Pescara vini

MUSIC TO LISTEN TO: HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN – THE ANIMALS

READING TIME: 12 MINUTES

I have always enjoyed seeing Marco Tullio Giordana’s film “The Best of Youth” ever since I was a teenager when I saw it for the first time, but I have only begun to understand the true meaning of that film.

It was an August afternoon a few years ago, it was very hot and my Oenology professor at the University of Teramo sent me a young trainee candidate to get to know me, to get to know the Ciavolich company, where I still work, to let him have a work experience during the now distant harvest of 2014. That’s right, I should have taught him something, but what? With difficulty I had just started to make peace with myself, I had only been working as an oenologist for 4 years, what should I have taught this boy?? I don’t know! The idea left me a little perplexed and the young intern, as soon as he joined me in the company, even more so! He showed up with cropped pants over a pair of ignobly shiny Converse, a perfectly ironed polo shirt, a tidy hair parted strictly from left to right, a clean-shaven face, evidently hairless (hard to believe for a gorilla like me!), but that which ended up making my precious “marbles”, already very incandescent, even heavier, was when during the conversation he said:

“I’m a guy who really wants to learn, I did a year of law but it wasn’t for me, I preferred to change course by choosing Viticulture and Oenology, I think it’s a suitable faculty for me”

What could I have expected from a newbie looking for a goal without knowledge? Frankly nothing! But he was nice and as soon as the conversation was over we stayed outside to chat a bit to get to know each other better accompanied by two glasses of wine, then two more, then two more. After a couple of hours we ended up getting up euphoric from the table laughing out loud, with a typical ethyl cheerfulness. This is how I met Francesco di Michele, during a torrid August afternoon, one glass after another while we talked about nonsense in an atmosphere of lightness like the harvest that followed shortly thereafter. Francesco didn’t know well the “habitat” of the cellar but he really had a great desire to learn and all this was pleasant, stimulating for me! I realized it was worth it.

The experience was very formative for both of them and Francesco liked it so much that he returned the following harvest, but this time not alone but with another bold young man: Mr. Andrea Fusilli. Andrea was a boy who had trained as a chemical expert, which I didn’t mind because I would have “handed” him all the annoying chemical analyzes of grapes and musts, he was very precise in the laboratory, tidy, he often countered my observations, sometimes too much, to such an extent that I tempered his soul with healthy humble cellar work! But his real strong point was the delicacies he brought from home for lunchtime, worthy of a wedding dinner, it was for this reason that Francesco and I baptized him the “Baronet”. Andrea and Francesco had two different characters, it was not easy to coordinate them in the cellar, but the autonomy acquired by Francesco often helped me to concentrate better on Andrea, indeed it was Francesco who in many cases indicated to Andrea the knowledge that I had transmitted to him last year. What for many would seem trivial but difficult to do happened, to pass on one’s skills without fear. It was these episodes that slowly triggered in me an irrepressible vortex of confrontation and the need to exchange ideas and knowledge, the true essence of these internships was to get everyone involved, me first.

We threw another harvest behind us, but there were many other good intentions, Francesco was now close to graduating, he was only missing one important detail, his thesis. Without much delay he did not hesitate to ask me to carry out an experimental test in the cellar, obviously I could only agree to his choice. The thesis topic was focused on the production of a Trebbiano d’Abruzzo 2016 obtained through alcoholic fermentation with two different selected yeasts. A very stimulating scientific test that marked, in the following years, the beginning of a series of constructive collaborations with various trainees from the Viticulture and Oenology course of the University of Teramo and beyond, it was also the fuse that unleashed my desire to get back on the books again and complete the three-year university course with a specialist degree, an idea that I had never abandoned, despite the adverse events that had marked my years after my first degree. After Francesco, Andrea could not be missing who during the 2017 harvest decided to carry out his experimental thesis test by observing the differences on a Trebbiano D’Abruzzo obtained through an alcoholic fermentation carried out by indigenous and selected yeasts inside terracotta amphorae. But it doesn’t end there! The same year together with Andrea there was a nice boy with curly hair who couldn’t wait to do his internship in what had now become our little “temple of wine”, his name is Antonio Dogali, a former young handball player of Citta S.Angelo, of which I will never be able to forget his brief moments of relaxation spent resting sprawled on a wooden pallet with his mouth wide open surrounded by grape midges that invade every cave of the cellar during the harvest. Antonio, like Andrea and Francesco, was very “sui generis”, willing like the others, but much more calm in spirit, he instilled a lot of tranquility even in moments of enological chaos. When he did a “bullshit” in the cellar you couldn’t flood him with reproaches because of his angelic gaze of a “good altar boy” so much so that one day, among the many episodes that I could count in my personal “encyclopedia of the bullshit of the cellar trainees at the barrage”, he happened to exchange the pure white wall of the cellar for a painter’s palette to color with delicious fermenting red wine on 5 meters of wall with a “multiple sketch” effect that would be the envy of an artist like Jackson Pollock. His repentance was so great that he decided of his own free will to paint and cover his work of art with white paint, obtaining the result of a true professional painter. So it was that from then on he became “Tonino the painter” for us.

Antonio decided to carry out an experimental thesis work on the macro-oxygenation of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo grapes in fermentation and seeing that by now with red wines he had given the opportunity to show all his artistic flair, the result was really very interesting. Another year went by and another harvest and 2018 was the turn of Alessandro Luciani known as “the President”, a nickname acquired during his university period for his activity as a student representative, but especially for his attitude as a “trade unionist”. puzzle” that came to him better than making wine! Alessandro is a very tall boy, with a distinguished bearing, sometimes a little snobbish, except when he exceeds a certain blood alcohol level in which he undergoes a “forced” metamorphosis, giving free rein to all his primordial instincts. He is a skilled cook whose presence was very welcome during the endless harvest evenings in the cellar, where his celestial vision emerged from his vision blurred by a blinding hunger with a “cofana” of spaghetti alla carbonara who was welcomed as the “Messiah” ! With Alessandro we carried out a complex experimental work in the vineyard for two years, which began in 2017 and concluded in 2018, evaluating the impact of bunch thinning on the quality of the final wine on a Cabernet Sauvignon cultivar. The experimentation was made difficult by the totally opposite climatic trend of the two years: very hot summer 2017 and vice versa very rainy and so humid summer 2018 that I still remember the massive presence of mosquitoes that dominated the habitat under the pergolas and the continuous sprinkles of Autan that the poor “President” was forced to give to his delicate and tortured legs!

By now at the Faculty of Oenology in Teramo I had the reputation of welcoming all students who wanted to have a mystical oenological experience and in fact other strange young “enotraviati” trainees soon arrived. In the vicinity of the 2019 harvest, a strange boy with short, blond hair with blue eyes like Terence Hill appeared, spirited, with a glacial gaze and an evil laugh. He looked like a character from the Doodles of A Clockwork Orange, when I found myself reflecting with perplexity: never a normal person! Finding an intern girl to dispel the sexist myth that sees males abound in this sector has always been a chimera, if then those who arrived were also very strange then we had to raise our hands! The strange blond was called Matteo Selvaroli and by now, as usual habit consolidated over time in the cellar, we necessarily had to find him a nickname, we just didn’t know which one. Matteo is an impetuous boy, a compressed spring, you couldn’t finish giving him a task that you could already see him getting to work accompanied by a good dose of naive desire to do something that often led him to make a “compilation” of bullshit to make you turn his head, but which he compensated very well with his great skill in the laboratory in chemical analysis. This is why we nicknamed him “Crodino” as “the blond non-alcoholic drink that drives the world crazy”! A real storm that every now and then you had to appease with very colorful positions and verbal clashes, but on the other hand I couldn’t be too demanding of those who were starting to approach a world that, on the contrary, was very familiar to me. With Matteo, frankly I almost got to the point of throwing in the towel in some difficult moments of the harvest, I thought we wouldn’t go beyond that experience, but once again my sensations were wrong. Matteo made a considerable effort, proportional to his impetus, to complete his first experience as an apprentice in the grape harvest and he was not satisfied. During the 2019 harvest he decided to carry out his experimental thesis work in the cellar with me, a beautiful scientific investigation work that aimed to genetically and quantitatively trace the microbiological population of indigenous yeasts during the spontaneous fermentation of a Pecorino grape must and Trebbiano Abruzzese, inside terracotta amphorae. It was an exemplary work which, in defiance of some fashions that characterize the current world of wine, helped to give a scientific interpretation to a natural phenomenon that we have known for millennia.

During these six years spent with strange and nice trainees, the need to constantly question myself, emphasized by the good dose of enthusiasm and initiative spirit of these guys, has been the driving force for many initiatives that I have undertaken during my “professional metamorphosis ”. The conceptual understanding that ensued made me revisit some experiential horizons that should never be excluded in my professional and personal life. From this comparison of ideas and projects new friendships were born, real alliances, which led me to meet other “outside the lines” colleagues such as Lorenzo Pulerà and Simone Coluccia, with whom I pleasantly shared the Master’s Degree course at the University of Campobasso; two erupting volcanoes with a pleasant Neapolitan spirit that never bored you. Often our “philosophical” meetings during the lunch break began by calling us fraternally “Weee the uncle! But what do we do, mm o’ cafe? Jamm bell” and continued talking about the digital revolution in agriculture or the short supply chain, which wasn’t so short given the average of our coffee breaks of at least an hour and a quarter, but the moka-style “o’ cafè” was spectacular!

I have remained pleasantly in contact with them and, although we see each other very little now, our telephone conversations have the duration of real “State-Regions” conferences in which we discuss every possible innovative professional path, but also to remind each other of our interminable “philosophical” lunch breaks which ended, as the legendary Pino Daniele sang, “co na’ tazzulella è cafè ca cigarette a coppa pe nun verè”. Finally, the idea of concluding the specialist degree was achieved with an ambitious experimental work carried out between 2018 and 2019 in the vineyards of the Ciavolich company in Loreto Aprutino. The topic of my thesis concerned the use of eco-sustainable and innovative means against the dreaded pests of the vine, a long experimental work, which has been added to other scientific works that for years have been trying to take the difficult path of sustainability in agriculture. This path of life, lived intensely, has awakened in me the desire to discover new points of view, new visions of one’s professional life path, always with the same spirit and curiosity of a boy who approaches a new world, aware that the best youth I’m living still has the whole life ahead!