Reading With Glass Sheep In The Shade

Today was a bit too warm for me and on days like this I prefer to sit in the shade with a glass of wine (or two) and a good book.
I've just started reading a book called Between The Chalk And The Sea by Gail Simmons. It is inspired by the author coming across an antique map in Oxford's Bodleian Library, showing a faint red line between Southampton and Canterbury which suggests a significant, though long-forgotten, road. Renamed the Old Way, medieval pilgrims are thought to have travelled this route to reach the celebrated shrine of Thomas Becket.
Over four seasons, the author walks the Old Way, winding 240 miles between the chalk hills and shifting seascapes of the south coast of England, to rediscover what a long journey on foot offers us today. It blends history, anthropology, etymology and geology and ask if it is now possible to reclaim pilgrimage as a secular act. It's an utterly fascinating and beautifully written memoir and travelogue with what feels like a completely new take on one of the oldest literary genres (the story of a pilgrimage).
Now on to the wine - my image is of the sheep bedecked label on the bottle of one of my favourite wines (alongside two accompanying wine glasses -  the wine's not blue by the way it's just the reflection of our garden parasol, in case you were worried!) - Pecorino Terre Di Chieti.
Pecorino as a grape variety has a long, complicated and all-too common history. It has been cultivated in the Marche region of Italy for hundreds of years but low yields saw it replaced by more productive grape varieties, such as Trebbiano, and by the mid 20th Century Pecorino was thought to be extinct.
In the 1980's a local producer researching native varieties investigated a rumour of some long forgotten vines in an overgrown vineyard. Cuttings were then taken and propagated and by the 1990's enough grapes were harvested to make a very good wine and since then the variety has expanded to be grown across Abruzzo, Umbria and Tuscany. The name Pecorino actually means "little sheep" (hence the illustrative ovine label) and is supposedly because the fallen grapes were a favourite treat for the flocks of sheep driven to lower pastures in the area.