Discover Our Land
SCHOLA SARMENTI
tHe iMpOrTaNcE oF tRaDiTiOnS
In the countryside of Salento, you can walk on a red land, greedy for sun.
Wine Stories and other pleasure
A typical ritual during our Sunday walks was that once we were get out of our car – a blue Seat Marbella – he repeated to me “Breathe Lorenzo, breathe deep. This is scent of life, this is the scent of your future!”. And I – as an obedient military – I breathed deeply that intense scent without actually thinking to my future, which was too far for me then. My position was always the same: some step behind him so that I could observe every gesture and repeat it with the same love for that land, a love which – without knowing yet – was part of me by then. Also, when he was no more, I kept walking along those rows. I came back every time I needed to listen to his voice which – in my opinion – was deep-roated in that land, just like those old vines, never tired to give fruits of rare and precious flavour as a gift…
…More than twenty years had passed since that Sunday and many things had changed when one afternoon I met Rosangela, my sister. She wanted to talk to me about a project for our future. From the relationship with Alessandro – her boyfriend – a wish aroused: to give birth to a winery. That dream gave us a real adrenalin rush, catalyzing all our aims and thoughts like an impetuous vortex. In 2000, that wish became “an intense scent of wine just squeezed”, the scent of our first grape harvest. There was fermentation in the air and that was not grapes, but our hearts passionate of life. From that day on, more than ten years have passed and now that future is our present. I often came back to that land – we are united by a lasting tie of blood. I hold my son hand now, I look at him and tell: “Breathe Umberto, breathe deep. This is scent of life, this is the scent of your future!”. For in the vineyard life never ends, life always goes on without ever stopping.
