Ep. 50 Monty Waldin interviews Paolo de Marchi (Isole e Olena Winery) Pt. 1 Discover Italian Regions: Tuscany / Toscana

Italian wine podcast. Chinching with Italian wine people. Hello. This is Italian wine podcast with me Monte Walden today. Paulo de Marquis is going to tell us about Isolena. His family is a state winery in the western part of Canti Classic in Tuscany Paulo. Welcome. Nice to have you. Great to be here. Thank you for inviting. Okay. First question is, let's talk about the name, Isole, e, Olena. What is Isole? And what is Olena? We we get to the to the point. These are little hamlets. There are no times there are two states. The state of Israel, and the state of Elena, little hamlet. Where the sharecroppers used to live. So it always goes back, to the memory of the time of sharecropping. So no castle, no big villa, the hamlet of the sharecropping. So the sharecropping was when in the nineteen fifty of sharecropping was, coming back to centuries in Tuscany, in in Tuscany, and, and it, extremely fast, dramatically in the middle of the sixties. So what does sharecropping mean now? Sharecropping was a system, five farming, but also a social organization where a big estate was divided into units called podere, given to a family of peasants, and they were farming, mixed farming, producing almost all what they need and dividing a little more than fifty percent to the family and the little less than fifty percent to the estate. And it was very clearly ruled, who was doing what, who had to pay for what. Very little money in the system and was just producing the food that they needed. And the next question is, it's not just called, What is a Fattoria? Fattoria is the name of the state organized the sharecropping contract. So most big, states, medium, and big states in Kianti used to be Fattoria. So where there was a Fattore, a foreman, working for the family of the owners who usually was not living in the state. There were noble families of people living in, in Seattle, Rome, Rome, that was the state, which was, made up with different poderi. So in all time, they were saying, how how big is, your factory, yeah, was not the number of hectares, but was, it's five podares, seven podares, ten podares, ten podares, because the podere was, usually more or less the same size. Okay. Now your family is from Piamonte where you have three generations of wine growing under your belt. Did it help that when you came to Isolay, Eolayna in nineteen seventy six, you were an outsider. I was an outsider. Somehow, I'm still an outsider. I've been extremely lucky because I came here in a time of big changes. So the doors were open to new ideas and, new people. Everything helps. We need to understand what, what we receive from the past, the past of the family, the past of place where we are. I consider the past is understanding the and the thinking of the past is one of the way we have to imagine the future. This is, is my idea of tradition. So taking the best the old pleasant traditions. Understanding where we come from. I think it's difficult, very difficult to know where we want to go if we don't understand where we come from. And I consider the only way to understand modern candy is to think of the end of the sharecropping economy, how things happened, how fast they happened, how the what the problems were. Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense. What has happened in the seventies and the eighties or the super task and all the not local varieties. To the French varieties came in. To the French varieties came in. So when you started Islle, was it? It was still very traditional. It was still mainly based on the Tus and Great varieties, I cannae Olo, but mainly San Giovanni. It was, only based on the Tusan varieties. It's not a bad thing, but it it was, it became a bad thing because of the sudden end of the sharecropping because, when my father bought the estate in nineteen fifty six, it was all on this very strict traditional sharecropping. So one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty people are living on this state, non mechanization and producing everything. And you're consuming most of the product, on the site. So in the mid of the six is in less than five years from a hundred thirty people and only fourteen people were remaining on this state. So for the first time, we faced the problem of, capital and the problem of producing for the market. Free fact which happened at the same time. The collapse of sharecropping, the new appellation sixty seven in Canti Classico. And because of the collapse of sharecropping, so Canti was literally abandoned, and the new Europe made a five years project to give a new life to modernization of Kiati, which was done, in a time of big changes, but, we on the appalachian rules, which was, thought, and written according to the sharecropping economy. So because of the five years plan and the money, sometimes, it's it's good to get money to get help, but sometimes it's not good if we do not sit down and think what to do. New people coming. So the factors which are important for the quality and have to come in balance. So understanding the soil, in the climate, the genetic of what we plant, and the people who makes it were in a kind of trouble. It's very difficult to make things, well done in balance when all the quality factors are not clear and balanced and not in balance. Can you talk about these replanting, this replanting of, of traditional, but also the French varieties, but you were quite unique in the fact that you wanted to replant sangiovese d vines that gave lower yields, but more flavored, more concentrated wine, whereas everybody else is seeming to go for for high volume, pilot, high cell achieve. Is that true? I think it is a way of look at it is not exactly I think we had to be very careful to judge the past with the the eyes of today. We were kind of lost and not just myself, and they were to become unless they knew what was going on with the new rules and all the plantings. I think of an application which replants the totality of the vineyards in five years. It is an easy consequence to imagine, but it is what happened And when you replant everything, then you have the whole population with young vines. And also because of the sharecropping quality of wine that was made, with a lot of white grapes, because the sharecroppers, they needed to drink the wine immediately after the harvest. Probably they were getting to the harvest. The wine of the year before was was finished and they needed wine. And most of the time, they were drinking wine, one third of the wine and two short of the water. For years, I tried to have my older sharecro as it became work, because I I was trying to have them tasting the new wines I was making. And the answer works, I didn't drink wine. Probably the sharecropping time, the consumption per person was over two hundred liters in this region. And the answer is I don't drink wine. Yes. I don't drink a pure wine because they used to drink wine to give acidity to the worker, working long hours outside in the hot climate. And the wine which was exceeding the needs was sold. Most states were not bottling the wine, and it was sold to the big merchants. And the big merchants had to face the problem of, fixing the wine for the market. The easy project starting in sixty seven ended in seventy two. The most famous wines, Tignanello, first intervals, he leaves the seventy one. Tinanello was a was a wine obviously staff for an international market whereas previously Kanti was, as you're saying, it was drunk. Almost all of it was drunk locally by the, either by the farmers, the peasants, or Yes. But the old region, with the new plantings had to look at the market local, but not local, on the states, Italian, let us say, and international. And the wines produced with the with the new operation, were disappointing, not only because of the white grapes. But because of doing things too fast. So San Joese is a great variety, but if you plan to San Joese without checking what you planned without working on it, you have a gap which you can feel because when you're in Plantavina, then in theory, you are thinking of fifty years. So when I moved to the estate in nineteen seventy six, I was kind of, a big question mark and was, the problem was where to start. Those vineyards also been planted without much respect of the soil because, you know, finally mechanization, not people. The big trouble at that time was, labor. So big tractors bigger tractors, big caterpillars, and bigger caterpillars to make the hills flat. Almost all the system of the walls, the water hills, and I'm trying to make a bigger single pieces of vineyards. And then big demand with a nursery of Sanjuviso, so there was no selection. So a lot of, Sanjuviso, not so good, being planted. There was a total revolution. Basically, the the landscape, the physical aspect of the landscape change, what was planted in the vineyards changed, so more production oriented system them. More production oriented because this was, this is history, and we cannot argue with history. I think the big difference between history and tradition history has already happened. Tradition is, understanding history and understanding where we come from, but the working and changing things to have a better future, I think, to transport, to deliver a trade. So tradition is something which is always moving. It has a lot of human factor in it. And it's the effort of keeping things alive. So, Fence God, Canti is alive. Had a very difficult time, but he's alive. It's extremely alive. So I'd been working, but I never thought that I was the only one. I had my way. I've been somehow lucky because I was not from here. So I had the kind of a more open mind because I just needed to understand where it was. And where it was was chaotic. So I had to place things on priorities. And San Jose is the most important variety. So it was natural to have San Jose as the number one a priority. We had not financial strength to replant. Venus planted ten years before, so we had to do what what we had. So trying to improve and understand. But you're very unusual in the sense that, you know, you've been making top quality wine that everybody loves for thirty years and you've never ever had a consultant. You work things out for yourself. I think, quality, if we want to make what they call a wine of origin, quality is not something that, we have to have a pre conceived in our in our brain. If we decide how the wine has to be, it's the first step towards food industry. And then the use of technology and the trying to change what we got from nature. So you're saying that rather than rather than even before you've picked a you know exactly what the wine is gonna taste like. It's almost like you're you're selling Lego. It's a question. I asked Doreen that when I tasted the grapes before the harvest, let us see what you, the wine, with the climate of this year have been a to produce. We make red wine and the quality, potential quality is already in the skin. We have been able to produce, and the wines have been able to answer to our needs. This is not exactly what we want most of the time. So we had to always go back and forth what we would love, what the vines is doing, and then being able to understand. So I'm very flexible in my winemaking according to what I think is possible to produce from the grapes is always a gift. The vintage, I accept the vintage, which is difficult. I know it will give lighter wines, but I've never been worried with lighter wines as as long as there is balance. Each winter has its own balances. So my effort has always been trying to understand where that balance is and respect it. Of course, if we have a COVID intake twenty fourteen, it's obvious that it will be a lighter wine, but has such a vibrant acidity, what we want to avoid is, green lie acidity. So that wine will be a rather riesling. San Giovanni often age is, also. I don't say primarily. Paul real, the sangiovese are used to age very well because of the acidity, much more than because of the ceramics. So we had to understand these things. And just the so working for freshness, for acidity, and being extremely light handed in extraction. And and, the art of energy where we can do something different. Vintage variation might be a problem on the market. But San Jose is a variety which is a temperamental or reacts to all these things. And we have it's like a little difficult baby, but very interesting. When you go into the vineyard, you don't look at the vineyard as a as a as a field of, it's just one single field. You look at each in divine individually. Is that correct? I look at each of the vines. I look at the vine yet, I look at what surrounds the vineyard because it's also extremely important because it gives, sort of, like, hills or forest or fields or forest to forest. The beauty of candy compared to many other very famous wine region is this mixture. Venus in the middle of the forest. Venus with olives. Venus with a lot of the wild nature, which is great. We did a very interesting research on the wild yeast. We we use wild yeast, but I I'm also curious. And I want to know, I want to understand we did the work. We started in two thousand one. A Vigna, there's a five hectares Vignas, which is surrounded by, like, seventy hectares of forest or more. And, we analyzed the East which carried on, the spontaneous notation, very good East. The work was done with a friend of mine at the University of Florence. And they preserve the East, but, then my friend went to the US to specialize in DNA of East, and then in twenty eleven, he came back and I asked him, I want to do the same. We did it ten years ago to see if there is a a family of east. If there is a family relation, they used to ten years before. I mean, ten years, there's probably millions of generation of east. So it the same unification. And, it is in a direct line of family, which is unbelievable. So the the East are connected. And, we started to look where are the Easter when there is not an active fermentation because, when there's not an active fermentation, the Easter seems to disappear. And we found that we found in the hornet, in the big wasps. All the social insects, they have the yeast in the intestines, and the winter larvae, they carry in the intestine of the good yeast, so they are the ones who go when the grapes are almost, right, break the skins and they donate this gift of good yeasts. I think it gives a different idea what is a single vine and what is a crew. It's not just the combination of soil and climate, what is the whole life. So it could be a master wine question. I'd love to see the masters of wine in their exam. Ask you a question about how important is our B populations to wine quality? I think it's extremely important. This friend of the university of Florence moved to another area in Latin, Italy, and they told me that, it was extremely difficult to find the wind wind the east. And, it is because of the spontaneous flora and the insects. Well, that was part one of this Italian wine podcast with Paulo de Marque of Italy Eolena. Do tune in to part two with Power Me, Monte Walden. Follow Italian wide podcast on Facebook and Instagram.