Suppose that one evening at the Parish Center of your town, Roveleto di Cadeo, Oscar Farinetti is invited to talk about his new book 'Stories of Courage' and an interesting conversation ensues about the families who have dedicated their lives to the production of wine, for generations, and have made the wine-making history of our Belpaese... well, if all this had happened, wouldn't you like to know how a speaker like Mr. Farinetti who comes from the UniEuro world and wanted to talk about it? We'll explain it to you.
The interview opens with a very simple question addressed to the patron of Eataly, namely why the idea for this book, which is mostly about courage, came about.
First, Farinetti explains that the first need was to communicate something that is on the verge of extinction: for the historical moment we are living in fact, the more we complain, the less there is courage, these two forces being inversely proportional; if we add to this need the desire to talk about wine then it is easy to understand how stories of positive values came out of it, as contagious as the negative ones, since society changes according to them. So Oscar's job was to look for good examples, found in wine, a very powerful world.
He then moves on to give some figures and some information, such as the global reach of this market, which is around 60 billion annually, compared to Coca-Cola's at 110. The first are still the French, while we are limited to second place, despite being a poetry market that represents our territory more than any other product. Just as the wine market is magical, so is the profession of the winemaker, a professional who will always wait for the perfect bunch of grapes for the perfect wine, but that will never come. He will wait for harvest day, the day of regrets or remorse, and once he is done being a farmer he will find himself being a winemaker, and the relationship will no longer be with the land but with the barrel. After his time as a winemaker, he will become marketing director, choosing the bottle, deciding on the label, the price, and building everything around it, thus finding himself to be a commercial figure who promotes his achievement and sells it around the world. Eventually he will be a financial director, immersed in bureaucracy, and then return to the farmer, back to his roots. The work of the winemaker then is a three hundred and sixty-degree cycle, a work that encompasses many others, and above all that of managing imperfection.
The choice of the book's protagonists fell on twelve wine-producing families, with whom our narrator spent a great deal of time but talking very little about wine and a great deal about everything else, reasoning about the great local issues. Each chapter of the book is a story in itself, which he was able to tell side by side with a Japanese friend, who was born the same year as him (1954) and who has the gift of nature to recognize flavors and aromas in an instant, being endowed with a refined palate and above all, as Farinetti calls it, 'absolute. Accompanying the two men on a journey of two thousand kilometers up and down Italy was Oscar's indefatigable press officer, Simona Milvo: the wines they were supposed to taste were more than sixty, too bad Simona was pregnant and the Japanese man first tasted and then spat it all out.
After a brief interlude of levity thanks to this and other jokes it is time for a second question: what are the most important values that make up the greatest one that is courage and how is it possible to really become courageous?
For the Piedmontese entrepreneur you can become anything, you are not born already as you are, otherwise you kill the idea of the future, but the important thing is to never give up. His idea of courage is explained in the book's foreword, and it requires the intervention of brain and heart, of sharing, and these stories teach how to do that, despite the fact that he frequently emphasizes that he is only the narrator of such experiences.
The power of the experiences in those pages thus lies in his encounters with twelve characters, some of them well-known and important. The first reference is to Antinori, heir to a family that has been a producer for twenty-seven generations, and the second to Niccolò Incisa Della Rocchetta, a horse enthusiast, producer of Sassicaia, who 'speaks elegantly ill of Berlusconi, without swearing'; then it is the turn of Costantino Charriere, a producer from Valle d'Aosta, who after a youth between studies and other jobs, is called back to the origins of his land and his family and manages today to produce an incredible wine that often encounters difficulties because of the height of the territory.
At this point it is obvious to recall the biodiversity in which Italy is rich: in fact, on the national territory he explains there are as many as one thousand two hundred native grape varieties, although those used are only four hundred. The advantage of the French in this regard is their narrative ability, since their native grape varieties number twenty-two but they use as many as twenty-five. To explain this difference, Farinetti says that we Italians are 'lonely heroes sons of lonely heroes,' while in France they are 'sons of their land.'
The next to be nominated is Angelo Gaia as a real 'challenger' to the French on the price front; he is followed by Peppe Rinaldi who stubbornly continues to produce only thirty-five thousand bottles a year, as his father did and before him his grandfather, despite the fact that everyone asks for his wine, which is completely sold out within days. Winemaker Bucci is mentioned to talk about the much-discussed 'generational transition,' since despite having a son he does not delegate anything. This cue opens a door to the topic of the difference between sons and daughters, who are often underestimated in this area, despite the fact that there are several examples of outstanding female figures in the winemaking world: Chiara and Francesca Lungarotti are two important examples, especially since, as Farinetti points out, they are helped by their complementary character.
It is then the turn of Alessio and Francesca Planeta, Sicilians, from a land that is by itself a real planet, and who welcome their guest with a plate of pasta, engaging in important discourses such as the relationship with the mother earth that is often not respected, as can be seen from the increasingly tired countryside: a small excursus therefore on agriculture that must look back to the past, going back to working more and without herbicides.
Since much of the discussion was about children and therefore young people, Farinetti is asked what he thinks about the new generations.
First he explains that if it were up to him it would be necessary to change first of all article number one of the Constitution: 'Italy is a democratic republic founded on the beauty that our forefathers have left us, and to do it with work. In fact, work should go from being a subject to an object or a means.
Entering the subject of 'work,' the entrepreneur allows himself a small historical digression, explaining that around 1850, midway between two industrial revolutions, the social model in which we still live today, that is, the consumer society, a very simple society, whose basic steps are job, salary and consumption, but always consuming a little more, that is, starting that spiral that has completely changed the world in little more than a century, began. This problem arose as early as when we were only 1.5 billion individuals in the world, but for the past 30 years a completely dichotomous idea of work has been created that has led us to consider an invention all the more important the more it takes away jobs, forcing two opposing ideas to coexist. In the mid-1900s the quality of life began to improve, as did the distribution of wealth, but this scaffolding is collapsing again. The nations that are still strong is because they enjoy two basic qualities: a physical one, which is constituted by the dominance of exports, and a metaphysical one, which is based on civic consciousness, on the idea of citizenship, which comes into play especially now that the world is overpopulated.
Italy's weakness is its low export, he continues, given the enormous potential we have but do not know how to exploit because of this lack of 'courage. As evidence of what he says, Farinetti offers a significant figure: the annual tourists throughout the country are fewer in number (47.5 million) than those in Manhattan alone (52).
In addition to our food and wine heritage, we could also do a lot with fashion and design and keep a qualitatively high level, doubling exports and better managing the money that such resources would yield. This topic is really topical and touches the attendees on the live, but to make it clear that with conscience and courage it is possible to cross this finish line, Farinetti goes for the personal, explaining that his father taught him to draw the line between difficult and impossible, pointing out how absurd it is to spend 110 billion a year on gambling and only 120 on food. It is necessary to focus on exports and on young people, he explains, and quoting De Gregori with his 'no one is innocent,' he accuses the generation that is now between fifty-five and eighty-five years old of creating a disaster, and thus exempts them from being able to give advice to young people, who whatever they do, they will certainly do it better.
Of course, if he were still young, he admits that he would go abroad, just to look at how different there is from Italy, choosing among those nations that have focused precisely on exports and civic consciousness, such as the Germans and Americans who always speak by 'slipping a maybe' into their sentences, unlike us Italians who can only say 'I,' without instilling that doubt that is often essential.
In fact Farinetti says he is certain that everything is solvable and that by now our numbers are so low that they can only grow, while recognizing that the real revolution must come from the top, by good example. Demonstrating that peoples can change in a short time were the examples of Nelson Mandela and Pope Francis, or even our Pope Emeritus Ratzinger who had the courage to resign at a time when the Church was in even worse shape than politics because of money and sex, thus succeeding in changing even the vision of secular people, as Farinetti declares himself to be. So the combination of great people-good example can only be the input needed to change the collective civic consciousness. He closes the topic of youth by expressing all his optimism and decreeing that, in his opinion, in ten years' time we will be the richest and most prosperous country in Europe.
We are moving towards the conclusion of the meeting and it is at this moment that the patron of Eataly decides to read some phrases from the book, one above all 'wine unites the earth with the sky,' to introduce the final commentary through the incipit of the publication and bring the debate to a close with a parable of Matthew.
The reflection revolves around the fact that of all successive human generations, ours will be remembered as the one that first attempted to imitate birds by flying, moving from being 'onland' to 'online'; in fact, we will soon 'take flight' with the web, which will bring remarkable changes in a very short time, introducing us to a world in which we will know no limits and which, in his opinion, will be much more democratic and beautiful. What needs to be clear, however, is that we are in the midst of an epochal change, as Tonino Guerra explained, which he finds himself quoting: man must continue to look forward but without ceasing to look back, otherwise it is not possible to grow, so think about the future while respecting traditions.
The time has come for questions, and the first one he is asked is how it is possible to go back to farming without fertilizers as he proposed. He consciously answers that the problem is actually the proper distribution and not the amount that is produced, since the amount that is still available would be enough to feed the whole world, but most of it is wasted and thrown away, since one part of our planet gets too much and the other part too little. Good products are already being produced, as are 'clean' ones; the next step is to make them fair, equitable.
He is then asked how wine might become in the next few years. 'Little,' is the direct answer, as countries that don't yet know it will start to do so (especially in the Far East),and when that happens it won't be enough. To reconnect with the theme of young people and their relationship with wine, he suggests that they should go to the countryside, where it all begins, while in general it would be a case of regulating sales, pushing for a quota to remain in Italy.
In the Cesarini zone I slip in, winning the last question: basically I ask what he thinks will remain of Expo 2015, a universal exposition that is excellent for us, to make our country known, but fundamental above all for the theme it addresses, namely 'Feeding the planet, energy for life.
The content is universal, but the goal is 'zero people going hungry,' we must not forget that, and it is certainly aware that our candidacy had already started with Petrini and the policy of slow food, of taking our know-how abroad, helping African countries to produce the resources to survive on their own. The Italian strength at Expo will be precisely to make this know-how known and let everyone talk about their biodiversity. All this impressive storytelling has the privilege of being done right here, in our country even if the real problem will be welcoming this incredible amount of tourists. A preferable solution would be to bring them also to the countryside and make play-force of their own potential, reading the positive of this immense event.
My personal assessment of this meeting is that Mr. Farinetti is an excellent speaker, a fundamental endowment to become a great entrepreneur, and that if he convinces great personalities to put his intentions into practice then it could also happen that in ten years we will find ourselves to be that beautiful country he told us about.
For now, let's roll up our sleeves and think about the Expo, perhaps drinking a glass of good wine.
