When I did my first inGamba trip, I was immediately taken by all of the tiny, incremental details that added up to a sublime experience. The one that stuck with me the most wasn’t the fine tuning of my bike after every ride, or the incredible dishes that Borgolecchi’s chef Tomi Morgade whipped up every day. It wasn’t even the locally vinted Chianti being poured into my wineglass at the carefully laid dinner table. Instead, it was the wine glasses themselves that caught my attention. I admit, I had never given wine glasses much thought in the past. But as I sat at the table night after night, I noticed that the perfectly balanced, ultra-lightweight mouth-blown wine glass with its narrow stem and shockingly thin lip was changing my drinking experience. I looked it up.
The glass—Zalto Denk’art’s Universal Glass—is widely considered the best wine glass in the world. So naturally, it was the glass that was used at Borgolecchi with every meal. I should have known that inGamba wouldn’t miss a trick.
It took me a year and a half to finally decide that I deserved to make every glass of wine feel special—even when the bottle cost a small percentage of the price of the glass itself—but buying my own set of Zalto Denk’art glasses means that every night at the dinner table, I’m transported back to Lecchi and my trip. That alone is worth the spend.
After the wineglasses transformed my post-dinner cabernet sauvignon into a wonderful ritual, I wondered what other elements I could bring from the Tuscan villa to my home.
Adding linen napkins to the table at night instead of paper ones? Both eco-friendly and instantly mood-elevating.
Even my approach to cooking shifted: Asking myself WWTD (What Would Tomi—the head chef at Borgolecchi—Do?) was an eye-opener. He wouldn’t just toss food onto the plate from the pan. He’d take the few seconds to arrange it nicely, and nip out to the garden to cut a few leaves from a basil or coriander plant to add on top for some fresh flavors.
The same was true of other little details in my daily life: My morning coffee, for example. At Borgolecchi, it’s easy to take the extra minutes sipping coffee at the table to finish hearing a story from one of the other guests before getting ready to ride. It’s also easy to meander to one of the patios that overlooks the incredible olive groves that stretch out behind the villa, sipping coffee while watching the morning mist start to clear.
My mornings at home involve good coffee (more so now that I recently brought back a few bags of beans and a perfectly sized and weighted ceramic mug from Handlebar Coffee Roasters in Santa Barbara). That’s a non-negotiable. But the time to actually sit, sip, ponder, savor? Absolutely not. I have emails to answer.
But if I embrace the inGamba memories, I know that the emails can wait an extra five minutes, in favor of sitting on my back deck and listening to the birds, actually enjoying that final sip of the perfect Americano.
And of course, while I don’t have access to a professional mechanic or WorldTour soigneur, there are a few ways that my ride can feel like it felt on an inGamba trip. I don’t always have time for a cafe stop mid-ride, nor is it always reasonable with my workout. But I can make sure that my chain is freshly cleaned and lubed pre-ride, and I can take a few minutes to foam roll (in lieu of a massage) post-ride. And while I do miss the follow car and a soigneur or guide snapping photos of me mid-ride, I still can take the extra seconds to enjoy my surroundings, and despite not being in the hills of Tuscany, I can see that the trees are starting to bloom and spring is here—things I wouldn’t have noticed if I didn’t take the seconds to savor.
