It’s ME
A Man from Chianti.
Words I wrote when I had a wine shop in the town center of Siena. It was called “Vini e Vizi”: wines and vices.
Even in Canada?
So, what?
On the booklet-backlabel he saw pictures of a town of now 300 people, which he can barely pronounce – Vagliagli – which he recalls being his father’s own town fifty years ago. That bottle takes him back there – to a culture many young people are only now rediscovering. They can’t find a place to stay in the city and they move to the country, wondering how cypress trees and terraced vineyards and olive groves came to be. And this happens while I find myself in the city, running a wine store within the old city walls, very close to Piazza il Campo…what a strange life this is! I’m not complaining – it makes me enjoy wine’s culture even more vividly.
In a small room, with antique furnititure, filled with products and witht the smell pf my country… It’s sunday, it rains and nobody’s out. But a friend comes by on his escape from a grey day and a grouchy wife. How is it possible that a sip of good wine and some “buristo” on bread end up reconciling mind and body with where you are? Possible it is, with as little as an old chair, a bite and the right sip; add two words and we are reconciled with ourselves and with the whole world.