Winery

We consider wine as a living organism, since it is the son of living organisms.
We imagine it with the heart of man, of which he is the creature, and with the skeleton of the vine, of which he is the son.

But the largest and most mysterious organ is the skin. 
The skin performs a very specific function for the organism that it surrounds, and its opposite at the same time. Let’s pause, for a moment, to reflect on it. The skin protects the organism from the outside world and at the same time is its contact with it. It is the organ of defense of the living being but, at the same time, of its subtle sensitivity. It closes and opens the exchange routes with the surrounding environment, through the passage of liquids and gaseous substances. For this reason, we devote infinite attention to the skin of the wine, that is, to the vessel that welcomes it. 
Just like that: the wine jar acts as if it were the skin of the wine it contains. We choose it and take care of it, both in the youthful stages of the wine and in the adult ones.
The concrete, leathery skin, sculpted in large parallelepiped-shaped tanks, protects some wines, in their delicate youthful phases, when they are unarmed. The more fragile terracotta of the amphorae allows the life of more structured, robust and tenacious wines, able to look after themselves. The wood of the tonneaux, flexible and resistant, is a unique skin, like a tailored suit: each barrel is different from the other and better suits one wine than another. Alda Merini wrote: “Poetry is the poet's skin”. We are convinced that he was right, to the point of thinking, with analogous mysticism, that the container is the skin of the wine.

They are six, large, imposing, mysterious… but yet they are fragile.

The amphorae arrived, after a long journey, that began, several months ago, in Russian Georgia.

They are six, large, imposing, mysterious. But yet they are fragile. We look at them, for a few more days, in all their majesty, because we know that they must be buried. Not only because of their fragility but, above all, to bring them back into contact with the soil, the material they are made of, the material they need in order to function. Georgian earth in contact with Italian earth. Georgian tradition in harmony with Italian tradition.

Wine has always united people. Wine is conviviality, “cum vivere”, that is, living together. 

We interpret the vinification in amphora in our own way, using a long experience with fermentations and submerged cap macerations. We use bamboo canes to confine the grape skins below the free surface of the wine; keeping them immersed but separated from the liquid, to move the moment of their final separation as far as possible. It is a small betrayal of the Georgian tradition. We know this, but betrayal and tradition have a common etymology, precisely because tradition changes and regenerates itself, over time, through many small betrayals that we are used to calling changes.

We don't know exactly what amphorae will give to our wines; it's part of their mystery. We just need to know what they give to us and we are sure that, in turn, we will return it to our wines. For thousands of years, before science supplanted myth, before protocols replaced rituals, man buried objects, entrusting them, hopefully, to the beneficial telluric forces, capable of renewing and transmitting vital energy to these objects. This ancestral practice led us to bury the terracotta amphorae and to entrust the care of our wines to them. The place where they are lined up has become our waiting room. Here, we confidently await our wines before sharing them with you.

The tonneaux has stood up

Its usual horizontal position, consistent with the cradle shape, typical of the barrel - almost propitious for the rest of the wines in aging - is not in tune with our vinification process. 

We need verticality. Why? For our self, there is no distinction between the moment of fermentation and the period of refinement. We interpret the winemaking time as if it were a long present, with no fractures between before and after. For this reason, we do not separate the peels from the liquid part, because they are daughters of the same material: the grape berry.

They remain together, as it was on the plant, in a creative path that sees the wine born at the very moment of their separation: in that instant, the first separates from the after. That first can last several months or even years. In that first time, the compact peels of the grapes, float in the liquid, floating submerged, as if they were a submarine on the surface. This is why we need verticality. 

The steel cylinder, at the top of the tonneau, appears to be the submarine's turret. Actually, it is the distinctive element, in the aim of our solution: it is used to create an expansion vessel for the liquid part, so that the peels always remain immersed in it, confined below the upper bottom of the tonneau.

The goal of the long maceration is not to extract substances from the peels, to give them to the liquid. The spirit of wine is neither that of subtraction nor that of addition, but that of equality. The goal is to give the parts time to restore that balance that has been shattered, when the berries are broken, when the sugar has been destroyed to generate alcohol, when many substances, present up to that moment, in the grapes, have been metabolized by yeasts. Restoring the balance takes time. That time is the first. The after, we entrust it to you.

A special stone

An old vocabulary of Italian etymology reports the following, with regard to the lemma concrete: "[...] Any composition of a glutinous or tenacious nature capable of binding more things together". By extension, the verb “to concrete” becomes a word to indicate the mysterious process of strengthening spiritual unions, between individuals: for example, friendship. On the other hand, the concrete conglomerate (commonly called concrete) is a special stone. A liquid stone. Yes, a stone willing to give up its essence, hardness, to be molded into the desired shapes, before returning to being solid stone.

For thousands of years we have established a special relationship with this stone, to the point of being able to consider it, even strictly speaking, a domestic stone. 

This is the foundation of our relationship with the concrete barrel. Conditioned by the charm of a stone in is solid form that was once liquid, like the wine it contains. A stone that has been used throughout history to build the homes of billions of men. This intimate relationship with matter has led man, over time, to a long process of domestication of this stone and, vice versa, the stone to an inevitable conditioning process of man.

We are perfectly aware that this story is pure emotion, irrational narration. We are equally aware, at the same time, that wine has its own essence in the irrationality of emotions. On the other hand, who could ever imagine that the first reinforced concrete structure was designed to create a vase of flowers? Who could ever imagine that the importance of reinforced concrete was used, for the first time, to support a slender flower? Isn't  that just as irrational?

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