Coop. Agr. Le Otto Terre

I dined on a small piece of focaccia, 
but I drank greedily an amphora of wine; 
now I gently touch my beloved lyre 
and sing love to my tender girl. 

Anacreon

I remember an evening with friends at a wine bar on the industrial outskirts of Avellino, with Professor and poet Antonella Prudente leading us on a daring slalom between wine and poetry, wine and history, fortunately not alone. With her were Antonella Venezia and Anna Picariello, both committed on different fronts to the search for the flavors and aromas that are the promise of our Irpinia and to the dissemination of healthy lifestyles.

A warm evening of welcome and sharing, a modern symposium, as Professor Prudente defined it, an education in wine drinking, that wine that accompanies us like a friend or a father, underscoring the profound, intimate bond that unites man and wine.

Wine is the poetry of the earth (Mario Soldati)

The Relationship between Wine and Historia

Historia (a Latin word that could be translated as History in English, though the meaning is slightly different) is like a search for truth and truthfulness, Professor Prudente pointed out: a way to avoid overusing the Latin saying In vino veritas (I don’t like clichés, especially overused ones) and to lead us to what later became the true meaning of the evening.

Wine, when it’s a good wine, when the atmosphere is right, when the people are right, is research or the prospect of research: wine helps us look at others and look within ourselves not so much with the need to reach the truth, but with the need for research itself and its essence, movement.

Aeschylus said that wine is the face of the mind, and the mind searches, tirelessly searches. It’s this constant wavering, this shipwreck that I feel is my own and belongs to me as a man.

But wine also has the ability to dissolve and recompose: in a complete reversal of common wisdom, Thomas De Quincey said that a man doesn’t change by getting drunk; it’s when he’s sober that he’s different. Perhaps the verb to get drunk isn’t one to be used lightly on the pages of a winery’s website, but I can’t help it, and I don’t like to sugarcoat it (cancel culture, as we would say today). I like to think, instead, that drinking doesn’t change a person, but dissolves them from what they were and recomposes them, precisely, in other places that can only be those of art, poetry, friendship, and sharing.

These thoughts arise from an evening spent with wine and friends. Without them, they make little sense. Oh, forgive me, I forgot a piece of the puzzle: the love Anacreon speaks of. The most important piece, certainly.

Luigi Pizzella