In early june I arranged an appointment with a friend of mine, and when we met he took me to visit one of his customers who lived in a Villa in the countryside near Padua. “Don’t worry” he said “it’s an informal and easy situation, and this person is a wine collector too, you’ll find him interesting!”. In fact I was introduced to this man as a wine connaisseur. So he took him immediately to his private cellar, and usually what I look for is the amount of bottles, that is quantity, and the labels, that is quality. It is a comparison among what I am already familiar with, what I’ve got and what I’d love to buy but I don’t have yet.

At first I watched, although I felt uneasy, all those wines diserved to be tasted, but in a cellar or in a wineshop this is what you have to do, experience follows knowledge! However for me it was a shock, a large conditioned room filled with what I could hope for -the best Italian labels and vintages, like a real guidebook, or maybe it was much better since bottles weren’t made of paper. All those wines, like jewels on shelves, a secret passion on display…….. I congratulated with him and I wished he would lock me in, while I was asked to select two bottles of red wine. I panicked: which ones? Any of them was hundreds of Euros worth, what was I supposed to do? After all his offer was appealing, so I couldn’t decline. I choosed one Gaja Nebbiolo Sorì Tildin 1997 and one Conterno Barolo Riserva Monfortino 1999, since upstairs eight businessmen were waiting for us, therefore good wine and good business matched. Definately these wines aren’t “easy drinking”, due to the limited production and the collection vintages, so rich in aromas and flavours, each of them diserved a whole tasting session. Then while I was sipping them, I wondered whether I was drinking the wine or the label, and consequently what was my mouth feeling? The image of that wine or the material side of it? Time got the wines better, time was one of the natural ingredients of the wines, and complexity reached its peak enhancing each distinct flavour, and rare aroma.

In front of me people were discussing, but after the first sip of wine they stopped, looked out of the window of the Villa in the countryside, and stayed silent for a while. Were they meditating about the quality of time? Again, was the reputation and the fame of the wine, or its mterial uniqueness?

My favourite one? The Monfortino………..

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!