The Harvest Issue

September is when Tuscany goes to work. The grape harvest — the vendemmia — gives the countryside a purpose and the traveller a reason to be there just as the August heat breaks and the coach parties thin. This issue leaves Florence to the day-trippers and stays out in the hills, where the year is turning and the light runs long and gold.

The mistake is to try to see all of Tuscany at once. Better to pick one zone and let it deepen: the cypress-lined clay hills of the Val d'Orcia around Pienza and Montalcino; the wooded vineyards of Chianti between Florence and Siena; the quieter country west toward the sea. Each is an hour or two from the next, which sounds like nothing until you are doing it every day on winding roads.

Where you stay runs from grand to grounded. A restored castle-estate with its own cellar is the cinematic option; a working agriturismo — a real farm that lets a few rooms and pours its own wine and oil at dinner — is the cheaper and, to our minds, the better one. Both put you among the vines, which is where you want to wake in September.

Then let the season do the rest. The cantinas are busy, the tables run long, and the new olive oil arrives a little later, green and peppery and poured over everything. String the hilltowns along the ridge roads — Montalcino to Pienza to Montepulciano — and stop whenever a view or a wine shop makes you.

— Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief