Wine Travel: Two Hacks to Plan Your Next Overseas Wine Holiday

Today on the blog we welcome back Perth-based Naomi Fuller who recently contributed Ideas to Host Your Own DIY Wine Event. Naomi is a born and bred WA local from York who is an avid wine drinker and traveller.

Back in 2016, which seems too long ago now, I was invited to attend the wedding of a very good friend. My Australian friend was marrying an Italian in a small town called Brisighella, a Province of Ravenna in Italy.

I was only able to secure two weeks of annual leave for my trip so I knew I had to make the most of the trip, which meant I had to ensure I had a robust itinerary in place.

This article, will touch on the planning aspect of my trip, and more specifically how to include visits to a specific winery or wine region(s).

Wine Travel Research via Pinterest

Firstly, I love Pinterest for travel planning. If you’re unaware what Pinterest is, they describe themselves as “…a visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas.”

Think of Pinterest as an online version of a vision board, where you can pin articles and images of things you like and when you no longer need them, you can unpin them. I love how Pinterest has kept the terminology very similar to how you would use a conventional vision board.

So now that you have a general understanding of Pinterest, this is how I used it to help with my winery travel planning while in Italy.

As I was attending Italy for a wedding I knew that there were days already allocated to activities. As I hadn’t been to Europe before I started my search pretty wide. My initial searches were things like “Italy”, “Italy Holiday” and “Italy in Summer”.

Being a social network/search engine of topics, it meant that I had to weed through a lot of images that clicked off to interesting articles and some that weren’t so relevant to my holiday. From here I started to narrow down the type of searches which aligned to my holiday, such as “Italy in July”, “2 weeks in Italy” and “July Italian holiday itineraries”.

This was a great start and meant that as I saw articles I was interested in I was able to save them to my newly created Pinterest board, aptly named “Italy in July”. I was then able to come back at a later date and refer to the articles as I worked through my ideal holiday itinerary.

By using Pinterest I was able to find some great hacks from bloggers from around the world who had travelled to and who had enjoyed Italy. I was able to then fit in a day trip out to the Chianti region and found a cheap and cheerful tour operator called Fun in Tuscany: Tours for Every Taste, stayed a night at Fontanafredda Winery, which last year was crowned European winery of the year and my personal highlight of the trip (after the wedding of course) was visiting Prosecco Road.

An example of where Pinterest helped me was when I was attempting to find a tour operator in the Prosecco Region of Italy. The majority of tour operators left from Venice, however, I wanted to stay within the region itself, staying in Follina. My Pinterest search meant that I found a blog article about an American who travelled to Italy, who had the same issue as I was experiencing. A reader of her blog suggested a driver by the name of “Oriana” and her details can be found under the section “UPDATE FOR 2018: I’ve found a driver you can book with!” on the Indiana Jo Blog.

Wine Travel Planning with Google Drive

In the lead up to the trip, I had reached out to a friend who was based in London to see if she was free and willing to travel to Italy for a week. Who wouldn’t be, right? Fortunately, she was free and although I had already started somewhat planning for my trip, it was great to get her input on what we should and shouldn’t do along the way.

We straight away jumped onto Google Docs to share our ideas and to start planning our trip.

We used the following columns:

• Date

• Location

• Itinerary

• Accommodation

• Transport

• Comments

We started by plugging in the dates into our shared Google Word Document and dropping in our must do activities such as flights, car hire pick up and accommodation. We also included a section on the first page where we would write extra comments, such as Italian wine regions we wanted to visit ( for me it was important that we hit up as many wine regions as possible!) and things we had to do before we left for our holiday.

As we worked through our travel itinerary, we assigned each other a colour for the comments so we could ask questions and respond easily such as who would buy tickets or who would do the research to find out more information.

The additional benefit of using Google Docs, is you can easily share your itinerary with anyone who has an email address. I shared the link with my immediate family so they knew my plans and as I updated my plans, they were well aware of what I was up to.

So now that you have read my travel hacks to plan a trip which included Italian wineries, do you have any other pre-travel hacks to share?