The Wine Route and Why

Have you ever noticed the response wine gets, as a conversational topic?  Let’s take a dinner party with friends.  One of the guys has brought along an outsider: she’s shy and she doesn’t belong…  In brief, you couldn’t care less.  The guy’s obviously got a crush on her and raves.  She’s an M.A. at Yale (yawns all around).  Fluent in six languages.  (General annoyance.  The other women start the cellulite catalogue: she’s not as thin as she looks.)  She’s got a wine tasting diploma.  AH-HA!  The “new girl” on the (stumbling) block is suddenly not so bad after all.  Everyone starts pestering her with questions – you’d think she was a war hero, an astronaut, a famous explorer.  What was it like to walk on the moon, Mr. Armstrong?  What’s the best Italian wine?  Is it true that reds help to prevent heart attacks?  Tell us all about this Barolo: how can you smell tar in it?!  The Cellulite Girl from Yale has us all hanging on her every word.  She recounts the spices and nutmeg, red fruit, iris and violets; the toasted bread, green apples, honey and vanilla…  A world of sensations, associations, wistful nuances, memories and metaphors of the senses has quietly gathered into this swirling glass.  There is something solemn and near-sacred about its crystal rotundity, something that captures us in its orbit as the glass whirls, whispering countless aromas and harmonies.Wine is an art, they say.  It must be true, since turning matter into poetry is art.  They call it complementary to music, for it stimulates every sense except hearing.  Like music, wine is visceral, universal.  Both exert an immediate appeal, founded on the most ethereal of substances – the vibrant air of fragrances and notes – yet sustained by ironclad technique and math-like rigor.  Unlike many artistic expressions, however, wine is deeply rooted in the soil and the people.  Its roots are solid and real; made of sap and of sweat – roots interwoven with history and civilization.  Vines, like men, are native to a given terrain yet can be uprooted and exiled – sometimes happily so.  They can thrive in new habitats, even new continents.  A case in point (there are many) is Sangiovese, Italy’s most widespread red grape, at home in Tuscany over all other Italian regions, yet planted as far as the New World, as early as the late 1800s (in California).  Today, the sweet violets, cherries and spice of its native Tuscan soil bloom in Napa Valley as in Australia or Argentina, acquiring the local accents, colors and style – just like Italy’s émigrés, perpetuating and transforming an ancient heritage, investing it with new energies and fertile diversities.Journeying down the wine route, more often than not, means going back to our sources, rediscovering where we come from.  It means bearing testimony to ancient civilizations.  (It is no chance the word “culture” refers to both humankind and education, and agriculture or cultivation…)  The Wine Route, in particular, will allow us to explore that glorious country the ancients called Enotria – Land of Wine.  A land whose vineyards form millenary arteries and vital connections, row upon row, generation after generation, narrating the history of Italy and its people.   There are many stories to this ancient history.  We’d like to tell you some of them and we’d like you to savor them, taste them and feel them.  We shall set out for a long walk through the vineyards of Italy: geography, traditions, legends and appellations, curios and chronicles.  The Italians’ taste for life is for sharing, like fine wine.  Like Thanksgiving dinner.  Like a dinner party with friends.  The Wine Route, after all, will always take you home.    

                                                                                                                        Lucia Picardi