Sigmund is wearing stained lederhosen, woollen socks and has a pair of disintegrating walking boots on his feet. On his enormous head is perched a tiny felt hat decorated with a pheasant's red tail feather. The hat is so small and battered that I imagine he must have owned it since boyhood, but he tells me that he has only had it a matter of weeks. With his great stubbly jaw Sigmund looks like Desperate Dan's mountain cousin, but there's nothing comic about Sigmund. He's a chef who's very serious about his cooking – though his portion control could do with some attention. From his tiny kitchen in a wooden hut halfway up a mountain, he serves dishes so huge they could trigger an avalanche. There are meat stews, dumplings, roasts, and sizzling pans of kaiserschmarren – sweet pancakes that are a meal in themselves.
We beg for mercy, but Sigmund hasn't finished with us yet: he wants us to wash it all down with a glass of schnapps brewed with flowers from his mother's mountain meadow. "Salute," he beams at us in his native Italian. We knock back the fiery liquid before stumbling back out into the snow.
An outsized chef dressed in Austrian clothes, speaking Italian and serving classic German food is not as unusual as it sounds in South Tyrol. In fact, Sigmund is pretty much par for the course. South Tyrol (which also goes by the German name of Südtirol, or Alto Adige in Italian) can be a little perplexing. Everyone speaks at least three languages, and road signs and menus appear in triplicate, too.
The problem is that South Tyrol is essentially two countries. The autonomous province is the northernmost corner of Italy and was created in 1927. The standard line among the confused locals now is that South Tyrol offers the best of both worlds – Italian hospitality and Teutonic efficiency. (Teutonic hospitality and Italian efficiency wouldn't be quite as appealing.)
I'm visiting the area with my wife, Juliet, and our three children (Liberty, 15, Rufus, 13, and Vita, 8) to sample the area's skiing. This is only the second time we've been skiing – and the trip is not something we've undertaken lightly. There's the expense to consider, of course, but our reservations are more deep-seated. We have history with the piste.
Eight years ago, we booked a week's holiday in Chamonix. It was a disaster. The temperature dropped to -26C, it was packed and the runs all seemed to be death slides. On the first morning, a fist fight broke out on the shuttle bus. When we reached the slopes, the instructors were as brutal as the weather – at one point an enraged ski instructor approached Rufus (then just five years old) and shouted in French: "You are a total zero."
I know French ski teachers have a fearsome reputation, but the fact that each morning the hotel's boot room was filled with hysterical children begging not to be made to go skiing made me wonder if they'd gone too far. At the end of an emotional week, we announced our retirement from skiing.
And yet, eight years later, we've decided to give the sport another chance. The resort we've chosen for our comeback ski holiday is Alpe di Siusi (in Italian) or Seiser Alm (in German). It nestles on the eastern edge of the vast South Tyrol ski basin, an area where the Italian Alps give way to the Dolomites. These beautiful mountains were named a Unesco world natural heritage site last year. Strange to tell, the range is in fact the world's highest coral reef – formed 250 million years ago when it was shoved unceremoniously into the sky by the boot of Italy moving into the European land mass. The Dolomites now form a striking ring of pale beige and pink rock towers which arch out of the snow.
The resort is a cable car ride from the station between the valley villages of Castelrotto (Kastelruth in German) and Siusi allo Sciliar (Seis am Schlern). It's worth noting that only 2% of the area's visitors are from Britain, so English is the one language you rarely hear. The cable car ride takes about 15 minutes and when you step out of your dangling gondola, you're in the resort of Compatsch, at the eastern edge of Europe's largest and highest expanse of Alpine meadow – all 22 square miles of it. It's like arriving in a mystical winterland above the clouds. The unusual combination of dazzling peaks surrounding a huge snow bowl means the runs are tailor-made for novice skiers: long, gentle, wide and with few trees to crash into. All are marked red and blue; there's only one black run. Adrenaline junkies would find it a bit tame. But for us, a bunch of hopeless beginners, it was ideal.
Alpe di Siusi itself has about 37 miles of downhill runs and 22 lifts. But it belongs to the Dolomiti Superski, the world's largest interconnected ski area, which means on the same lift pass you can access 12 skiing areas and up to 745 miles of runs – including the Sella Ronda, a 16-mile tour around the dramatic Sella Massif peak. Naturally, we skipped all that as it sounded more than we could handle and, on our first bright morning, headed for the ski school and a lesson with Manuel – a patient and funny guide who spoke English with a strong Brummie accent, He'd worked for five months as a waiter in Sutton Coldfield.
My wife, still traumatised by our Chamonix experiences, decided not to ski. The idea of hot chocolate and mountain scenery was enough for her. But we were both there to watch the children line up on the nursery slope. Being teenagers, the older two were at least a decade older than most of the other kids, but Manuel made sure they never felt foolish and within a three-hour lesson, he had them heading for the chairlifts and whooping down some of the longer runs.
Morning sessions were followed by huge lunches in wooden huts perched on the shoulders of the mountains – restaurants such as Sigmund's (Gasthof Schwaiger) and Gasthof Tiroler. One day we went up to the Williams hut, warmed ourselves with hot chocolate piled with cream and then swapped our skis for old-fashioned toboggans before chasing each other down a 3km run to the foot of the chairlift in powder snow as deep as our chests. There are seven toboggan runs – all several miles long – and it was as much as we could do to force the kids off the sledges and back on to their skis.
To keep our costs down, we stayed in a self-catering apartment, but one with a difference – it was on a working farm. Alpe di Siusi is dotted with traditional wooden farm buildings, and our farm, Pristingerhof, is one of 1,300 working farms in South Tyrol that offer rooms. It's owned by Rudolf and Josefine and has been in Rudolf's family since 1780, though he claims people have been farming at Pristingerhof since 1396. Returning from a day's skiing to watch the cows being milked and help feed hens, goats and sheep gave the trip a surreal air.
On the final day, the kids were booked in for their last lesson, Juliet took a chairlift up to one of the huts for yet another hot chocolate, and I found myself free to head for the area's best and longest run – the Punta D'Oro (or Goldknopf). I pushed off from the top, the vast amphitheatre of Alpe di Siusi stretching out beneath me. The huge white slope was empty beneath the blue sky. Ten minutes later, I reached the bottom and turned to see another lone skier swooping down behind me. With each turn, her skis threw out a long plume of pristine powder. Then, just as she reached the end, she snagged a ski tip and fell. "Bugger!" she grunted – it was the only English voice I'd heard all week.
• Apartments for six at Pristinger Hof (pristingerhof.com) start at €60 a night. Ski equipment is available at K&K Sports (kandk.bz). BA (ba.com) has return flights from Gatwick to Verona from £97 or to Venice from £98. More information at suedtirol.info
