this side’ onto my right hand – but I was so sweaty the pen wouldn’t work. As I drove down the street, I tried to imagine I was just driving the gravel road at Mt Gnomon in the ute, sticking to the right to avoid the potholes. I gripped the wheel at 10 and 2 and leaned forward like a pained turtle. It took about 15 minutes for me to realise where the rear-view mirror was.

Bronwyn skillfully navigated the outskirts of the city with the help of google maps and a dodgy tourist map from Europcar. It took quite a while to get into the rhythm of pausing for zebra crossings every 50 metres. Bronwyn was like the driving instructor I had when I was 17: patiently and quietly giving directions and reminding me who to give way to, and to watch the pedestrian, cyclist, scooter, truck, and deer…

As we reached the highway, the paper map came to an end, and the phone battery ran out. We were on our own for a couple of minutes as Bronwyn extracted my computer from a bag in the back seat whilst not taking her eyes off the road.

It wasn’t long before the speed went from 50 to something much faster, and I found myself on a four-lane highway among trucks, caravans, and whizzing little Fiats, Alpha Romeos, and Peugeots. Bronwyn’s face paled a little when I excitedly told her I’d never driven among four lanes of traffic before – let alone the wrong (or right) side of the road.

After about 30 minutes the pulsing blue arrow took us off the highway – we had a couple of false alarms that gave me a chance to practice merging back onto the highway – and we entered the roundabout zone. This was the first time Bronwyn raised her voice. She didn’t yell, but she was firm and pointed with great precision as I got utterly confused.

In the countryside, I had to control myself to keep my eyes on the road, and not look at the crops and the freshly rolled bales of hay. The roads become narrower and narrower, and I hoped my hand-eye coordination had improved since I put the tractor forks through two of our sheds.

By now all our navigational batteries had fizzled, and we were following written instructions to a family farm producing balsamic vinegar.

When we finally found the address, and pulled into the drive, I hugged Bronwyn and thanked her for navigating us there. I was trembling as I got out of the car to meet our host.

P.S. I have now learnt how to say I am a pig farmer: “Io sono una allevatrice di maiali”.

Next… Why did I just pay 90 Euros for 100ml of balsamic vinegar?

Pig farmer visits the Colosseum and a butchery

I’m such a farm girl. We’ve spent three full days in fashionable, tourist-thick Rome, but I’m itching to get into the countryside.

We’re on a train heading north to Milano. We’re passing paddocks of bright sunflowers and tall stands of corn. I’ve seen one dairy herd of sheep, but no cattle yet – and certainly no pigs. The soil is a light brown, fawn colour and lumpy.

In Rome we stayed in an apartment in the suburb of Lazio owned by an architect. When visitors book in, she packs her bag and stays with her boyfriend – a clever income-booster. It was a good spot, not touristy, and we think we got a little taste of day-to-day life in the Italian capital.

On the first afternoon we discovered a corner shop with a big fridge of cheese and a slightly smaller shelf of charcuterie. We thought the shop was shutting - the lights were all off – but we realised later the shopkeeper was waking up from his siesta, with the help of a coffee shot. We bought prosciutto, parmigiano reggiano, bread, and wine – of course. I made the shopkeeper laugh when I tried to explain I was a pig farmer by pushing my nose up and snorting. As we left the shop, Bronwyn suggested we really should work on how to say, “I am a pig farmer” in Italian, to avoid embarrassment.

We did some sweaty sightseeing – the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and the Vatican. The number of tourists was phenomenal, and so was the price of gelatos from the food wagons parked conveniently outside the historic spots, but it was hot, and we had to have one.

We visited two markets: the first was the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele. It gave us a look at the multi-cultural side of Rome, with lots of stalls selling lentils, spices, Asian vegetables, and halal meat. In a way I was a bit disappointed, because each vegetable stall seemed to have exactly the same selection of products, and I wondered who the farmers really were.

At one of the meat stalls, a keen-to-sell English-speaking stallholder told me all the beef was imported, and that 80 per cent of it came from Australia, and the rest from different parts of Europe. The meat was really cheap – the most expensive cuts were only 5 or 6 Euros a kilo. He told me Italian meat was only for the rich.

The second market we went to was Campo de Fiori. There were stalls selling fruit (juicy ripe apricots, and flat, doughnut-like peaches), pasta, and truffle-infused condiments. The highlight though, was the discovery of Antica Norcineria Viola, a butchery that has been going for four generations. The youngest generation butcher was very good looking, of course, and spoke English. He told me they make more than 20 different types of salami, and that people come from Spain to buy them. There was also pork jerky, cooked pork skin ready for pizza, mortadella, an olive and vinegar salad with pig’s head, and a roof hung full of air-dried hams. The hams were not refrigerated, and I could see the fat glistening in the 30-degree heat.

We’ve had some baggage issues – as in, our baggage still has not arrived and we’ve been here four nights. Talking to the baggage claim office has been a bit like talking to Australia’s main telecommunications company – but far worse. I like to think that we’re proving it’s possible to travel Europe with just a school bag and a sunhat. But we are a bit sick of wearing plane clothes.

More photos at flickr.

Next blog… ”If I can drive a European tractor, I can drive a bambino Fiat on the wrong side of the road. Surely.”

Pig farmer goes on an adventure

Yesterday I kissed and squeezed Guy and Mum goodbye at Launceston airport. They argued all the way in the car, of course: Guy teasing Mum about her driving and Mum hassling Guy about looking after my cat while I’m away.

We drank coffees and I handed over my camera and tried to explain how to get it to focus. We went through security and Mum’s fake knee set the alarms off. Guy was in tears of laughter as Mum got searched, thoroughly. “She’s lying,” he told the security staff, “She hasn’t got a fake knee.”

And so began the first leg of my first overseas adventure: a Churchill Fellowship that will take me to Italy, France, Spain, and the UK for seven weeks.

My bags are underweight, my clothes are new and clean, and my bits and pieces are organised in see-through bags.

I met my friend Bronwyn Purvis at Melbourne airport last night. Bronwyn’s a film maker, and she’s coming on this journey to help this farm girl get on a big plane and catch super-fast trains, and secondly, to help me record what I see and learn. I’ve been introducing her as ‘Mount Gnomon Farm’s film maker’.

She laughed at my over-the-top packing last night. Doesn’t everyone pack spare rubber bands, lock seal bags, glue sticks, pegs, and scissors? And apparently I’ve packed enough drugs to open a chemist. I put in the instruction manual for my travel socks, too.

The trip we’re going on is all about food and farm tourism, and I’m asking the question, ‘how can Tasmanian farmers incorporate tourism into their businesses, and offer visitors something amazing they’ll never forget?’.

I’d love it if consumers could spend more time on farms sniffing and scratching and seeing how their food is produced. Tasmanian farmers grow fantastic, quality produce, but we could do so much more with it.

So, the itinerary so far (journalists always leave things to the last minute) starts in Italy, where we will visit balsamic vinegar producers in Modena, go to Parma ham and Parmesan cheese factories and suppliers, and stay at ‘agriturismos’ with organic farmers.

Then we’ll head to Roquefort in France, where blue sheep’s cheese is matured in caves. We’re staying with sheep farmers who supply milk for the cheese, and we’ll stay in the tiny village too, that’s pushed up against an escarpment. Maybe a region of Tassie could do something like this: a whole heap of farmers could supply a handful of artisans to make a product so special it’s exported to the world.

Spain’s next, where we’ll follow the Dehasa and acorn-crunching pigs and learn about the science and romance of Jamon. The ham comes from Iberico pigs – big and black with huge ears and smooth hides. The ham makers are still allowed to hang their hams in the open air, without refrigeration – isn’t that fantastic?

At this point, Bronwyn will fly back to her job in Sydney and I will tackle the United Kingdom on my own. I’m planning to go to heaps of pig farms, and of course places like River Cottage and Jimmy’s Farm. There’s a property, Helen Browning’s Organics, that offers camping with the pigs, and even has an on-farm pub!

I’m sitting in the cactus garden at Changi airport in Singapore, my Tasmanian feet and hands swollen already with the heat. The sun’s just gone down, and we’re waiting for the big flight to Paris, where we’ll catch a smaller flight to Rome.

What do you think the first meal in Rome should be?