Besides wine, what do we expect from a bottle? For sure aromas, flavours, and pleasure, but what we should look for is landscape. Which one, or which ones?

We can have both an esthetic idea of a landscape and a wine related one: soft undulating hills, scenic back-roads through enchanting villages, impressive sunsets, or soil and subsoil, drainage and exposure, grapes and prunings, altitude and slopes. There is a further option, though, the producer point of view, dealing with the preparation of the soil, the selection of the grapes, the growing and the vinification methods.

Surprisingly, wine is often out of a human contex, a perfect product of enological techniques, one of the many brands on the market.

A glass of wine is not a crystal ball which makes visible the invisible, but it could be a magnifying lens focussing on the relationship among nature, landscape, and human activity. In a word, civilization. So what do we really find in wine? The expression of authenticity, uniqueness, and identity, a facinating experience involving both senses and mind.

Since wine is a manufactured product, it is the “place” where different experiences meet, such as the merging of international grapes with a rooted local traditions, or of modern techonlogy with local wine processes handed over from father to son over the centuries. And when we think, taste and talk about wine, our major effort consists in coordinating different languages, such as enology, memory and personal experience, all together in a consistent way.

Moreover wine is both real matter and a great metaphor too.

Is it possible to find all we said in a bottle? If it sounds confusing, what you can do is take a seat and taste a glass of wine………. salute!