The Days of Wine and Vino Sfuso

Tripe stand

The photo (right) shows a sandwich stand a few blocks from out apartment. The stand opens at about 9:30am, continues into mid-afternoon, and serves snacks and simple meals to Florentines who order at the counter, sit or stand, eat, and talk with one another. It’s an inexpensive place to eat but it’s also a place to meet friends and talk. 

One thing here seems remarkable. Of course, wine is offered to the customers but there is no wine list, no wine steward, no vintages, just three magnums of sturdy red wine, two on each side and one on the front counter. The menu lists prices for water, soft drinks, and beer but wine isn’t mentioned. Buy a sandwich, get a plastic cup, pour some wine, and enjoy the break in the day’s routine.

List of offerings

The bottle is replaced when it’s empty. (Yes, I agree with you, I cannot imagine anything like this at home.) The stand specializes in tripe sandwiches and lampredotto (cow’s stomach) sandwiches. Today's special is a sandwich with the tripe or lampredotto cooked with porri or leeks. (This is also hard to imagine at home.)

Wine spigots

Italians drink wine. Italians drink wine often, lunch, dinner, sometimes at a cafe early in the morning. Italian adults don’t get drunk drinking wine. Ever. (But Americans students do, unfortunately. Italian young people have some problems, also.) Everyone sells wine, grocery stores, butcher shops, gas stations, bakeries, internet cafés. We’ve seen young children sent to the store by their parents bringing home groceries including bottles of wine. The attitude toward wine is different here. Wine doesn’t go with food; wine is food.

In recent years we’ve bought bulk wine from a wine shop near our old apartment. The shop sells bottles of wine, generally rather expensive wines. The shop also pours wine out of large stainless steel containers into bottles and corks them. The bulk wine is very inexpensive and quite good. The shop offers three reds and one white. In Italy wine sold in this way is called vino sfuso.

Wine in bulk containers

Owner of Bacco Nudo

This year we have a new apartment nearby and we’ve discovered a new vino sfuso shop that we had never gone into before. The shop is called Bacco Nudo, nude Bacchus, and they use the Caravaggio painting of Bacchus as their logo.

The Bacco Nudo shop is a step up from our previous wine shop. Here is a photo (above, left) of the list of their offerings.

Volunteer worker 2

Volunteer worker 1

Bacco Nudo offers 18 reds and 10 whites in bulk. There are large glass containers of wine all over the little store and out of sight in back, all connected by tubes and pipes to a set of labeled spigots. If you’d like some rosso di montalcino, that would be the first spigot in the bottom row. When you pull the spigot toward you, a pump comes on and wine comes out. Actually, the owner does the pouring but he was so amused when we asked to take a photo of the spigots, he insisted that we give it a try and photograph each other.

This is his only shop. In our daydreams we imagine how pleasant it would be if he opened a shop down the street from us at home. 


Sigh.