Roots, primary essence of every form of life. What drives a man towards his origins, towards those childhood memories that occasionally resurface in the mind like ancient, indelible dreams, scenes that make us feel good when we think back on them.
To me too, as I imagine to many, well beyond the famous "middle of the road...", when so many things have been done, when the experiences that we believed to be essential have been lived (and perhaps it was seen that we could easily ignore them), yes an insistent voice emerged, discreet but at the same time tenacious, which could not be ignored.
I was born 57 years ago in a small town in the Tarantino area where a superb wine has always been produced: Sava and its Primitivo wine.
My grandparents cultivated it, and their fathers before them, always on the same land. The house where I was born was built above their cellar where tools dating back to the first decades of the last century can still be found. My parents' bed where my sister and I came into the world, is located as the crow flies exactly above the large wine press in the cellar, the "furata crossa", which was used by my grandparents to make wine or more precisely "lu mieru”, as they say where I come from. A sign of destiny? Perhaps…
Back then, the ambition of every small landowner was to have their children study to free them from the hard work of the fields, and so my grandparents did with my mother and father, they both became teachers and, obviously, they demanded from me and my sister a path similar to theirs.
However, I remember with a feeling of strong nostalgia the afternoons of September and even more so of October of my childhood, when, having finished my homework, I would go down to the cellar to taste the new wine fermenting powerfully in the large "capasoni" still there by the dozens , to look with admiring eyes at the work of the decanters, witnesses of an ancient but not forgotten past.
Then we grow up, unfortunately loved ones leave us, life takes you elsewhere until, suddenly, you realize that in order to pursue objectives and stereotypes almost imposed by society, you have neglected and almost caused your original world to die, your most beautiful memories. Dear.
This is why, even though I was no longer very young, I decided to restore the family vineyards, a few hectares but located in the heart of the area probably best suited to the production of Primitivo wine; half where the land is fat, black and generous and with exceptional productions and half where the land is red and calcareous, a land that ripens few grapes but of very high alcohol content.
Five hectares in total to begin the adventure I want to tell you about...