I looked into options for wine based tours, but I wanted to chart my own path.

I figured that Samantha and I could devise an appropriate itinerary and it would be up to me to call and make advance reservations for those smaller wineries and the most exclusive ones that would require advance notice.

There was one wine tour that did interest me, and that was the Food & Wine vacation tour. Sponsored by the magazine, this tour would certainly be designed to give me a taste of the best of both worlds; that being food and wine. I decided that we would do both. We would spend six days with food and wine vacations and then do another eight on our own.

I definitely wanted to visit Florence and Rome in my travels. Of the regions, Montepulciano, Montalcino and San Gimignano and Castellina would be at the top of the list. I would begin wine tasting the region while working at the Balsams with my spare cash, and then do research in the evenings to select the specific wineries that I wanted to target.

When I mentioned the Food & Wine tour to Samantha, she was ecstatic. We would both have to do some saving, but I agreed to fund most of the trip for the both of us. Samantha would come up with thirty-five percent and I the other sixty-five. It seemed fair enough, since I was currently working and she a full-time student. As we talked each Wednesday I would tell her about the wines that I was drinking. Additionally, I had started a wine blog to not only keep a record, but I thought it might someday be useful for a book on wine at some point in the future.

I was going to make this a career, and I was going to do it the right way!