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This interview with Stefano Papetti Ceroni took place over Skype in October, 2020.
Tell us about the history of the estate.
I will try to summarize the history, because it’s quite long.We should start with my relationship with wine, which is quite strange.
I’m from
I studied law at university. My passion was history but my father told me I needed to study something that get me a serious job (laughs). It felt like I was forced into it, but some good came out of my studies because it's where I met my wife. She’s originally from
We used to go visit other farms over the weekend, and finally she proposed we see her family land. It took so long because she was not linked to this land at all; her family had ceased being directly involved after World War 2. After the war, the farm was managed by people hired by her family. They ran the farm and sold the grapes, olives and wheat.
To be honest, I was not expecting to see such a beautiful place when we first visited. Her family never talked about it, so I suppose I was expecting something more normal, simpler. But from the very first visit, it was magical: I always say it was my second "love at first sight" after my wife. The place was incredible, is incredible. So starting in winter 2007, I started going there every weekend. I was 32 at the time and while I was very unhappy with my job, it did not feel possible to just quit. Neither of our families would understand or accept this decision: we had two new borns, good jobs…
So I started going every weekend and learning from the
Obviously my dream was to start a wine project, but it really felt like just a dream: I wanted to build a traditional, underground winery, etc… But at the time I didn’t have the courage to ask money from my family and had none of my own to personally invest. But in 2009, I made an interesting discovery.
After a disagreement I had one day with the old man managing the farm, I asked him to give me the key to the farmhouse to see what was inside. He gave me the huge key ring and after opening up the house, I discovered there was an underground winery in the basement. This was shocking to me; for two years I had been spending every day with this man on the weekends, telling him about my dream to start a winery. He never once told me that this
So your principal concern with starting your own winery was the financial burden of building a cellar?
Exactly. But when I discovered the
I started calculating the humidity and the temperature of the
2010 was my first
A close neighbor of mine is Francesco Paolo Valentini. He knows the area very well, knows the quality of the
Who were the people living and managing the farm before you took over?
Consider that in my wife’s family, everyone had jobs in town. The last person in her family to manage the farm was her great uncle. That ended after World War 2. He was also a politician and a lawyer. So after the war the family hired someone to manage the land. For decades, my father-in-law (and his father and grandfather before him) would visit maybe twice a month to check if the money was well managed. At the end of the year, they never lost money, made a little bit of income and that was good enough for them.
The amazing thing, and we still don’t really know why, is how well the
So they maintained and replanted everything in alberello? And this is very rare in the region?
Very rare. We are one of the very few farms in
So the house is unlivable at the moment?
It was, but we restored a bit of it. It’s been 10 years of me doing this full time, and last year we finished restoring the first floor of the house. It was a lot of work and a big investment, and we had prioritized restoring other structures, for example where the wheat is stored, a
I’ve gotten great satisfaction over the years bringing life back to this place. Before World War 2, 150 people worked here; it was a huge community. There are houses inside the farm where entire families used to live, some fully equipped with ancient ovens.
Now we are eight people working there full time. During the grape and olive
You still live in Bologna right?
No. I live on the farm and go to
And your wife stays in Bologna throughout the week?
Exactly. She stays in my family home there and I stay in her family home here!
It’s the opposite of what you used to do!
Exactly!
But I like this way of life. The three hours I have to myself in the car are mine alone: I don’t talk to anyone and can plan what I need to do for the week. I think it’s also great for my children: they spend their entire summers here and spent the last six months of the lockdown in
Can we talk about biodynamics? It seems very important to you and De Fermo is one of the most respected in this newer wave of biodynamic farmers.
I came to
With this approach to farming, it started with my friend Federico Orsi who had created his own winery in 2005. He had hired a
From there, I started intentionally seeking out
But frankly, I don’t like talking about
You mentioned earlier that you have progressively increased production each year. Where are you at now?
In 2020, I didn’t sell any white grapes and maybe 15% of the red grapes. It’s been more or less the case for the last three years. But I’ve always worked all 16
Can you explain the “Concrete” line of wines?
This project started in 2014. The American restauranteur Joe Campanale came to visit after tasting and liking my wines very much. At that period, the only red wine we produced was the “Prologo”, a very rich, powerful and traditional
So it started that way, but I also kept some of the production for myself to better understand this style of red and eventually I started selling it. I became very happy with this wine, because doing a young and fresh
And the Concrete Bianco?
In 2015, the
For a while we were selling a lot of the white grapes. But Stefano Bellotti, in the last year before he left us, told me I should really be saving them for myself. For me, the "Concrete" wines are the everyday wines, simple wines. When you say semplice in Italian, it’s a positive thing!