Born in Brescia, I graduated in Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florence, but felt unhappy with theory and lectures that never took us out of the classroom and into the fields. I later found that working in the vineyard explained to me why I had thought of studying agriculture in the first place: working in the field was much more satisfying.
In 1989, the year of our first harvest, I moved to Portese where my wife Paola reached me a year later. After some time, besides the wine and oil production we opened a small country restaurant and two comfortable farmhouse holidays apartments. For a few years our simple but distinguished cuisine, carefully matched to our wines, proved an excellent marketing tool for our name. In 2001 we decided to transform the restaurant into a third apartment, thus ending an activity that was very satisfying but too labour-intensive to manage on our own as we had planned. Today we have four holiday apartments, about four hectares of vineyards and two of olive groves, producing around 20,000 bottles of wine and 1,000 of extra-virgin olive oil each year. The small size of our farm and the high value of the land in our area mean we are always striving to improve our products, adding value to everyday work and personal satisfaction, which makes us appreciate what we do far more than profit alone.
