Meet The Makers Bruno De Conciliis Part One

Previously, we already established that many of the great wines, you’ll taste or have tasted in your lifetime aren’t simply an expression of a good vintage and of an excellent way of making wine. Out there, there are so many different Barolo, Nebbiolo, Aglianico ect. The prices vary, based on the vintage, the type of grape they’re made from, and the winemaker. So what makes one wine more special than the other when it comes to the same wine type but different winemakers? We all know by now that a good vintage per se or a perfect winemaking technique is not the answer. In fact, great wines aren’t simply the wines that were well made. Great wines are a direct reflection of the personality behind the winemaking process and of all the little nuances that helped in such process. To prove my point, I could not think of a better example than Bruno De Conciliis. His wines, from the moment the grapes are picked until they are bottled carry with them every little hint of the passion for wine itself and for the land they come from. They are also a magnificent expression of their winemaker’s great personality and of all the people who work with him. Their names, the labels he picked, every single detail will distinguish his wines from all the other Aglianico, Fiano and spumante out there. The following interview will be a revelation of the sensation you’ve felt when you tasted his wines, or a preview of what you’ll discover when you will taste them.

Here is the first part of it enjoy.

Gabrio: Bruno De Conciliis, visiting New York. Thanks for coming.

Bruno: Thank you!

G: I know that these are the last days of your tour, how did it go?

B: Extremely well! Warm welcoming on the wines, the new vintages….

G: I can see you happy, and very tan.

Let’s talk about the beginning of your adventure; your life, for as little as I know, was totally different. Can you briefly explain the events that have led you to your present life?

B: Yes! I’ve apparently lived two or three lives; something that nowadays seems to be a normal occurrence. More often than not, when I talk to people this pluralism comes out, and I, like many of our generation, my generation, have lived at least three. This will be the last one: farmers plant their roots once and forever. Inside this life, I brought… I brought the precious treasures that I collected in my previous lives: the open, revolutionary -if I’m allowed to say so- vision of the world; certainly the will to change; the desire to…

I always thought that my generation was one of the last ones who had the impression that they could hold their fate, their future into their own hands. This is something that I could not see in the new ones: the ability to decide of your own existence, of your own future, of the organization, of the structure to live in. In the “maturity” phase, if mature is the phase I’m leaving now, this will, this awareness to hold the future in my hands and to give it a shape; to inform the world with my terrestrial passage, still holds a social drive. The Cilento area has been and still is one of the most disadvantaged and poorest areas in Italy. At the beginning, this drive was definitely stronger. I strove to prove to my fellow neighbors, that it was possible to go behind the logic of power and the servitudes passed on from one generation to the next and to demonstrate - and this is a paradoxical act for an anarchist- that through individual effort, the ability to put oneself in the field and to transform in an entrepreneur able to manage people and things, one can be able to move on to a different society in a microcosm, and in a microeconomics.

G: It would almost seem that you have closed the circle by touching the two ends. Let’s talk about your winery. How long has it been your family’s property?

B: The vineyards were planted by my father in the 70s, the oldest ones, or even the others ones that we have then, taken over little by little. Until 1997, most of the grapes were sent to a Cantina Sociale. My dad established the winery in 1961, a year before I was born. However, again, the grapes were granted to a Cantina Sociale. In 1993, when my first daughter, Chiara, was born, I decided that I had to do something with my passion for wine. Therefore, I went back to my family. I asked my father and my brothers to assist me with this project. I spent three years studying the possibility to make wine because, as you already know, we do not have an enologist. I always had the idea that if we had to do something, it should have been from within ourselves; the energy should have come totally from the inside of the winery. After my three years of studies, in 1996, we had our first harvest, only white wines: Fiano, and at the time, we had also Trebbiano and Malvasia. In 1997, it was our first harvest for the red wines. Therefore, the 2006 harvest has chronologically been my 10th one and this is the reason why we came out with the idea of the Cilento pictures on the Aglianico bottles…

G: Really nice! I’ve seen it this summer when I was there to visit you. Who helps you in the cellar? Who are the other key players of the team?

B: The slave players. The cellars as you know….

G: Slaves?

B: Slaves… (Both laugh) Yeah, yeah, a Freudian slip. (Pause) First of all, there is my brother in the vineyard. He is a key player because he has inherited the most serene and tranquil family trait. Supervising the vineyards entails waking up at 5 am in the morning, every morning and starting the work, establishing the timing and the techniques. It also means to have to go in the vineyard and determine the health state of everything else related to the vines. He took over this part of the job and he’s constantly improving himself. The true path of a farmer is never ending because it is a path of constant growth.

Then, there is Giovanni, my brother-in-law, considered the mother of the wines. He is, like me, totally self-taught. He’s done 2000 different things in his life. He still writes and paints; he has a highly creative soul. In the cellar instead, paradoxically, probably because of me- I’m too invasive, I occupy his creative space- he has an extremely strong, precise, productive behavior. He is fully committed and in total control of the wines and their evolution. He is the mother of the wines. He “feeds” them daily. Then, there are the girls who make up for the female component, which is vital in winemaking; the devotion in the feminine and maternal sense is a really strong one.

G: When I was there during the summer, we tasted some wines from the barriques. We also tasted some bottles. Many of the barriques I’ve seen there, you told me that were only experiments, that you were not convinced, you didn’t know and that most likely you would have never bottled those wines. Specifically, you made me taste an Aglianico that was a bit peculiar, and that you said you would not bottle, but I could not understand why?

B: I’ve said that I’ve learned to make wine on my own by making mistakes and mistakes, mistakes, mistakes, mistakes… I’m an empiricist. To learn means to experiment. If we try to play “The Game of Roles” and you put on the winemaker pants and shoes; you can understand how exciting it can be the possibility to have a game so variegated and so vast where truly… during vinification sometimes it is enough to raise by a half degree and the structure and the characteristic of the wine changes in a way…. How to say?

G: A drastic way.

B: Yes, yes, in a total and absolute way and…Since I’m not starting from an absolute certainty, from a requirement, from a recipe, nor from a consolidated history of the wine… The one thing that one can find in the Cilento area today is the fact that we can start from a land, which has a very ancient history: if the grapes came with the Greeks 2600 years before Christ, and we are now in 2008…

G: No...

B: Yes, 600 years before Christ. They have been around for 2600 years. However, it is also true that there isn’t anything encoded about winemaking. For this reason we have always had; I have always had in front of me a blank piece of paper and I have to admit that I never had the writer’s angst…

G: …of filling this paper…

B: Yes of filling it… because the variety of things, the quantity of ideas that came up to me and the ability to read the grapes and the will to imagine what could have been the wine’s evolution of this raw material has always been… actually it has always been an element of added confusion. This is the reason why these wines, some of these wines, most of these wines are in experimental or approaching phases, which I’d define as the courtship of the wine, which even in this field is the part that gives you the most adrenaline charge because…

G: Hm! That’s nice.

B: Eh…Because you go around it, because it’s not…. Many things in the contemporary world are banal because they are assertive and in this way they are self-referential. Saying that the paper is white is banal and it is also useless and, therefore, there is no need to say it. It becomes monolithic and monochord and senseless to the purpose of the conversation. Instead, it is good to say and to think: “I see this paper baby blue, purple, orange or full of leaves, of butterflies”. This is the phase where the objects assume a shape within the one who has the responsibility to create them, or to give them a definite shape, or to make them become objects that are concrete, tangible, drinkable in our case (laughs)…

G: Mostly drinkable (laughs)

B: Exactly! This phase is for me the most interesting one. The harvest is the time where we reach the peak of the hormonal explosion… no?...

G: Is it there where-as they would say in a Northern Italian expression- you get hard! (laughs)

B: No… No! On the contrary… On the contrary, once again, this is a game where it is important to reach a balance between the masculine and the feminine components. Therefore, the one, which, in a way, takes, owns the things, and gives them a shape in the creative phase and which I would define as the masculine component has to absolutely find a balance with the feminine one. This is the one that, instead, comprehends and takes things in. If you are not… If you are not able… if I weren’t able… This is my creative process I do not want to, and it would be crazy to universalize it….

My creative process starts from the comprehension, it starts surely and always from the feminine component.

During the potential phase, everything that I can express from the wine can be found in the grape. Not in the grape as…. How to say this…

We are not talking about the Fiano and the Aglianico and we’re not talking about the Fiano and the Aglianico from the Cilento area but of every single harvest, which, based on the climate condition, based on a series of processes that took place over that vineyard and that vintage, brings to the grape an aromatic or a potential structural characteristic that is very precise and distinctive. If the “wine creator”, the one who has to imagine and create this wine, is not able to comprehend this peculiarity, the only thing that he can do is to amplify to an extreme level the masculine component. Therefore, he states that this is the way the wine has to be, and this is a way to force the harvest in function of a state, of an idea, of a prejudice…

G: of an objective

B: Exactly! This is poles apart from my idea of what a wine should be. I hope I was clear, or at least less confused than what I feel I’m being right now...

Stay Tuned for the Secon Part

Buona Bevuta a Tutti