I came to winemaking out of love for the land my mother had inherited from my grandfather, and for my fondness for the people who worked it. These were the places of my childhood summers, which every year we reached coming down from Genoa for the holidays. They were places of freedom, of countless possibilities in open spaces, alongside the work of those who tilled the land and kept animals.
Places of intense scents, of old tools, of simple farm labour. Without quite realising it, I grew familiar with that atmosphere. Then came the time of responsibility — unforeseen, unplanned, at a moment when that old world was fading away and one had to think how to give it a new life. It was the 1970s. But it took many more years before a real commitment took hold. First came an interest in studying philosophy. Then the 1990s arrived. And since then I have tried to become a farmer
who makes wine, and, when nature allows it, also oil.

Every year, as harvest approaches, uncertainties and hesitations arise, in the worry of getting it wrong, of picking too early or too late, of missing the right moment with the weather.
Then, when the grapes have finally come into the cellar, a calm and a silence envelops them. They have been broken; the beauty of their integrity, exposed to sun and wind, no longer exists, but their life in the cellar begins — a deep transformation, in which they will be looked after and accompanied as they become wine. But I spoke of the calm that surrounds them: it is the waiting for something to happen.
From the very first hours, shifting aromas begin to release, different from grape to grape, and one senses that something not yet visible is taking place. Then the tumultuous phase will arrive, and the uncertainties will fade.
Learning to accompany it and look after it is no small thing, but in the end the wine makes itself. This is what I have learned by observing the complex process of transformation that takes place in the fermenting grape. Turning to learn this elemental simplicity of winemaking, learning to follow the shifting processes of transformation, with the anxious question: is everything going the right way? But asking it in a spirit of trepidation, not in order to steer towards some corrective action — learning instead to trust that unfolding. Never letting go of the rigorous work done beforehand, the work that brought the grapes into the cellar, but then rightly trusting, with confidence, the process of transformation that has been set in motion.
This path has also meant reconsidering what quality in wine actually is — inseparably linked to its wholesomeness and to characteristics far removed from the aromatic complications brought on by heavy preservatives. Learning to receive those fine sensations that only a non-invasive vinification, born of grapes ripened without forcing, can offer. Quality, then, as a synonym for finesse, from which arise sensations — of smell and of taste — that draw us in rather than assail us.

Physical strength is needed in our work, but also sensitivity and tenderness, practicality but also the capacity to imagine. We need to learn to observe the world around us as a single whole, while at the same time knowing how to observe its details closely. We must measure ourselves against the soil, interacting with its tendencies and particularities, and at the same time understand the behaviour of plants and grasses, since it is inevitable to bring about something that alters the simple and inescapable natural paths that every soil follows under the effects of climate, in order to propose others. And for this we must put our minds inside these processes, entering the complex world that interacts with us. The horizon of biodynamics can then become — out of that complex vision that it is — the most natural perspective for farm work, if we recognise that life expresses itself through infinite relationships, between silent bodies of immense size and force and infinitesimal particles, themselves extraordinarily active, and everything holds together — the mineral part along with the vegetable and the animal, all animated by energies we perhaps do not fully understand. We must seek the path of these relationships and feel that they exist, and try to love the life that wants to emerge in all its forms.
It is not possible to embrace all this except with a feeling of deep humility, putting ourselves in a listening posture, with perseverance and will, with our boots and a few useful tools, trying to see this whole because life has a shape. And then, as with any work, one must learn to accept and to know oneself too — our mood swings, our limits of understanding, but also our good intuitions.
In this way natural events can be seen not as continual obstacles to our plans, and our work can rise enormously, freeing itself from constant fears and finding the confidence to explore those paths that nature makes possible for us, if we search for them with perseverance. Learning to live alongside adversity, without wanting to eliminate it violently and abruptly. Accepting, where necessary, the more tiring and costly path, if it proves to be the right one and the one with the greatest prospects.