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01/31/2018 07:30 AMSo, what did a girl who would marry an Italian winemaker drink when she was single? California wine, she says. But no more. Now Westbrook resident Renée Angelini, whose husband Julius is one of the proprietors of Angelini Wine in Essex, says she prefers a glass of Italian prosecco.
There will be all varieties of Angelini for drinking at the upcoming Italian Cheese Rolling and Taste of Italy on Saturday, Feb. 10 at Angelini headquarters in Centerbrook. The event benefits the financial aid, community outreach, and music therapy programs Community Music School in Centerbrook. The school, with headquarters in Essex and a satellite location in East Lyme, is celebrating its 35th anniversary. Renée is the vice-president of its Board of Trustees.
Cheese rolling is exactly what it sounds like. Contestants have a large round of pecorino cheese that they heave down a 50-foot alley, hoping to knock over a single pin at the other end. Those who succeed go on to round two, in which the object of the game flips completely. Now the challenge is to get as close to the pin as possible without knocking it down. The roller who is the closest wins.
What does the lucky contestant get? Why, the wheel of cheese. Renée says the cheese, wrapped in heavy duty packing tape over its own rind for the contest, should still be edible. The event, scheduled for 65 people, sold out last year. This year the attendance limit has been set 15 guests higher at 80.
Cheese rolling, Renée says, is an event that takes place in the piazzas of some small towns in Italy.
“Not in big cities,” she adds.
An Internet search revealed an annual Easter cheese rolling in the Italian town of Panicale in Umbria, and a yearly rolling of a wheel of double Gloucester cheese at Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester in England. (Since 2013, a foam replica of the wheel of double Gloucester has substituted for the real thing to prevent injuries as contestants chased the wheel of cheese, which could reach speeds of 70 miles per hour, down a steep hill.)
Renée never took formal music lessons as a child, but her nine-year-old son Ethan is currently a guitar student at the Community Music School. He started with kindermusik, a program for infants 6 to 18 months old. Programs at the music school reach all ages from preschoolers to senior citizens who make up the New Horizons Band, the local branch of a national group dedicated to senior musicians.
Ethan loves to paint and when his father saw a recent design, he thought it would make an excellent label for some new wine varieties that Angelini is about to bring out.
“We cropped it a little,” Renée says of the design.
As a family, the Angelinis get to Italy yearly to the farm in the Marche region in eastern Italy where the grapes they use to make their wines grow on a 200-acre farm that has been in the family for three generations. Only about eight of those acres, however, are devoted to growing grapes. In addition to wine from their own grapes, Angelini Wine also distributes other vineyards’ wines from Italy as well as from a number of other countries, including France, Argentina, New Zealand, and yes, California.
Renée, who grew up in Pomfret, says she speaks a little Italian and understands “about 50 to 60 percent,” of what is said. Her own family background is French Canadian. She graduated from the University of Connecticut with a major in psychology and had “no idea” what she was going to do next. She got a job in human resources with Kelly Services, known for its Kelly girl temporary office staff, and worked not only in New England but also in California for them, before leaving for another staffing agency.
Her first job came long before those professional situations. She was 14 and asked a man opening a vegetable stand near her home in Pomfret if she would work for him. He hired her, but she was unhappy.
“It was boring. I wanted to quit, but my mother convinced me that I had to stay and now when I think of it, I am glad that I did,” she says.
Today Renée is an enthusiastic gardener of both vegetables and fruits in her own garden. She is also an enthusiastic cook, undaunted by complex recipes. After seeing an intricate cake called a Charlotte Royale on a television program, The Great British Baking Show, she decided to make it herself, a project that she recalls took two or three days and included making her own strawberry jam and sheets of sponge cake—and then when it was done, Renée, who follows a gluten-free diet, couldn’t even eat it. She says her husband and son enjoyed it.
She once spent a long cooking day with her mother-in-law making what she calls the best lasagna she has ever eaten, which included making the noodles from scratch. The process took eight hours—“and she had already made the sauce,” Reneé recalls.
Angelini Wine has sponsored a number of events for the Community Music School, including providing wine for the annual gala, and hosting a number of events, like the upcoming Italian Cheese Rolling night, at its warehouse. Renée participated in the cheese rolling last year.
“It takes a while to understand how the cheese rolls,” she says. “Let’s just say I didn’t make it to the second round.”
Italian Cheese Rolling and Taste of Italy
Angelini Wine, 22 Industrial Park Road, Centerbrook, hosts Italian Cheese Rolling and Taste of Italy, presented by Guilford Savings Bank to benefit the Community Music School, at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 10. For tickets, $65, visit www.community-music-school.org/cheese or call 860-767-0026.