interview

<p><em>This interview with Federico Orsi took place over a Facetime exchange in February, 2017.</em></p> <p><strong>You&#39;re not from a winemaking family right? How did you get your start?&nbsp;</strong><br /> <br /> That&#39;s not entirely true. All of my family, but particularly my mother&rsquo;s side, are farmers. They&#39;ve historically had land&nbsp;in the western part of&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="172">Bologna</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> Many of my cousins are still active and work near me. My parents were actually the first generation to step away from <glossary title="78">agriculture</glossary>; my father still works as an engineer in Brazil, where we moved when I was three&nbsp;years old. I grew up there, then left at 19 to go to college in&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="172">Bologna</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> After getting a degree in engineering, I started working as a business consultant.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> My goal at the time was to get an MBA abroad. But I had also developed a passion for wine during my studies. The seed was actually planted when I was quite young, as my grandfather was&nbsp;also a wine lover and accumulated many great bottles from his visits to <glossary title="212">Burgundy</glossary> in the 1950&#39;s and 1960&#39;s. My mother and uncles were used to great bottles at home, which weren&#39;t even that expensive at the time.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> So this passion for wine transferred from generation to generation, and upon my return to Italy I took a <glossary title="969">sommelier</glossary> course and started working in restaurants. It was a part-time job during my studies.<br /> <br /> Around 2005, we found out that a winery two miles from our house was for sale. I talked to my family about it, almost as a joke, and they encouraged for me to go for it. But it wasn&#39;t in my original game plan, and furthermore I felt that economically I could never make it work.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> My wife wasn&#39;t happy with my original plans with the MBA, which probably meant moving to the US or France; she therefore kept insisting that if any part of me wanted to start a winery, I should go for it. And despite my parents, siblings and fianc&eacute;e giving me the green light, I still resisted for a long time! They finally convinced me, and I told them we could do a five year test-run. If I could not make it successful after five years, we would resell it.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> So together with my family we took over the winery in 2005. I dropped my MBA and divided my time between consulting and the farm. Year after year I found my time at the winery increasing, and eventually it became full-time.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>Was the winere already called San Vito?</strong><br /> <br /> Yes. <glossary title="">Azienda</glossary> <glossary title="78">Agricola</glossary> San Vito.<br /> <br /> <strong>What exactly did you take over?</strong><br /> <br /> We took over the original <glossary title="254">cellar</glossary> and vines. We have two neighbors who we&#39;ve been renting vines from for many years as well.<br /> <br /> <strong>Can you give me a precise breakdown of the&nbsp;estate?&nbsp;</strong><br /> <br /> We own about 9.5 <glossary title="523">hectares</glossary> and rent about 5.5&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="523">hectares</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> Seven of those are planted in the <glossary title="1139">indigenous</glossary> <span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="798">Pignoletto</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> which produce &quot;Sui Lieviti&quot;, &quot;Posca Bianca&quot;&nbsp;and the <glossary title="959">single vineyard</glossary>&nbsp;&quot;Vigna del Grotto&quot;. &quot;Vigna del Grotto<em>&quot;</em>&nbsp;is a steep slope of older vines and represents about 1.6 <glossary title="523">hectares</glossary> of land.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> We then have about 2.5 <glossary title="523">hectares</glossary> of mixed white grapes:&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="92">Alionza</glossary><span>,</span></span></span>&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="85">Albana</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> <glossary title="623">Malvasia</glossary> and still a bit of <glossary title="927">Sauvignon Blanc</glossary> and&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="858">Riesling</glossary><span>.</span></span></span><br /> <br /> Then in red we have two <glossary title="523">hectares</glossary> of <glossary title="711">Negretto</glossary> and <glossary title="217">Cabernet Sauvignon</glossary> and one <glossary title="523">hectare</glossary> of&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="138">Barbera</glossary><span>.</span></span></span><br /> <br /> <strong>When you started, you had no real knowledge of viticulture&nbsp;or winemaking right?</strong><br /> <br /> Almost none.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>Tell us how about that learning process.</strong><br /> <br /> When I took over the winery in 2005, everything was done&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="331">conventionally</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> My original plan was simply to find the best way to market myself:&nbsp;I was aware of being a very small winery in a relatively unknown area. My initial goal was to work with grapes <glossary title="1139">indigenous</glossary> to this land, to make a wine that corresponded to&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="172">Bologna</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> I wanted the wine to distinguish itself; not to make something for the sake of being different, but to express my region.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> Through research I discovered <glossary title="160">biodynamic</glossary> farming. I found the concepts to be far more interesting than the rest of what I&#39;d come across, and decided it could be a means to obtaining a product closer to nature. This was right at our beginnings, and we started <glossary title="332">converting</glossary> the vines in 2006.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>So you came to&nbsp;biodynamics&nbsp;on your own? Were you aware of other&nbsp;biodynamic&nbsp;or &ldquo;natural&rdquo;&nbsp;estates&nbsp;flourishing around Europe?</strong><br /> <br /> I knew of some, for example&nbsp;<a href="http://louisdressner.com/producers/radikon/">Radikon</a>, Gravner and&nbsp;<a href="http://louisdressner.com/producers/Stoppa/">La Stoppa</a>. These <glossary title="427">estates</glossary> all struck me as unique and inspired me to study up on what these producers were doing.<br /> <br /> Another big influence was the film Mondovino. It made me second-guess what I&#39;d been drinking over the last decade, and opened my eyes to the standardization of wine.<br /> <br /> <strong>So did you study&nbsp;viticulture&nbsp;and&nbsp;oenology?&nbsp;</strong><br /> <br /> I started going to many tastings from likeminded producers as well as meetings for <glossary title="160">biodynamic</glossary> farmers. By 2007, we decided to stop using selected&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="1128">yeasts</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> no&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="299">clarification</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> not&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="447">filtering</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> etc... We had great results on the red, which was very encouraging! For the whites, however, it took another two years of experimentation to get good results.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>Tell me about the Posca wines. It&#39;s one of the more unique projects we import.</strong><br /> <br /> To be honest, it came by chance.&nbsp;The idea started in 2008, the year we started making all our wines naturally. In 2007, we started the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/it/cosa-facciamo/mercati-della-terra-slow-food/">Mercato della Terra</a>, a farmer&rsquo;s market in <glossary title="172">Bologna</glossary> promoted by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.slowfood.com/">Slow Food</a>. Because the wines were less balanced than they are today, I thought we could sell them as bulk wine. We wanted to encourage customers to re-use their glass bottles in an effort to reduce environmental impact.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> I&#39;d read a study from <glossary title="1055">Tuscany</glossary> where each bottle produced consumes about two&nbsp;kilos of&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="310">CO2</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> I&#39;m talking about the whole process in making a bottle here: making the glass, the&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="336">cork</glossary><span>,</span></span></span>&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="185">bottling</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> logistics of transportation... And furthermore, 60% of that is in making the bottle! So that&rsquo;s where the Posca project started. The farmer&#39;s market seemed like a perfect place to launch that. So we started with the&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="444">fiascos</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> as we wanted a container that could be re-used and could get banged around in your shopping basket without breaking.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> The wine became so popular that local restaurants started asking me for it. They would put the <glossary title="444">fiascos</glossary> on the table and refill them as the night went along. But this created a new problem: how do I send them the bulk wine? At the beginning I would go to the farmer&#39;s market with a small <glossary title="">stainless steel</glossary> container. My first thought was bag-in-box, but I was not comfortable because I didn&#39;t want to sell wine inside a plastic container. It was also a perception thing; most people, rightfully so, associate bag-in-box to shit wine.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> I found no other solution, so I compromised and started making 20L boxes exclusively for restaurants. That eventually decreased to 10 liters, which I still use as it&#39;s easier for the restaurants to store in a fridge. But the plastic still bothered me, and so I started monitoring how the wine would change over time. This made me fill up boxes at a faster pace, sometimes multiple times a month, in smaller increments.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> At a certain point, I finished most of the 2008 and just decided to fill the <glossary title="1140">tank</glossary> with some 2009. We still had some 2009 by the time the 2010 was ready, and I started <glossary title="1146">blending</glossary> again. By 2011 this became an intentional pattern and I became a fan of the results. I started looking into vino perpetuo, which turned out to be an ancient technique practiced by some contemporaries, for example Francesco Guccione in&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="951">Sicily</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> Currently there are six <glossary title="1109">vintages</glossary> in the <em>&quot;</em>Posca Bianca<em>&quot;</em>&nbsp;<glossary title="1140">tank</glossary> and eight in the &quot;Posca Rossa&quot;.<br /> <br /> The wines have become so good to me that about two and half years ago, we decided to start <glossary title="185">bottling</glossary> it.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>How do you keep track of the&nbsp;solera?</strong><br /> <br /> I don&rsquo;t keep track. I like to bottle 5 to 10% of the Posca <glossary title="1140">tank</glossary> at a time, so that when I refill it, it will only be a marginal retraction/addition. And despite these small amounts, it completely changes the balance. It&rsquo;s like a mother <glossary title="1128">yeast</glossary> for bread: every time you refresh it, you are changing it. But that mother <glossary title="1128">yeast</glossary> is also absorbing the new additions, expressing itself differently.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>So the wine is just&nbsp;aging&nbsp;in its&nbsp;vessel&nbsp;before being added to the&nbsp;tank?&nbsp;</strong><br /> <br /> In fact, I have many different&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="1160">vessels</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> and this is what makes the Posca wines so interesting to me. I&#39;ll give you an example: I just added some 2016 in the &quot;Posca Bianca&quot;<em>&nbsp;</em><span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="1140">tank</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> It represented about 5% of the&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="1140">tank</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> and I decided to use a wine <glossary title="1104">vinified</glossary> in <glossary title="325">cement</glossary> because it was tasting very fresh. It coincided with me feeling the<em>&nbsp;</em><glossary title="1146">blended</glossary> <glossary title="1140">tank</glossary>&nbsp;was feeling a bit tired, and I wanted to liven it up. So I added just 5% new wine, and after a week the <glossary title="1140">tank</glossary> transformed; it was crisper and sharper.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> Another example: I&rsquo;m currently considering adding some wine from&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="103">anfora</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> <glossary title="623">Malvasia</glossary> <glossary title="610">macerated</glossary> two weeks on the skins. It was a little high in <glossary title="1116">volatile</glossary> last time I tried it, but I will try again soon and re-assess. It&rsquo;s really about what should be brought in and when.<br /> <br /> <strong>So how many different&nbsp;vinifications&nbsp;are you making at this point? And are they all for the Posca?&nbsp;</strong><br /> <br /> I&rsquo;ve got wine <glossary title="441">fermented</glossary> in big and small <glossary title="731">oak</glossary> <span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="142">barrels</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> in&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="325">cement</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> <glossary title="986">stainless steel</glossary> and&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="103">anfora</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> Some wines I make without&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="610">maceration</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> others with short or long ones. So in the end, there are 10 different types of&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="1104">vinification</glossary><span>.</span></span></span> And yes, the wines go in different places. In 2015, for example, some of the &quot;Vigna del Grotto&quot;, which <glossary title="441">fermented</glossary> in big <glossary title="731">oak</glossary> <span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="142">barrels</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> went into the Posca.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>We&rsquo;ve talked a lot about the Posca, whose origins come from the farmer&#39;s market you organize. The market seems quite popular. What happened with that?</strong><br /> <br /> I&#39;m one of the founders of the market. It is funded by the province of&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="172">Bologna</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> <glossary title="963">Slow Food</glossary> and the Cineteca di&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="172">Bologna</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> where it takes place. It started about nine&nbsp;years ago, with two markets a year, one in November and one in December. The next year is was twice a month, and after that first summer it became a weekly event. The market is every Saturday.<br /> <br /> <strong>How many vendors are there?</strong><br /> <br /> There are around 35 year-round vendors, with some occasional participants.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>This leads me to another question! Tell us about those beautiful pigs of yours! You make the best mortadella I&#39;ve ever tried!</strong><br /> <br /> Being a <glossary title="160">biodynamic</glossary> farmer means having animals. But I wanted to have another element to the&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="427">estate</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> not just wine. So animals became part of it.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> 
The laws here for animals are very strict, which causes a lot of problems. It took a lot of time and effort to get everything in order, to let the pigs roam freely. I started with five pigs. I didn&rsquo;t even really have a plan for them, but after a month I decided to make a mortadella like the world had never seen!<br /> <br /> It&#39;s obviously a very popular cold cut around here, but most producers don&rsquo;t use great meat for it. I wanted to make something in contrast to the incredibly industrialized mortadella you can get anywhere. We do it just once a year, and production is around 50 to 60 mortadellas. We don&rsquo;t want to make more.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>I&rsquo;ve been doing these interviews since 2010, and the following question still seems to yield interesting answers: How do you feel about the current state of the&nbsp;organic/biodynamic/natural wine&nbsp;movement?&nbsp;</strong><br /> <br /> When a group of us decided to start&nbsp;<glossary title="1115">ViViT</glossary>&nbsp;within&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="1105">Vinitaly</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> our goal was to get out of our underground niche. At most <glossary title="708">natural wine</glossary> fairs, we see more or less the same people; it&rsquo;s great but I feel that we can certainly reach a broader audience.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> With&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="1115">ViViT</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> people who didn&#39;t know anything about <glossary title="708">natural wine</glossary> were given an opportunity to discover something new to them. We are a tiny part of&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span> <glossary title="1105">VinItaly</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> but it&#39;s had some very positive effects. For example, it is because of <glossary title="1115">ViViT</glossary> that many of my neighbors decided to finally try my wines for the first time. They had payed for their <glossary title="1105">VinItaly</glossary> stand, were on premise and could see how much success this little side-section of the fair was having. So they came to taste, to try and understand.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> Not to say that I&#39;m oblivious to the fact the movement has become increasingly popular. When this movement started, it was avant-garde. This happens in all types of fields: the arts, philosophy, literature... Even gastronomy! Nouvelle Cuisine&#39;s goal was basically to break all the rules. And there is always a faction of the avant-garde that wants to push things to its extremes.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> In all of human history, new movements start in reaction to others. We should find a name for the late 1990&#39;s, where winemakers reacted against modern winemaking&#39;s standardization. This meant shunning, for example, over&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="324">concentrated</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> ultra<span class="zalup"><span><span>-</span><glossary title="1010">tannic</glossary> </span></span>reds. Today we drink the exact opposite! All this to say that with time, things become less fringe and more rational.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <strong>What wines do you like to drink?&nbsp;</strong><br /> <br /> I drink everything. It can be from anywhere. So much is at play with wine: what I&#39;m drinking, who I&#39;m with, the place... It depends on so many factors.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> Of course, I prefer anything that doesn&rsquo;t give me a headache!</p>

harvest report

<p><em><strong>Words by Federico Orsi, October 19th, 2019.</strong></em></p> <p>Overall we had good quality,&nbsp;healthy&nbsp;grapes but <glossary title="1129">yields</glossary> were radically different&nbsp;from vineyard to vineyard. For example&nbsp;in the Vigna del Grotto we picked the same quantity as last year&#39;s (that was a record for us) but in other vineyards we <glossary title="521">harvested</glossary> up to 40% less. We had a&nbsp;little bit of <glossary title="1137">mildew</glossary> and&nbsp;two light <glossary title="1136">hailstorms</glossary> but I think the main reason is that it rained a lot during&nbsp;the&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="1179">flowering</glossary><span>,</span></span></span>&nbsp;we had to <glossary term="Contact Treatment" title="328">treat</glossary> and probably had <glossary title="1252">coulure</glossary> problems.</p> <p>At least we had a good weather during&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="521">harvest</glossary><span>,</span></span></span> so it wasn&#39;t too hot and thanks to the rains we very had juicy berries. The only grape that was ripe but with low sugar and <glossary title="181">botrytis</glossary> was the&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="711">Negretto</glossary><span>.</span></span></span>&nbsp;<glossary title="441">Fermentations</glossary> went quite well. Let&#39;s see how the wines will <glossary term="Aging" title="74">age</glossary> during the winter. We are confident in making all the regular&nbsp;<span class="zalup"><span><glossary title="363">cuv&eacute;es</glossary><span>.</span></span></span></p> <p><img src="http://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article/2020_Apr_28//f2/42/f242009476818ed62d0711dd07476ef6.jpg" /><img src="http://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article/2020_Apr_28//b8/e1/b8e19ab1359cd1e50e4148a334ec993c.jpg" /><img src="http://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article/2020_Apr_28//e3/45/e345fc328b198cfef91858bf03d43b7d.jpg" /><img src="http://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article/2020_Apr_28//f6/1f/f61fdd6a7a654e92f40e33f0266ed135.jpg" /></p>