When Wine Calls “2025 Wine Afficionados Tour”

#1 Prologue

Welcome back to “When Wine Calls”.

Those of you who have followed our blogs in recent years will recall our fantastic When Wine Calls “The Summer Vintage Tour” in 2023. What a memorable trip it was. Later that year we headed back to Europe on “The Winter Grape Tour” for a memorable “White Christmas’ with the family in Seefeld, Austria and to celebrate New Year in Budapest. For those wanting to catch up on those unbelievable trips you can read all about it on our blog “When Wine Calls”.

 In May 2024 we travelled to Japan and had 3 wonderful weeks exploring the Japanese Alps, Tokyo and Kyoto and importantly spend some memorable time with our “Japanese daughter”, Tomoni and her wonderful family.  We had not seen Tomoni, other than through social media, for a very long-time and had been promising to travel over to Tokyo to visit. Tomoni is now married with a tremendous partner and two teenage boys and so we had a lot to catch up on. We will not leave it that long again to visit.

It was on this trip, however, that we decided to head back to Europe on another adventure in 2025 exploring new places on our bucket list as well as revisit those that we fell so much in love with on our “2023 Summer Vintage Tour”. And so, the When Wine Calls – “2025 Wine Afficionados Tour” was born and we set about organising flights to and from Europe and planning the itinerary.

Six months on after returning from Japan we had a draft of the places we wanted to visit but there were many logistic issues to overcome as we wanted to visit more countries than our previous trips and train travel that we relied so heavily on previously was not a realistic option. We also found that in many countries’ accommodation options were already an issue with travel throughout Europe continuing to increase in popularity, so we had to alter some of the countries we were planning to visit or the dates and direction of travel to secure accommodation as well as ensuring the itinerary fitted within visa constraints.

After much effort we finalised the routing framework and set about securing connecting flights between the various countries. Researching and booking the various accommodation places in each location was next on the agenda followed by identification of special activities that required pre-booking due to their popularity. What we have found interesting was that the opportunities to arrange “free walking tours” in many of the towns we were planning to visit appear to be more limiting now than in 2023 but that may be just due to the places we are visiting or that the paid offerings from the key tourist providers are more prevalent. 

When booking return flights from Australia using points, we found it was easier to get the flights using points by staying a little longer and being flexible with the arrival and departing cities so on this trip we are flying into Milan, Italy and departing from Istanbul, Turkey. For those planning to travel to Europe and not on a tight time schedule this is worthwhile remembering as acquiring point seats to/from Australia to cities like London, Paris and Rome is difficult due to their inherent popularity so being flexible and arriving at any hub in Europe and flying onto to your preferred destination from there can be a very effective outcome. On this occasion we had strangely never been to Milan before in all our travels, so we are excited to spend some time in this fabulous city to commence our 2025 “Wine Afficionados” Tour. 

Our trip has now finally all come together which is very exciting despite the many hours spent on the computer. In telling our friends and family of our new adventure many have asked why we are not just going on an organised tour, a cruise even or simply travelling to a single destination. This is not the first time over the years that we have been asked this question, and our answer is always the same i.e. we are not ready in our lives to travel in that manner, we love exploring by ourselves to a variety of destinations and meeting a plethora of interesting like-minded individuals from all over the world. While we can still do that, we cherish the opportunity – there will be a time, no doubt, in the future as we age to explore other wonders of the world by sitting on a bus or lounging on a cruise deck, but that time is not now. Having said that, we appreciate that our approach to travel is not for everyone. Indeed, we really enjoy (at least most of the time) undertaking all the researching and planning for our trips as well as unearthing unusual treasures  along the way.

So, where are we going on our When Wine Calls “Wine Afficionados Tour”. After a few days exploring Milan we will fly over to Iceland and drive through this exciting  and majestic landscape, then call back into our “must visit city” of London, for a few days, travel through historical but picturesque Cornwall and Devon on route to Land’s End explore all of wonderful Ireland by car, discover the historical islands of  Malta and Sicily, over to the Puglia region of Italy (where we left our hearts in 2023)  to visit more of this amazing region then back to magical Venice on route to a return to Rovinj in Croatia as we did on the 2023 Summer Vintage Tour. On this leg of the trip Pauline’s mum at 88 years old is flying over to join us for a few weeks so after Rovinj we will take her on a road trip through northern Italy traveling up to the Italian Lakes as well as embracing the famous Piedmont wine region. Pauline and I will then head up to the fabulous Dolomites to again walk the picturesque mountain trails before calling in on the Veneto wine region (home of Prosecco)) and rediscovering the enchanting city of Florence and the incredible Tuscany region. We finish our 2025 “Wine Afficionados Tour” at the crossroads of Europe and Asia in the memorising city of Istanbul in Turkey.  

We will be heading off very shortly, so we hope you enjoy reading about our “2025 Wine Afficionados Tour “ through the “When Wine Calls” blog as we journey off again to explore and taste an array of wonderful wines across the various wine regios of Italy, Guinness in Ireland, Aperol’s throughout Europe with Grappa in Croatia all paired with fabulous unique food from these amazing parts of the world. Until then, take care.

Bruce & Pauline