Where does the source of inspiration for Sommelier Wine Box come from, among the many enlightened minds who have contributed to making Italian wine great? Especially from the writings of Luigi Veronelli.
As for many passionate wine lovers, our source of inspiration - very high - is the life, choices and writings of Luigi Veronelli (1926-2004), Gino to his friends: the father of the Renaissance of Italian wine.
Life and battles of Luigi Veronelli
Philosophy student, anarchist publisher, television star, gastronome and chef, innovator in the field of criticism, leader of epic battles in favor of quality, highly cultured, he was the first to understand that food and wine are culture . And he fought for this concept all his life.
A legendary intellectual, Veronelli had the ability to speak to farmers (when the word farmer was derogatory!) and fought extraordinary battles for them. He called them winemakers . He gave them the thought and vision of the future and in return received the lifeblood that nourished his free spirit. Winemakers were the protagonists of the "Renaissance of Italian wine" and Veronelli was the philosopher-director of this extraordinary season: he designed its architecture and popularized it.
Language by Luigi Veronelli
Veronelli created a new language of wine : a dry language, often biting, essential and exciting at the same time. Veronelli's words are still cutting edge today.
Veronelli invented Italian wine criticism: he was the first to talk about wines not only in a literary way (a path already started by Mario Soldati, Paolo Monelli, Piero Accolti...) but in a concrete and precise way, all based on countless tastings.
And then, as a great intellectual, he invented a language, which also owes a lot to poetry, and today the vast majority of wine journalism speaks with the lexical legacy of Veronelli, who invented a new way of describing wine, not only passionate with unattainable heights, but also suggestive in the metaphorical use of a different lexicon, re-semantized for the purposes of oenological description: an aspect which, in addition to being extremely fascinating, has left an indelible legacy on how today we speak, think and talk about wine.
Without him today we wouldn't be talking about "ready to drink", "meditation" wine, "dialectical red"...
Veronelli's battles
Inspired by the French, he involved small winemakers, strongly encouraging them to valorise native vines, to use what he called carat (the French barriques , used to refine special wines and spirits), to reduce the yield of the vineyard in favor of quality .
- Read also: what you need to know about the barrique
Culture and culture for Veronelli
Those producers, discovered by Veronelli - until then harsh and humiliated - slowly opened up to the market, favored quality over quantity, innovated without ever betraying tradition, opened their cellars, believed in their work, starting to enhance a thousand-year-old heritage.
His battle for the identification of wine and territory, carried out since the sixties, was truly futuristic and also laid the foundations for what we today define as environmental sustainability.
All this against industrial wine , deeply despised by Veronelli because it markets: "Millions of bottles. Each identical in a mathematical sense."
" Poet of world wine" according to Josko Gravner (great Friulian winemaker), Luigi Veronelli played a crucial role in the rehabilitation of the value of material culture convinced that cultivation and culture determine progress .
For him, even drinking and eating constituted real intellectual operations as they allowed us to think and divide the good from the bad , the beautiful from the ugly.
Luigi Veronelli's cellar
Legendary is the cellar that Veronelli put together over the years, which at times - with the critic alive - reached close to 70 thousand bottles, Italian and foreign. Today the 35 thousand specimens are collected in 350 square meters dug underground, in the house in Bergamo, purchased precisely for the capacity of this space. In addition to testifying to Veronelli's passions, purchases and gifts, these bottles also tell how Italian wine is capable of aging longer than one might believe.
Enhance Italian wine today
It is from this point that Sommelier Wine Box started in 2018, to do its part in this valorization process , because there is a long way to go and practically infinite realities to discover.
The answer is a subscription service of niche wines, selected by the best sommeliers in Italy, to discover the most hidden and true world of wine.
