Contact & Location
All tours meet in central Florence: Via dei Renai 19 / 23R.
You will see the sign "Formaggioteca Terroir" which is our Cheese & Wine Bar that you are also very welcome to visit after your tour to sip an extra glass of wine or to browse excellent wines to ship back home.
Ask a Grape Question: info@grape-tours.com
Grape phone number (unless urgent, we prefer you shoot us an email): +393337229716
Our guests have been amazing!
The good, the better & the GRAPE
We treasure every comment!
Who we are & what we do
We're Grape!
What makes Grape Tours special is us and our extensive knowledge of Italy's wine regions. We now rely on three decades of experience in the wine business giving us great connections to some of the best wineries, most of which practice sustainable and organic viticulture.
Life is too short to drink bad wine, so high-quality is our personal and professional goal that we always aim to feature in our itineraries. Our approach to wine is to make it comprehensive so storytelling is an essential part of our tours.
Grape Tours was started by Rebecca and Pierre, and we are hands-on in every aspect of the business. The rest of the Grape team is made up of wine professionals whom we’ve proudly collected over the years! Ilaria Miele was one of the first team members and you will likely hear from her if you have a question and email us. The rest of the bunch you'll meet when we see you at our meeting point in Florence.
Rebecca
Rebecca Christophersen Gouttenoire founded the tuscan-wine-tours.com website back in 2004 and did the initial footwork for Grape Tours.
Super passionate about Tuscan wine and wine in general, she saw a need for quality wine tours for the evermore well-traveled guests. She built upon previous relationships established when she ran a wine bar in Florence and also later when she had a go at being a wine distributor.
She is a certified Italian Wine Scholar educator and in recent years, she founded the Italian Wine Institute in Florence which proposes wine education both for beginners and professionals.
Rebecca personally runs all the multiple-day Grapetrotters trips in Italy.
Rebecca writes the newsletters and once in a while on the blog. Here you can read the full version of how Rebecca & Pierre met.
Pierre
Pierre Gouttenoire is a French winemaker & enologist with a M.Sc degree in agronomy and is co-founder of Grape Tours.
He worked for more than 15 years for French leading wine companies.
His second life in Italy is spent partly on the family farm in Chianti Classico.
Occasionally he guides tours in France and some in Tuscany for experts, but he’s mainly behind the scenes making sure the operation runs smoothly.
Pierre’s childhood in Roquefort in the south of France made him passionate about cheese, so he also takes care of the cheese purchasing and aging for Formaggioteca Terroir, a Cheese & Wine Bar the couple opened downtown Florence during the tough Covid years.
Both Rebecca and Pierre hold certificates of Olive Oil Experts and produce and export their own prime quality organic extra virgin olive oil.
The couple also has two boys, Julian & Oliver, and an Australian Sheppard named Frisbee.