Faire Family: let’s help Emiko get her dreamy Enoteca project launched!
Enoteca Marilu: Natural wine and cooking school
A natural wine shop and culinary space for hosting classes, workshops and cultural events in San Miniato in the heart of Tuscany.
Emiko Davies has been a huge supporter of Faire and we featured her story in Issue 2 and now she needs our help! Emiko and her husband Marco have a dream of creating a bricks-and-mortar space. Emiko describes it as ‘housing a culinary space for food and wine workshops and a natural wine shop with the most interesting selection of excellent, sustainable, small-producer wines in the area’.
We have published an excerpt of Emiko’s Issue 2 story below and please don’t hesitate to click the link at the bottom of this Faire journal story to support their worthy Kickstarter.
Emiko Davies - Faire Issue 2
My husband and I bought our first home in the middle of the pandemic. It has meant many things to us as a family. For my husband Marco, it meant setting down roots in the Italian town where he was born and grew up, San Miniato. For me, a life-long floater—born in Australia to a diplomat Australian father and a Japanese mother, moving between Australia and Asia for most of my childhood and adolescence—this new home meant security and certainty for our little family of four in a moment when the world seemed everything but secure and certain.
Aside from being close to Marco's family, which the lockdown of 2020 made vastly clear was very important, one of the main reasons we chose to make San Miniato home, I'll admit (as a food writer and food lover, married to a sommelier), is the food. Its hills grow an abundance of extremely rare white truffles, celebrated at their own festival in the town each November for the past fifty years. Because this precious ingredient entices people from far and wide to come and taste it, there is a particularly excellent handful of restaurants, wineries, food shops, bakeries, and bars in this little corner of Tuscany directly in the middle of Florence and Pisa. I only have to walk out the door, and in a minute or two, I am spoiled for choice in terms of good food.
I am very often found in the butcher shop in town, sometimes just popping in to say hello to my friend Andrea, a fourth generation butcher, sometimes asking for advice for a recipe test or buying some natural wine (which he sells too). Other times I might be out the back, where Lina, Andrea's mother, is often in the kitchen, preparing some of the beautiful meals that she offers in the meat counter, ready to take home and just cook—her insalata russa is unparalleled, and the pork loin rolled in a finely minced mixture of garlic and herbs, stuffed inside a hollowed-out baguette, and all wrapped in pancetta—is one of my favourites. One day while Lina and I were chatting behind the shop, my eyes fell on a grove of fruit trees down below. They were groaning under the weight of their ripe oranges that no one had picked. I asked Lina about them.
“Oh those are no good for eating,” she said, “They are too bitter.” I understood immediately that they must be arance amare, or Seville oranges. A hybrid between mandarins and pomelos, they are practically inedible raw and have very little juice, thick piths and – when you cook them with sugar – absolutely delicious and perfumed rinds. When Lina saw my eyes light up, she ushered me out into the garden with a large bowl to collect some. I told her I'd try out a test batch of marmalade. "But come back and get the rest," she urged me, "They'll only drop and go rotten otherwise!" And that was not the last time I pilfered oranges from the butcher shop garden.
When I'm in the butcher shop, I often entertain my two year old, Luna, with the Falaschi's pig ornament collection. They even have a vintage wooden rocking pig. While I wait for the customers ahead of me, I admire the decorations in the shop. It is truly a beautiful shop. The counter overflows with what looks like offerings from the most beautiful pastry shop, thanks to Lina's creations. There are pig frescoes on the ceiling, a stack of cookbooks to browse through, and posters and antique knives (family heirlooms) framed on the walls.
Story continued in Issue 2
