How to Build to Last

Arianna is from the southern part of Sicily, started 20 years ago, started her domain with one hectare along a 3,000 year old road called SP68, also the name of her most well-known cuvée, and now is growing not only wine, but also all the good stuff coming from Sicily. So there's capers, there's citrus, there's vegetables, olives, my personal favorite. So... Thank you. Welcome, please. Ready. Enjoy. Well... I'm very excited. I'm a farmer so, let's say, I don't find myself in front of all these people every day, a little less. I will talk about my story and this love story I had with wine, for almost twenty years now. But above all I prefer to speak in Italian because if I have to connect first of all with myself and then above all with you, I will do it in my native language. For me, talking about wine is like talking about love. That rebellious love, a little bloody, a bit controversial, In my opinion, which we have all reached in life. That love that if you can't interpret it well, to decipher it, because you basically lack the tools, It also makes you fall several times. But if you can then transform, if you can then understand and also move on, it's that love that also gives you the chance in life to be able to do a lot. Above all, to understand yourself and move beyond. And it is above all that love that you allows you to build that in life your story piece by piece. My story began around... 20 years ago and even a little more. I was 18-19 years old. I was at the University of Milan to take samples in a vineyard. Then I decided to study viticulture and oenology and I was in a land that had this same sand, but this sand was red, so my shorts and socks were all soaked. It was summer, it was very hot and they were soaked in red earth. Another time I met the red earth in the my life was when I played tennis at 14 years old. I had to give up tennis then. because basically I didn't have peace of mind that I have now. or at least that serenity that slowly arrived in life. Above all, I decided at that moment in my life to change sports, to enroll in athletics and run 100 meters. Because those 100 meters gave me the opportunity to unload much faster and turn blocks into power. which were basically not the starting blocks of those 100 meters, but they were the blocks I had in life. And so athletics helped me a lot at that time. Basically, little by little, I found myself again. At that time I decided to do oenology and viticulture and if at the same time as university they studied very conventional oenology, very industrial, the models were those of the 90s, those of the technology of large companies, but above all of those who no longer spoke of agriculture and of those who no longer felt agriculture. At the same time I was lucky enough to meet a couple of friends at university and the weekend instead of having too much fun we had fun in a different way. we went to visit artisan producers, producers who at that time were looking after a piece of land, but above all a piece of sky. Those producers who were like custodians to me. What is a farmer after all? He is a custodian of a portion of land, of a portion of land and if there was no agriculture and hence this multitude of guarded lands, there wouldn't even be our landscape if you think about it. What is landscape after all? It is the set of cultivated and non-abandoned lands, it is the set of sea, woods and forests. This is our landscape and if I think about it Italian landscape this comes to mind, Thousands of small cultivated appreciations come to mind. In those years I basically started dreaming about my places, because then I went to Milan to go to university and I started to miss it, not the lack of parenting, homelessness, but basically the lack of places I had lived in since I was little. But there comes a time when you want to escape from Sicily, because basically everything is too tight for you, sometimes we didn't have the cinema, there was no library, I grew up in a small province, so my biggest wish was that of going to discover this world. But only when I moved away from this I felt a strong need to return to the world at home and above all to do it in my country, in my city which is called Vittoria and from there start with my dream, because it was a city that ultimately sent me many challenges. With the wine and the varieties I work with, which in particular is Frappato, Frappato of Vittoria, I always say we held hands. I needed a lot of variety, a variety that had stratification, beauty, elegance, maybe I wouldn't be the person I am today, basically without the Frappato, but maybe Frappato also needed a person who would pick it up with pride, that he took it around the world a little and did it to taste differently and to do it with love, with sensitivity. This is what I tried to do. So we held hands and slowly we slowly moved forward together, with that pride that was a bit different and above all new twenty years ago, which I never heard often in the words of many Sicilians who instead spoke about their land in a somewhat distant, almost not proud to give another. Where were we? But where did all this pride come from? This pride came from the words, from the experiences of producers who first they have looked after my land. I'm talking about names like Marco De Bartoli, but also great Italian producers like Stan Corradi with Rinaldi, Elizabeth Foradori, Elena Pantaleoni, Giovanna Morganti, people who taught me to look at this world with a different sensitivity and I learned a lot from them. I definitely lacked experience, I had no sales behind me, but I had a strength, a necessity. Basically maybe I also needed to find from a void that I had fed in a certain moment of my life a project that would fill it and so I had listened mostly to people who they did this work in a profound way, I had learned from them and so there you realize that the artisan gesture is the most important thing and what is the craftsman? Basically the craftsman is that person who in very naturally it weaves its web little by little piece by piece, making the head work in sync with the eyes but they are eyes that can also be closed if you want because that gesture is so natural that he would continue to do that thing continuously simply following the scent of what will be. So the craftsman is someone who does this in a natural way, who has learned but continues to do so in a natural and for me wine is a bit of all this, it's simply a gesture that comes naturally to me and the frappato is the friend who accompanies me. These twenty years for me have been full of encounters, in my own, of awakenings, of difficulty and if the first ten I ran a lot because I had from twenty to thirty years old so for me everything was about eating life, the last ten have been years in which I tried to build, improve, motivate, include above all. so I started from a totally individualistic project that maybe I needed it to be like this otherwise I wouldn't have pulled the strength from nowhere else and then pass it on to others. For me, wine has had a totally transformative power, I finally managed to transform this life after these years of apnea and above all I understood that I had to change this project into something that slowly plan could include others as well. Whoever lives a dream every day in life, so if you are a farmer, entrepreneur, restaurateur, dreamer, farmer you usually have a very poor relationship with the limit and I had and still have a very poor one relationship with the limit because every day these limits you try to overcome them basically you try to go far ahead and sometimes these limits are also the people who come into your life with their desires, with their logic, with their own strength, with their experiences and with everything they bring with them inside and then slowly you realize that this you can only have it included if you acquire tools, if you gain knowledge, if you also acquire that ability to dialogue but sometimes we can't always communicate with everyone because often projects like these or like those that Today we heard there are also projects of dissent, they are projects in which certain times and certain days you have to even don't listen to anyone but you just have to move on and then I understood that the only one possibility was to acquire tools, at that moment and today I have no other choice if not to acquire tools. I was born in Marsala which is a town in the west of Sicily but I grew up in Vittoria and Vittoria is a place which I sometimes call the Bronx a bit because actually when I started making wine I found myself in a time when my generation was totally running away, who was born in '82, in '83 he escaped from Sicily because he had to go away, basically we were in Vittoria also the only enclave who had also rebelled against Cosa Nostra, that is, Vittoria, the mafia was not called Cosa Nostra but it was called Stidda since we were rebels so the people of Vittoria are a bit rebels and I say this for better or for worse. So I found myself in a context of Sicily that was a context in which when I started to travel again he talked about how Sicily was a little bigger and out in the sea. was submerged by the mafia and as I saw it The change over the last twenty years has been wonderful. We are six million people in Sicily and we have been also very conquered so we are a little Arab, we are a bit Norman, we are a little French, we are a little Spanish and this conquest, This being continually conquered has never given us the possibility of carrying forward our projects and therefore we were also a somewhat modest people in many respects. In the end, I like to push these limits a little every day and so I really like the fact of being conquered because it's all But part of me definitely likes to go beyond all of this. and so I started this project at 21 years old renting a hectare of vineyard land. Today I'm about, I'm almost 40, I'm about 38, among native vines, frappato, black devil, albanello, Moscato and Alessandria which we call Zibibbo but above all over time I added to this monoculture that did not stimulate me more but that needed to go beyond a beautiful multiculturalism. I added wheat, I introduced other cultures and I realized I count on my pride on one hand, My ambition has always made me experience wine as an end in itself. The pride of making the best wine there was in Victory is definitely one of my prerequisites. I want to do the best, I seek the most beautiful lands, I try to do it in the best way but the thing that I realized more and that maybe it was necessary and that maybe my project needed was to think to wine not only as an end but also as a means. a medium that can basically tell four stories concepts that are then part of my daily life. I believe very much in biodiversity. Today the vineyards are full of different essences. For me, biodiversity is a great opportunity. There is biodiversity in here today. If we were all the same, we would all get sick in the same way, we would all think the same way. and the same biodiversity must be brought into the vineyard. This here you see some green manures that we have in vineyard because I interpret biodiversity within the vineyard but also outside the vineyard for which green manures made from 15-16 different species. Field beans, poppies, rifle, peas, mustard, marigold, wheat that we grow. This is another time of year. It is a typical Sicilian tree. We started producing everything in-house of the company for which trying to close a cycle we make compost inside using the vine shoots, using all our findings and pruning. and then we indulge the traditional Sicilian work which is that of working the soil during the summer. We do not only apply biodiversity in the vineyard but all around so I slowly set up a company garden of about 1500 square meters where we do small collaborations with friends but above all my boys are starting to understand that viticulture is usually a small elite because in wine we can find a much simpler transformation they see a much more difficult part which is that of a agriculture made of small products that if not transformed immediately They will die so you need to find a solution immediately. We have pears, we have olive groves and we transform all of this into a small business products that we are able to sell in our company shop. I began to understand that I had to have or above all return to a model of Mediterranean agriculture as you can see me I found further south of Tunis I had learned from the producers of I had learned about aloeira from producers in other parts of Europe. where it's definitely cooler but I realized that if not I was filtering all these concepts in a climate where it is very hot This sand from our lands reaches about 70-80 degrees and above all we have sirocco winds from 'Africa impressive I could not do agriculture. I then resumed all the old breeding forms I think that today the Mediterranean could become a model for all of us in this time of climate change and therefore I carry out activities such as mass selection, he layering, all ancient things that the Arabs, in short, all our conquerors had brought us to Sicily. And I also think of agriculture as a model for change. territorial where there are basically projects that can to change a territory, especially in Sicily, which we need. I collaborate with artisans, We recover cork from the ancient forests of our territory to make our caps for which 100% of the cap production today comes from a forest 20 minutes from home supporting the last craftsman from the Caltagirone area and they are both father and son. I collaborate with local associations because in Sicily it is important to associate fundamentally in Sicily we are often of great individualists we have a very poor capacity for associations for which I collaborate with associations and foundations Every year we publish a magazine that tells all this we recover ancient vineyards but above all I understood that the most important thing for me who was an individualistic dreamer was to start collaborating with people. Those same people who at the beginning were a big limit but today they are my great team and I hope that within my project may more and more new wines be born, new producers as have also emerged in recent years but for those who decide to stay we dedicate every day to training, dialogue, friendship. I try to convey a little bit of dream on a journey that will fundamentally never find its destination but it only stops when I decide to plant a vineyard because then after all, that love I told you about at the beginning of this story of love that I started in wine is no longer beautiful if it starts from wine, he returns from the wine and acquires tools, acquires new knowledge and then evolve over time into something different? Thank you