Gin, TabSpag, Swimming With Jesus, And More Gin

Bartender extraordinaire Paolo Gustado doing his thing outside the Splendido Mare (photo by me).

When the good folks from Portofino Gin invited me to their Italian home base to learn about the gin and where/how it’s made, I hadn’t tasted it or even heard of it. Doing due diligence, I tried it before committing, and fortunately it’s an excellent gin that has become a martini mainstay around Chez Sachs. You can read about it and much more besides in the latest installment of What’s Tony Drinking? over at Alcohol Professor (the link, friends, is right -> HERE <-).

One rule of press trips is that, unless you’re writing a travel-oriented article (as my awesome cohort Vicki Denig did for this trip, and you can read it -> HERE <-), you don’t write about the press trip. Ethics and all that, I suppose. But hey, this is my digital domain, and if I want to talk about how amazing this trip was, there’s nobody to stop me. So without further ado….

Located on the rocky Italian coastline south of Genoa, Portofino is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, hands down. The town was rebuilt somewhat after World War II, but no new construction has been done there in about 60 years, and even the colors of the bright pastel buildings has been mandated to stay the same, so the feel is quite timeless and decidedly not modern. Stunning villas emerge out of rocky outcroppings, which will make you wonder how the heck the occupants get home (the answers vary, ranging from paved roads at the back entrances to steep steps to hidden elevators carved into the peaks and hills). Amazingly, though there are plenty of shops to buy knick-knacks and T-shirts and that sort of thing, Portofino doesn’t feel like a tourist trap. The vibe is very… natural, for lack of a better word, and unaffected.

There weren’t any bad moments during the trip, but the highlight was probably a boat trip around the coast, to Camogli, where we encountered Christ Of The Abyss. It’s a large statue of Jesus himself that was deliberately placed about 50 feet underwater, to commemorate all the lives lost at sea, back in 1954. It’s become a popular swimming/snorkeling spot, and fortunately my cohorts and I were wearing our swimsuits, so we got to not only swim in the Mediterranean (it was the first time for me), but swim with JC himself. Most of my fellow journos went so far as to drink a beer while swimming — I abstained, not because I’m an opponent of tipsy swimming but because I don’t really like beer. In retrospect, though, I should have grabbed a bottle just for the heck of it.

The food, as can be expected, was astounding. The seafood was as fresh and flavorful as could be, which was no surprise given our seaside location. And the pasta was extraordinary as well, always prepared perfectly, whether it was tissue-thin sheets of lasagna with pesto sauce or spaghetti arrabiatta. We could never make up our minds whether to order seafood or pasta at the multitude of restaurants we dined at during our stay, so we eventually settled on ordering seafood with an order or two of spaghetti for the table, which we wound up shortening to “TabSpag.” At some point one of us had the brilliant idea of making TabSpag the hip new culinary craze sweeping coastal Italy, with all of us writing about it for different publications, and turning it into an actual trend. None of us has tried it yet, as far as I know, but I can envision far worse TikTok trends than Gen-Zers ordering TabSpag in Olive Gardens throughout the land.