Natural wines
Intervention, Protection, and Care of our land

Today’s men and women have a moral imperative – to look on upon the land with as much love as possible. Plastic bottles, like the ones floating among the rocks of Italian bays, or those that are carelessly tossed from the window of a passing car, are but one reminder of the problems of waste and consumer attitude so common in today’s world.
To see this land, which may soon become a part of the Unesco heritage, and the waterways that skirt many of the vineyards of Barolo, being choked and fouled by unsustainable waste, creates a sense of indignation and suffering.

There are many modes to respect natural heritage and also the health of consumers. Sometimes it is enough to adopt simple devices that anybody can easily do, other times it is necessary to follow proper plans of intervention, perfectly calibrated to have the most natural cultivation of vineyards; it is the same for other agronomic cultivations.

Too often, the idea and discussion of organic practices is just a “fashionable” attitude, adopted by companies in order to increase sales and to appear “good, clean and fair” to the eyes of the world and of the wine journalists. It is well known that the general concept of organic products is very important to consumers, especially foreigners.

Whether it is in fashion or not, to live in a clean land - where everybody recycles and doesn’t wantonly dispose of things that still have utility - without stressing the plants that are cultivated to produce fruits, or water and air and earth, is a feeling that needs to be adopted by everybody and in all circumstances.

I agree wholeheartedly with a recent article by journalist Brian Palmer in an article for Slate magazine, in which he writes “traditional vineyards in places like Burgundy, Languedoc, Piedmont, Mosel and elsewhere often stay in the same family for generations. Many of these vintners have stuck to organic farming practices, but don’t bother with the expense and bureaucracy of certification”.

For many years our cellar recycles everything possible: glass, paper, plastic, metals and corks; these last ones are given to a cooperative that transforms them in insulating materials for buildings. We use only recycled paper (80% recycled), we no longer use plastic wrap and if necessary, only those that are of vegetal origin; the same is true of the glass we are using for our bottles – they come from recycled glass.

But it’s for the “core business” of our company, such as the cultivation of our 35 ha of vineyards and the land where we grow our hazelnut trees (Tonda e Gentile delle Langhe IGP), that we try to do our best: for two years we have been operating with more sensitivity and respect.

We have started to eliminate spring and summer weeding, instead we’ve substituted it with mechanical work among rows and stumps. Additionally, in autumn, after the harvest, we use organic matter exclusively and only when necessary, and predominantly copper and sulphur to treat against classic vine mildews. Finally, we began to adopt sexual confusion techniques to mitigate moth populations.

Beginning in 2011, we will begin to prepare a number of our vineyards for organic certification, specifically those in Brunate (La Morra), Rocche di Castiglione (Castiglione Falletto) and Bricco Chiesa, a 4 ha vineyard close to our estate in La Morra.

This won’t be a small undertaking, as the land currently dedicated to winegrowing (35 hectares) is comprised of many, smaller plots within an area that spans from La Morra to Serralunga d’Alba in the south and west end of the Langhe to the vineyards of Neive, Trezzo Tinella and Vinchio d’Asti in the east. In the cellar we have always tried to maintain the greatest respect for the integrity of the raw materials we use, as we truly believe that these truly represent the richness and the versatility of our soil. We want our bottles to represent the great Piedmontese terroir.

These challenges will create an additional layer of work and “passion” for our vineyard workers, and we are deeply grateful for their hard work and dedication to quality in the vineyards.