Luigi Fenoglio
Sometimes it happens that someone approaches me and asks: «Is this the Tenuta di Valgiano?» And my first instinct is always to selfishly answer «NO», irritated. «No, go away!» I’ve spent years trying to remember the road up to this place. Curves, signs, small country lanes going up hills, becoming increasingly narrow, forking off, ending abruptly.
When you finally arrive, you feel like you have come through a door. And beyond that door is a microcosm teaming with spurs and with life, where the soil has a good smell and the houses look like they have sprung up out of the earth — planted, not built, moved by a natural impulse made of sun and photosynthesis. Like vines or wheat. Valgiano is harmony. It is a large and soft clock resting nestled on the hills. And all the people who live and work here are the mechanism that moves the hands, following a pace scanned by the rain, by the micro-climate, by the phases of the moon.
I immerge myself in this scenario and enjoy my condition of guest, of hired help when I can, of drinking companion during the hot, easy nights, lying in a field watching the stars.
Why on earth would I want to share all this?
People arrive here attracted by the wine; a good wine, a very good wine. But the wine is just the outcome, the resulting expression of a balance made of people, of nature and of respect.
And I’d like to ask the new arrivals who they are, how they got here and why.
But instead I just break out in a huge smile and say: «Yes, it is. Welcome to Valgiano».
And then, abruptly, a sense of envy comes over me, just like every time someone tells me they have never seen one of Sergio Leone’s films or never read a book by Jack London and sets out to do so for the very first time.
