Farmers at first generation. Said in English it sounds even better, “first generation farmers”; it seems like a spatial, new thing that transmits a sensation tremendously modern.
And modern wants to be our way of cultivate the fields , leaving aside the productivist aspect in favor of an ecological approach of conservation of territory .
We all work days in search of wine "good, clean and fair" and meeting the needs of community, with a very clear final objective: finding harmony, a balance between man and nature, between work and peace, between having character and the search for pleasantness .
We grow 20 hectares, of which 10 are vineyards, all organic. We are in Valtenesi, in the Garda hinterland, behind Salò.
On the wines in selection…
Constellazioni , the wine of a night.
We wait for the the must takes color, usually when it is already night. With the clear sky and the stars dazzled by light pollution. From the scent of the must it's a moment imagine the wine, because there is no space between the two, only a Gentile ferment, as natural as the flow of water downwards.
The Chiaretto (elsewhere called Rosé) is the wine of these lands. The wine of the grandparents, of the great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and so on. Son of geography, of the intersections of history, of Groppello's 700 years of resilience on these lands. Son of Lake, of the winds, of the moraines, of the lemons, of the cypresses, of the summer, of the blinding glare of the sun, of a September night.
Valtenesi, Chiaretto. Constellations.
In stramonia veritas.
The rows align on an inclined plane with a heart of butter. A red, clayey butter, which when it rains slips away under the wheels of the dancing tractor in disordered movements. A butter that becomes so hard when it is dry that it is unscratchable. A question of timing (as always in life) working with clay. Here at the end of the nineties my parents planted a Cabernet vineyard and a Merlot one nearby. Since then, every year these plants and this land have given us an elegant wine, with character, always jovial. I have to thank them, for this vineyard and for many other things. This is the opportunity to also thank Chiara, an old friend, the unaware inspiration behind the name of this wine, when she told me how the Datura Stramonium plant was used in the Middle Ages to prepare "truth filters" obtaining more or less the same effect as drinking a glass of good wine…
Enrico di Martino
