Florence/ Tuscany Wine
 

My husband and I will be staying in Florence in late July. We're hoping to taste wine, visit wineries and olive groves (if possible). Can anyone tell me if it's possible to do a wine tasting or winery tour on our own? Would we need a car, reservations? Any suggestions and tips would be great!

Simple - take a bus to Chianti-en-Greve, home of chianti wines and some wineries/wine houses are in town - you can buy a ticket for some or all of them - not sure - have not done myself but many have talked about it. Bus is cheap and short

http://www.chianti.com/wine/chianti-winetasting.html

tells you how to do it without a car - scroll down to by public transportation and some are right in the town of Chianti-en-Greve so a snap plus a neat old small town:

https://www.google.com/search?q=chia...=1600&bih=1075

You can see vineyards swirl right around the town - probably olive groves too but then those are everywhere in this part of Italy.

Thank you! This is great!

Whether you need a reservation or not depends on the winery. The wineries in larger towns, e.g. Montepulciano, don't require reservations. You just walk in, look around on you own, and do the tasting at their shop. All the wineries I have visited outside the towns required reservations. They might have a couple of hours in the morning, a lunch break, and accept visitors again in the afternoon. An English tour further limits available time slots, it they offered one at all. Out of town wineries tend to be in the middle of nowhere requiring a car of some kind.

You can sample 100 different wines at this enoteca in Greve.

http://www.enotecafalorni.it/#!wine-tour-english/c3yt

Someone posted a report once about visiting a winery from Florence by bus. You might turn it up with a search.