Great tour, but the description is rather inaccurate. Our tour started at 6:30pm and we didn't get back to the meeting point until almost 11:30pm due to our driver being 10 minutes late, then 20 minutes late, then finally an hour later he showed up claiming there was an accident - yet we saw none on our way back. He also drove exceptionally fast back to the original meeting point, possibly trying to make up time for being an hour late in picking us up.
The restaurant that we had our class in wasn't even in Florence. At the meeting point we were met by our driver, who took us to the restaurant which was at Torciano, which was a 50 minute drive outside of Florence. No where in the description does it say you need to get into a van and have an hour long drive each way, turning this 3 hour tour into a 5 hour tour. When we arrived, we were asked to wash our hands, don an apron, then head to the kitchen to start cooking.
We started first with the gelato, as this needed more time to 'cook' than the pizza. We were not given any flavor choices, we were told we were simply making vanilla. The chef measured out all of the ingredients then put it into the ice cream maker, and we just watched. Next we moved onto the pizza. The chef had already prepared 2 stations with the flour mixture, which was odd because I thought we were doing this ourselves? We weighed out all of the ingredients one at a time thankfully there was only 5 in our group or this would have taken forever, then started making our dough.
The winemaker had given each of us a glass of proseco, then a glass of sparkling rose, and kept topping off our glasses as we cooked. The wine drinking aspect of this tour is highly understated. We all walked out of there bumbling drunks by the end of the night. This was actually more of a wine tasting/drinking tour than pizza/gelato making - not that that's a bad thing, but it should be mentioned. After we finished playing with the dough, the chef took ours away from us and gave us already prepared dough to use for our actual pizza's. So again, a bit confused here... were we just going through the motions of making and playing with dough and not going to ever use what we made ourselves?
Next came the rolling of the dough. Chef failed to inform us that we should spread the roller with flour first, so half of us had sticky dough globs stuck on our roller and were struggling quite a bit. After stretching the dough, came the sauce. Create the perfect tomato sauce means popping the top off of a jar of canned sauce and spreading it on your dough. We didn't create anything with the sauce, it was from a jar. We were offered shredded cheese, sliced red onion, and sliced prosciutto as our topping choices, that's it.
Chef put all of our pizzas into the oven and we sat down for a formal wine tasting with the winemaker while it cooked. There were 6 different wines in total to try, with generous pours in each one. As I said, we all walked away quite drunk when it was all said and done. The pizzas came out great, surprisingly, and the vanilla gelato was a fine touch afterwards. The wine stole the show though. As I said before, this was a wine tasting with a pretend cooking lesson in pizza preparation.
It sounds like I'm complaining I guess I somewhat am, but we did enjoy the wine and bought 3 bottles to ship home - well 2 wines, and 1 bottle of olive oil. After all was said and done, the 5 of us sat there drinking and talking for over an hour while we waited for the driver to return and pick us up again. I was just very confused the whole night as the description of the tour did not match what our experience was at all. Did they bring us to the wrong tour? If someone didn't like wine, they would have been very disappointed in our group. Thankfully, we all did.