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COURTESY OF MONTALUCE
arts & culture
day tripper
Italy on the Etowah
DAHLONEGA WINERY OFFERS A TASTE OF TUSCANY
By Dan Jackson news@flagpole.com
mfmmim the locavore
West Broad Rising
LAND TRUST MARKET AND GARDEN MOVE TO ROCKSPRINGS
By Dan Jackson news@flagpole.com
Athenians are getting restless. The urge to
travel has been frustrated by coronavirus,
and countless trips have been canceled or
postponed. Baking, Netflix binges and jig
saw puzzles are pale substitutes for the joys
of seeing the world and savoring its bounty.
For those who’d like to enjoy the rolling
hills, wineries and food of Tuscany, we
may have something of a solution here
in Northeast Georgia. A mere 70-mile
road trip lands visitors at the doors of
Montaluce, an imposing Italian villa
perched on a slope surrounded by 18 acres
of vineyards overlooking the North Georgia
mountains. A travel agent friend with a
surprising amount of time on his hands
and frustrated by the current lack of travel
opportunities joined me on the trip where,
if you get a glass of wine and squint just
right, you can picture yourself thousands
of miles away. You’d never imagine that you
were deep in James Dickey country, just up
the road from a meat and three. Was that
banjo music we heard?
The edifice was originally built as a
clubhouse for a real estate development of
Italian villas on small lots, but the Great
Recession took care of that idea, and only
a few homes were built. Montaluce’s new
owners, also in real estate, ambitiously
changed the clubhouse into an elegant,
full-service restaurant that would lure
wealthy Atlantans for an afternoon or eve
ning of Italian food and Georgia wine.
Montaluce is also a working vineyard
that produces a surprisingly wide collec
tion of grapes on its 18 cultivated acres,
and winemaker Craig Boyd creates wines
ranging from complex reds to lighthearted,
quaffable roses; a fruity raspberry mead
fermented from honey that might bring to
mind a Jolly Rancher; and its most popu
lar, a sweet apple wine. Boyd has serious
wine chops, as evidenced by his degree in
enology and viticulture from University of
California-Davis, as well as his stints at win
eries in other unlikely wine regions, such as
Arizona and South Dakota.
From the monumental entrance, the
villa opens up into an opulent, high-ceil-
inged restaurant fitted with Old World
architectural elements, such as heavy
wooden beams and ceilings, rows of
Palladian windows, massive iron chande
liers, an immense bar and highly polished,
stained concrete floors. Lunch is prepared
by Christopher Matson, the executive chef,
who studied classical French cooking at
New York’s International Culinary Center.
Still in sheltering-in-place mode, we
donned our masks and ventured onto the
spacious outdoor terrace that frames views
of the vineyards and surrounding country
side with the large
arched openings of an
Italian colonnade. The
views of the dense
forests of North
Georgia reach as far
as Blood Mountain,
more than 20 miles to
the northeast.
With the higher
altitude and the
treetop height of the
terrace, refreshing
breezes soon wel
comed us, along with
a wait staff out of the
pages of a J. Crew
catalog. My friend
ordered the Centurio
red, with its “straw
berry, floral, perfume
and cola aromas with
a hint of earthiness,”
and I joined him with
a lighter Sangiovese. We were soon served
a Tuscan flatbread, large enough to share,
slicked with a sweet balsamic glaze and
ornamented with a fluffy meadow of pep
pery arugula ($18.)
Service is leisurely. The entrees arrived—
coriander-crusted pork tenderloin with
roasted fennel and citrus saffron foam
($28) for your writer, a rich pasta bolog-
nese ($24) for the travel agent—and were
promptly dispatched. The broad expanse
of a colorful French fruit tart dotted with
blueberries and raspberries soon followed,
and it too quickly disappeared. Wines by
the glass run $7-$22.
I checked my phone and, sure enough,
the temperature in Athens was nearing 90
and was only 78 where we sat. That alone
seemed worth the price of admission.
Wine lovers can sample five of the win
ery’s offerings with the Montaluce Flight,
with patrons choosing from 11 wines for
$30 per flight, and you walk away with a
souvenir Montaluce glass. Another option
not listed on the website is a two-and-a-half
hour walk through the vineyards with a
winemaker and a tour of the winery, with
a wine tasting, for $45 on Saturdays and
Sundays only.
Wines are also available at the wine shop
located at the entrance to the restaurant.
Prices range from $28 for their apple wine
to $82 for their 2017 Reserve Malbec. A
selection of charcuterie rounds out the wine
shop’s offerings. See montaluce.com. O
The Athens Land Trust recently relocated
the popular West Broad Market Garden
from its old location at the West Broad
School to the parking lot of the Athens
Housing Authority at 300 Rocksprings St.
The market responded to the pandemic
crisis by taking a page from the Community
Supported Agriculture playbook, offering
produce, meats, fish, dairy, prepared foods,
honey and many other products to its
customers on a new website (wbfm.local-
lygrown.net). Ordered items are available
for pickup at a curbside drive-through in
the parking lot at their new location on
Saturdays.
West Broad Farmers Market manager
Ellie Adams says that vendors and custom
ers alike miss the weekly jostle and activity
at the weekly market,
but that they have
responded enthusi
astically to the new
format. The new plan
allows vendors to
know exactly how
much produce to
deliver to the market
on Saturday, she says,
saving them a lot of
time.
Customers can
shop online from 5
p.m. Sunday through
1 p.m. Thursday.
Customers then
arrive at the new
location between
11:30 a.m.-1:30
p.m. on Saturday to
pick up their orders.
Payments can be
arranged online or
can be taken at the
drive-through. The
market accepts cash, checks, credit card or
EBT/SNAP. The market will continue its
policy of offering “double dollars” to SNAP
recipients, cutting their bills in half.
Vendors receive orders from the website
and create packages for each individual’s
order. Upon delivery, farmers market
helpers sort these packages, assemble the
orders, and deliver them to customers as
they drive through.
Heather Benham, executive director of
the Athens Land Trust, reports that the
market is attracting more new vendors
each week, about doubling since last year.
Currently, about 30 vendors offer 500 prod
ucts, including fresh produce, herbs, catfish,
specialty Wagyu beef, flowers, honey and
nuts. Want to watch caterpillars metamor
phose into Monarch butterflies? They are
available from the local Floating Flowers
Butterfly Farm, along with the Butterfly
weed essential to newly hatched Monarchs.
The new location will also host a commu
nity garden, restoring a popular feature at
the old location. The new gardens, currently
a series of raised planters, are filled with
rich, organic topsoil, and were assigned last
week at an ALT meeting to gardeners from
the neighborhood who want to raise their
own produce. Benham says the market will
work with the community to continue add
ing planting beds to the one-acre plot.
The ALT was forced to seek out a new
site for the market and garden when, after
a years-long debate over the future of the
property, the Clarke County School District
decided to turn the vacant West Broad
School into an early learning facility.
The ALT also owns Williams Farm, a
five-acre produce farm off North Avenue
where farm manager Seth Nivens practices
next-level farming techniques to improve
the quality of the soil. Currently, there are
only cover crops designed to improve soil
and suppress weeds in the fields. Prior to
fall planting and seeding, the cover crops,
a mix of buckwheat and field peas that
will provide mulch for the fall crops. The
garden’s 54 CSA customers are on hiatus
now and will await new fall crops in mid- to
late-September.
The Athens Land Trust has a robust
mission that includes the West Broad
market—its most visible project—and its
popular Youth Development Program, a
paid job-skills training program that has
helped more than 300 high school-age stu
dents. The Young Urban Builders, the Young
Urban Farmers and the Young Conservation
Stewards programs are designed to give
these students exposure to real-world job
training and provide “soft skills” such as
public speaking and leadership. Other pro
grams support local community and school
gardens. The ALT’s mission also reaches
across the state with conservation pro
grams that help landowners improve soil
and water quality on nearly 19,000 acres of
farmlands, wetlands and natural areas. In
addition to conserving farmland and green-
space, the organization also builds and
renovates affordable housing, using a model
in which the buyer owns the house, but the
ALT keeps the land in trust, reducing costs
and enabling the home to remain affordable
in perpetuity. ©
Resident Gloria Moses (right) signs up for a garden plot with Cameron Teeter,
community agriculture director for the Athens Land Trust.
AUGUST 5, 2020 | FLAGPOLE.COM H
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