Book a foodie tour of Italy for your team!

How to plan a foodie tour

There’s more to a foodie tour than sitting down at a local restaurant and order the house special. The whole tour should be a rich and complex experience, that will bring about surprisingly in-depth knowledge of the territory through its traditional products and recipes. By sampling local products, you will not only enjoy a vital part of Italian (and regional) culture, you will also learn about those products’ history and evolution and how they are tied into that particular community. Most foodie tours are planned with a specific theme or focus in mind. Depending on the region, it may be wine, cheese, a particular kind of meat or a special technique. The theme could also be seasonal: a Christmas foodie tour of any region will feature very different wines and recipes than a summer one. Before planning your tour, however, it is always a good idea to talk to your team members and find out what they like and what they need. Don’t forget to make room for exceptions and dietary restrictions and to discuss them in advance with all the restaurateurs who will be designing your chosen menus. Italy has a long and proud culinary tradition, with something for everyone: make sure your team members feel free to speak up about their specific dietary requirements, in order to create an inclusive and enjoyable experience for all involved.

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Wine tasting as team building

No foodie tour of Italy is complete without a wine tasting. Whether it be sampling the unique varieties of the Franciacorta region or matching delicious meat dishes to Sardinian wines, wine tasting is considered to be one of the highest and most sophisticated pleasures a visit to Italy can entail. Incorporating one within your corporate foodie tour is always an excellent idea, but it doesn’t need to stop at that. You could go the extra mile and turn it into a team-building exercise. With the help of a professional sommelier, your team members could learn how to tell different wines apart and how to judge each vintage’s unique characteristic and how to match Italian food to Italian wine. And then they could challenge each other to a blind-tasting, maybe even win a customised bottle in the process.

Hands-on experience

Learning about food means getting to know a region’s history, its character and its people. If you can set aside a few hours for an extra leg of your foodie tour, we suggest you book a visit to one of the many facilities that still produce traditional delicacies using ancient techniques. When planning tours of Tuscany for our clients, for instance, we always suggest including a visit to some of the small, local cheese producers, whose establishments still make some of the region’s unique varieties of cheese using processes that haven’t been altered in centuries. And food always tastes so much better, after you have learned how it is made and satisfied yourself that it is as genuine as it gets. Of course, your team members might want to get proper hands-on experience and try a cooking class. The best part of this kind of program? Getting to share a meal that they have cooked themselves.

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