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Have your read that odd book, "The Alchemist"?
There’s this Santiago, the main character,
who travels around the world looking for a treasure, leaving from Andalusia, in Spain,
and realizing once he arrived at the Pyramids in Egypt that he had the treasure under his feet, in Andalusia,
and it was hidden under the tree under which he slept.
What sense does it make for us?
That there’s a treasure more or less lost by everyone:
We need to take a lot of journeys,
And who finds it out?
Often, amateurs as I am do. I have another job, too,
but I know I’m probably more sensitive, avoiding popular ways of acting and thinking
But why?
I told you about when I decided to give up everything, when it all started:
in 2001 (even if the soil had been untouched for a long time)
actually with the 2002 crop to be more specific,
one of the hardest harvests ever,
when Marianna (my daughter) wanted a bunch of grapes and someone said:
"Wait, we have to wash them",
she was young, just a little more than one year old and I said:
"Unfortunately yes" and with that "unfortunately"
I thought to myself:
"Why do I have to come over here and wash fruits,
my fruits don't need to be washed…"
And there I realized that something had to change.
No one ever tried to push me into "natural", it was inside me.
At one point I said to myself:
"I don’t want to wash my fruits anymore."
Seems like a silliness but everything started from there,
and now the grapes taken from my plants don't need to be washed anymore.
Biodynamic, organic, all important things, but the real important thing is to talk about "natural",
a lot more important,
which means to find a balance between the plant, the soil and the sky,
balance sought by the winegrower and which can be tested by anyone.
If one said: “My ground has a good fertility,”
we just need to grab a handful of soil and smell it,
it doesn’t take a lot to have the proof,
and if you need to take a pickaxe to grab this handful of soil maybe it's not that fertile.
In general, and talking about the vineyard, these are things that you can test on your own if you know how to look at it.
For what pertains to the cellar,
instead things get a bit more slippery,
because checking whether there are gallic tannins, enzymes, added yeast, or not takes a bigger knowledge.
NICOLA:
GIANNI: