The last weekend in September.

The adventure starts, not at dawn, but at 10:21AM with a hard sprint through Genova Brignole Station’s underground passage to track 8. I pause at the bottom of the stairs just long enough to validate my train ticket at one of the little time stampers before charging up the steps three at a time. A cluster of friends stand at the top, cheering my arrival, and greet me with smiles, hugs and pats on the back. They were prepared to stall the train, make themselves big on the platform, stand halfway in the doorways, hassle the capotreno–anything, they said–but now it’s unnecessary. Moments after we clamber onto the train and fall into our seats, the train pulls away.

I am always running for trains. No matter how early I leave my apartment, something will make the ultimately successful boarding seem like a last second buzzer-beater, a victory. This particular time, the self-serve kiosk didn’t accept cash and wouldn’t read any of my credit cards, which forced me to unexpectedly stand in a thirty-minute line and deal with an Italian human in an Italian conversation.

Comunque, anyways, I made it. We all made it, and now we were laughing and talking and heading west and north for two hours to hit up the Piedmont town of Asti. Asti, like so many Italian towns, villages or cities, has become synonymous with something tasty. In the States, that tastiness was known as Asti Spumante, a softly sweet sparkling white, the vastly cheaper cousin of France’s champagne.

In the early nineties, the Spumante name was dropped when the wine received the highest classification of wine quality in Italy, the DOCG. Since then the two major sparkling wines coming out of the region are called Asti and Moscato d’Asti. Winsearcher.com characterizes Asti as ‘off-dry’, ‘fully sparkling’ and carries around a 9% alcohol volume. The Moscato d’Asti, on the other hand, is ‘semi-sweet, very gently sparkling and has an alcohol content around 5%-6%.’

While both are delicious, I was more taken with the red varietal of Asti, the Barbera d’Asti, which is made with the mostly the Barbera grape, very respectable in the Piedmont region, and a little less fussy than the prima-donna diva Nebbiola. For me, it falls somewhere in taste and feel between a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Sangiovese. It seems a great wine for Autumn.

Did we all learn something? Good. I have to say, when I read bits of wine-speak like the two paragraphs above, I get a little fuzzy in the head, a little bored, a little disconnected. Did you? Sorry about that. But after this weekend, I do know why people write about wine. I know why people spend hours trying to express the taste in long, languorous passages with painted phrases like ‘hints of leather and sweet rubber’, or ‘pit fruit and dried straw’.

Because when you go to a winery, meet the winemaker, tour the ‘Underground Cathedrals’ of wine, Le cattedrali sotterranee, where the Moscato d’Asti and the Asti are bottled and stored, when the bubbles hit your tongue while you are standing under the sconsed soft light of the cavernous red brick barrel vaulted built centuries ago, you actually create a taste memory that is linked to a place memory, to an experience memory. If you’re lucky, this memory gets rekindled each successive time you try the wine. It’s like hearing that classic song from your childhood that instantly transports you back to a very specific time and place.

You want to share that with people. Or I do, anyway. This was my Saturday.

Asti for lunch. A no frills place close to the train station. We thought the hour and a half window we had would be plenty to grab a bite, before we caught another bus to the real destination, Cannelli, a hilltop town south of Asti, boasting a new-this-year UNESCO heritage designation.

An hour and a half was nowhere near enough time. After a decadent, yet simple ravioli dish sauced with butter and sage we regretted to inform the poor waitress that we had to leave. She looked like a spotlit jackrabbit, eyes wide as saucers, when we informed her of our plans to depart.

“No contorni?” She said, appalled. No sides? No salad?

It was as if she feared for our health. How could we possibly: A) Digest our first course without a proper salad or dessert and B) Run away from a pretty well-maintained table? How could we possibly NOT take coffee?

“È impossible, no?!”

Ah Italians. Thank you for your concern signorina, but we will take our chances with digestion. Our stomachs will happily digest without said contorni. We were off to Cannelli.

I was almost wrong. Traversing the winding roads of Piemonte in a bus made many of us more than a little carsick. Pale sweat poured off a few of the less balanced in the group. I usually count myself amongst these, but today I was too enamored with the view to feel anything but a bubbling excitement. In these various states of nausea and anticipation we passed miles and miles…er, excuse me…kilometers and kilometers of terraced farmland and vineyards. We wound our way over cobblestone streets, and around countless impossible twists to finally be dumped off, to my mind at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere.

No, I take that back. It would have been nowhere if we took a left. Instead, we took a right and were greeted with a wide brick road blocked to traffic, lined with those ubiquitous white canvas/plastic tents with vendors from the surrounding countryside. Sure there were the knick knack shops: the little guy carving and selling wooden gufi (owls), the smartphone case place, the local clothiers selling dresses, but I didn’t really see any of this.

I was focused on food and wine. The tents with food drew my eye: Salumiere, with their delicious cured meat and cheese offerings, panifici, with piles of crusty bread, candy shops gone mobile, and produce stands. They all put on gorgeous displays, but my stomach was rumbling so I pledged to come back for these and headed for smoke, to the tents with massive ovens, or fryers or anything that was producing palpable aromas. Farinata, first. Farinata is typical in the Ligurian region, and is made by whisking chickpea flour with olive oil and water until a very loose batter is formed, and then pressing it paper-thin into wide pans and cooking it in an open, wood-burning oven. Mine was seasoned with salt and a little rosemary. Delicious.

Next, something even the Genovese in our little group hadn’t heard of, something called Friciule, (Free-chee-ooo-lay). The happy people manning the stand put a piece of dough about the size of a piece of paper into a vat of frying oil for about thirty seconds. When the dough puffed up and became golden they took it out, folded it half and put paper-thin strips of lardo in the fold. The hot dough almost melted the fat, and it was well, delicious. Crispy, chewy, sweet, decadent. If it had a sprinkle of salt, it would have warranted worship.

Stomach settled for the moment, we headed for a narrow street at the far end of the piazza. A short walk between huddled pink and cream stucco buildings sporting wrought iron Juliet balconies and hanging laundry and we were at our destination: Cantine Bosca, one of the five underground cathedrals of wine.

Under a red brick archway we were immediately met by a dawdling old Italian man wearing boat shoes, blue linen pants and a slightly disheveled white button up, only half buttoned.

“We had a tour scheduled, of the cellars, in English,” someone in the group told the man in Italian.

He looked at his watch. We all checked ours too. 2:20PM.

“For 2:30?” he asked.

“No. Two.”

He winced and looked pained. “You are too late, for the English. But I am about to give a tour now in Italian.” He paused and then added, “You should come. I speak very good Italian.”

We couldn’t turn back now. We would do our best to listen and learn. At the very least it would be authentic.

This is where the magic happened: a tour of the underground cathedrals of wine, past thousands of bottles in their various stages of fermenting and aging, all the while hearing the story of the Bosca family and of Asti wines. The tour ended in a side room lined with barrels and bottles, at the end of which was propped a crude plank table. On top of the table sat three big-bellied bottles, the bubbly of Asti and the house of Bosca. We tasted the Asti, the Moscato d’Asti, and a Rosè Moscato. Each one was better than the previous, all were heavenly. Maybe it was the bubbles, maybe it was the dusty underground ambience, maybe it was the food in my belly, but the wine was sweet and delicate and perfetto.

Yes, at this point in the story, the fancy wine people of the world may begin to lift their noses just a bit, to pucker up to tell you that there is a reason why the Asti is cheaper than Champagne or even of Spanish Cava. They may go on about residual sugars or the sometimes missing floral component, or lack of nuance as their famous cousins. But after the train ride and winding bus trip past the terraced fields, after sampling some of the local delicacies, after standing there in those cellars, tasting it, I thought it pretty good stuff.

I bought as much of it as I could comfortably carry, and then one extra bottle for sharing on the train ride home. We all did.

We caught the return train comfortably, piling into one small car that smelled a bit of livestock, perhaps sheep. Before the train had even left the station, the pop of a cork echoed and we filled our glasses. The two-hour trip passed in a blink as we recounted the day, laughed, and opened more wine.

Back in Genoa, as the train pulled into the station, we carefully collect our remaining bottles from the experience. Returning home I set them aside, where they will wait just a little longer, for the day when I’ll pop the cork again, sip, savor, and relive my Saturday in Asti and Cannelli.