I’ve been traveling for a long time… it seems to me always now! Yet, the thing that makes me think that I will never stop doing it is that certain places never cease to amaze me, to take me by surprise. Even those I’ve been to a myriad of times haven’t allowed the blanket of boredom to envelop them.
To push me is a necessity; it is not a specific place that draws me to itself, but the very concept of destination, valid only if the journey itself is the prelude to it. My journey begins at 12, when I took the first plane and found myself in a distant land. Far from the land that I considered home, far from the hearth that I considered familiar, from usual affections and usual delights. I learned to travel the moment I accepted diversity and the fear of not being able to understand, to understand, to grasp what one does not know, what one does not know.
Then the wine arrived and with it the journey became even more an integral part of my life and the concept of home became in a certain sense itinerant in another inherent in my self, free from material ties with brick and lime structures. , concrete but full of memory and moments of contact with what every era of my life, albeit young, has faced me.I learned to orient myself following instinct and experience, but I do not deny having made use of guides , maps and to still be on the lookout for advice, directions before and during each section of my life and wine journey. Today they ask me to be a guide, to give advice, someone assumes I can or even should influence the choices of others through clearer assertions, more drastic assessments, more pragmatic opinions (eg: scores). It’s not for me! I don’t want to be a guide, but a stimulus! I do not want to influence, plagiarize, condition, but simply assist those who already possess the marvelous qualities of curiosity and passion in discovering themselves as travelers, as much as I. The journey is something mysterious, at least as long as there is no way to rearrange impressions , sensations, events, thoughts, images and above all encounters that we have saved in the cloud of our mind unconditionally, according to the default settings of that extraordinary and very messed up computer that is our brain. it starts to make sense, a sense that can be more or less consistent with what our expectations were but that is worth a lot just for having found it. For me, wine is a journey. The trip of a lifetime! A journey that has never ceased to intrigue me and push me to get to know, know, discover and to do this I had and still have to study, ask and search, relentlessly, without any weight. today, the communication of wine still focuses on the absolute stripping of the side concept of wine itself, in which the journey through different places, cultures, contexts and people is put aside, despite being a fundamental component and, in my view, I believe that, never as in this era, we can and should tell and share much more than a series of pedantic and, often, prepackaged organoleptic descriptors. There is much more in and around a glass of wine and it seems so obvious that I feel foolish to repeat it for the umpteenth time but equally absurd is that it still needs to be done. starting from the land, the vineyard and the agronomic field, to then pass through the cellar and the oenology in all its forms as long as respectful (at least as far as I’m concerned) and even before diving headlong into the goal of tasting, there are people with their lives, their choices, their background but above all with their personality.Talk about wine by removing even just one of these values for me would be impossible and reductive, at times disrespectful not only of the work of those who make wine ago, but also of the thirst to know of those who are curious and thirsty for something that goes far beyond a cold evaluation or a fine criticism in itself.
So do not seek from me lapidary affirmations of omnipotence or onanistic conclusions aimed at conditioning your tastes. If you are here and you appreciate what I do and how I do it, let my words, my tastings, my travel notes move something as visceral as it is atavistic in you: the desire to leave!
If there is one thing I can’t stand it is when someone says to me “eh but who has the time to travel?!?” … I can’t stand it not because I don’t understand and don’t accept the limits of those who have less elastic jobs than mine (that that allows me to travel and has very little to do with wine), but because I believe that, if the passion for wine that drives you to read wine blogs like mine is even one thousandth of what I have, time can be found. In short, move those behinds! I’ll be a utopian, an incurable dreamer, but what I would like is not to push you to buy a bottle that excited me, about which I wrote with obvious emphasis but, rather, I would like to see you walking in the vineyards where I walked or maybe in others to be, to my turn, intrigued by your little big discoveries; I would like to see you browse between tanks and barrels trying to understand the dynamics of the cellar; I would like to see you get to the tasting after having chatted with the winemaker who at that moment is dedicating time taken away from his vines, his musts, the wine to come, but who is happy to tell about himself and to share with you the sacrifice and the joy of making wine.Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I should reduce everything myself to evaluations and rankings, but I have always thought that considerations of that kind were questionable just for the theses that some take for granted, but which are not at all obvious! absurd, the only truly unobjectionable and shareable thing as pure and simple individual and permanent truth is the story of a journey that lacks nothing, including inclusive and non-exclusive personal impressions. They almost succeeded in making me stop talking about wine emotions, but in the light of recent travels and after having risked not being able to leave except through a glass, the desire to share sincere emotions and sensations with you is stronger than ever!
After starting with a paraphrase of a famous quote from the unforgettable Steve Jobs, I conclude with an excerpt from that same speech, which he gave in 2005 at Stanford University during a graduation ceremony, as a fitting synthesis of my thinking today:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
― Steve Jobs
F.S.R.
#WineIsSharing