At Varano’s Italian Restaurant, we love to reward our customers, in May we ran a promotion for our rewards members, the prize being a private wine tasting for a customer and up to eleven friends. Elizabeth Seavey of Kennebunkport was the winner and she brought her husband and six of their friends for an evening of food and wine. Being Italian, I wanted to make sure and exceed their expectations. We started off with some Prosecco, parmesan cheese and fresh fruit. I took this time to explain how the tasting was going to work. I also wanted to let everyone know that this was going to be fun. I didn’t want anyone worrying about the tasting being too technical; I printed up maps of the Italian wine regions along with tasting notes on the different wines. We tasted nine different wines, three whites and six reds. We started in Sardinia, moved to the Veneto region and worked our way down through Tuscany and finished in Sicily. I tried to give our group a nice cross section of Italian wines, along with a little history of each winery and their families. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting most of the wineries on our list, which gave the tasting a little more of a personal flair. We tasted and shared stories and the night flew by. After tasting all the wines, we brought out a sumptious buffet of Italian foods and we retasted the wines, pairing them with the appropriate foods. We all had a great time eating and drinking together. Anytime you share food and wine with someone, it changes your relationship. By the end of the evening we were all laughing and joking, the transformation was amazing. I think the best part of the evening was how attentive everyone was. People were taking notes and asking alot of questions. One woman who didn’t even like red wine, commented on how much she enjoyed a number of red wines. The beautiful part of being a wine lover is the fact that you love to share your wine with friends. At the end of our tasting, I pulled out two bottles of the 1997 Masi Costasera Amarone and we finished our evening in style. This wasn’t part of the planned itinerary, it just evolved and became part of our evening of enjoyment. Food, wine and great company are the Italian components for a spectacular evening.