Ep. 1832 Rocco Toscani | Wine, Food & Travel With Marc Millon

The Italian wine podcast is the community driven platform for Italian winegeeks around the world. Support the show by donating at italian wine podcast dot com. Donate five or more Euros, and we'll send you a copy of our latest book, my Italian Great Geek journal. Absolutely free. To get your free copy of my Italian GreatGeek journal, click support us at italian wine podcast dot com, or wherever you get your pots. Welcome to wine food and travel. With me, Mark Millen, on Italian wine podcast. Listen in as we journey to some of Italy's most beautiful places in the company of those who know them best. The families who grow grapes and make fabulous wines. Through their stories, we will learn not just about their wines, but also about their ways of life, the local and regional foods and specialities that pair naturally with their wines. And the most beautiful places to visit. We have a wonderful journey of discovery ahead of us, and I hope you will join me. Welcome to wine, food, and travel with me, Mark Millen, on Italian wine podcast. Today, it is my great pleasure to travel to the Tuscan seaboard to meet my guest, rocco toscani, from Azander Gricola toscani, an estate that produces wine, olive oil, and which breeds quarter horses, Chinta Cinez pigs, and homing pigeons, quite a range of activities. Chow Ralko, thanks for being my guest this morning. How are you? And is it a beautiful day in Casali Maritimo? Yeah. Good morning. It's a fantastic day. It's kinda chilly, with pruning. And luckily, I could come inside a little bit and warm up and talk with you. Yeah. Pruning is a real winter task, isn't it? It's hard. You can even do office work in a way because you have to concentrate so much. So it's even frustrating sometimes. Yeah. And I think you get cold hands doing that. Oh, I get really cold hands, but the coldest is free. Alright. Get really cold because it's wet, humid, the hands work, if you just stand there and wait. Yeah. I mean, we always think the sun is shining and it's warm in in Tuscany, but winters can be quite harsh. Can't they? There are some days that it gets cold with north winds, but, we're getting pretty mild winters lately, especially some are starting to become very dry. So this is kind of a big problem for us. Yeah. Because that winter rain's important for the vineyard to soak up, isn't it? Very important. And, yeah, it's starting to we have very, like, very hard range for a short period, and then it stops for many months. This is one of the years that it's doing this. And it's kinda it's not really helping us. Yeah. That's there's crazy rain bombs that just everything runs away. Rocko, I want our listeners to really have a an understanding of where you are at Casali Maritimo. So can you describe where you are and give our listeners a vivid picture of your world. So is a very small town up on the hills in, in the province of Piza. We are basically four kilometers north of Bulgaria. I imagine everybody most of them know where Bulgaria is a very important area of production of wine here in Tuscany. A fairly young area. We are right outside. We're neighboring to the Bulgaria area. So basically, we are four kilometers from the water, from the sea at three hundred and fifty meters above sea level. On the same hills as Bulgaria. So it's where we are at where it starts the. So we have very red grounds, fairly loose grounds. Very cold mornings, I would say. We have the valley of volterra in the back. So we have this north winds that bringing this very cold air during the night and the early mornings, and it's a very interesting place. I don't know if anybody has ever been to volterra. Bolterra is a very etruscan town. And the only place where you can see a little bit of the water from volterra, which is kind of far away from the water, but the only area where you can see the water is exactly where the vineyard is. So it's used to be a hill or a place where the sort of let's call it the king of the town, of volterra would get buried. So we have in this area, we have all the tombs of the kings of volterra that would stay between the water and volterra. So it's kind of a very unique place. It's a beautiful place. Okay. And, of course, those etruscans were great wine drinkers. They they had beautiful wine drinking cups and the necropolis is where they married them. Had a lot of remains, showed the importance of wine culture going back thousands of years. Yeah. It's a very unique spot. My father is a photographer, and he chose this place when he was kind of a young gun. And he came over here and said that there were two places that he ever saw in his life that had the light as beautiful as here, was California and Casalo Maritimo. So he decided to buy in Casalo Maritimo because of the he says the quality of the light So that I think it's also something one of the details that is very important for growing binds here. It's the fact that we are by the water and, you know, photosynthesis. It's a big deal in winemaking. So I think it's, you know, the fact that there is this quality of light and, you know, it's it's a fantastic place. I would never imagine another place where I would go and live. Did you grow up there, Rocco? I was born here. I was, grown up in the farm. My whole life was always to I mean, I studied, I did art school in Chicago, and I I did another art school in France. And every time I had, like, two days, one day, I would always come back home. It's I always did this sort of homing pigeon process, my whole life, where every time I had a minute, I always come back here. So it's it's something that I was really tied to. And and the reason why I actually got into the wine is because I was kind of scared that my father or we weren't able to maintain the farm. You know, my father was doing this with his own job. It was kind of his hobby. And one day, I realized I said if I don't jump in, I'm gonna have to sell it or rent it. Italian wine podcast. If you think you love wine as much as we do, then give us a like. And a follow, anywhere you get your pods. Okay. Well, tell us the story of your father. He was a real visionary. Who believed in this area and in its potential before many others. This still is a big visionary. He used to come here in the sixties. He was, an art student in Zurich and he would come here and paint, like, do Acaros. It was doing, like, sort of the real artist part. And he would come up here with a with a loose, like, motorino. And he would paint the house that he bought and I would say fifteen, twenty years later. Actually, he would come here in the fifties. And then in the late sixties, he bought the first house, and he started, you know, building slowly, this beautiful place. The first thing he started was horses. He started with two or three horses, and then the thing became kind of big. And and then every year he would buy a piece of land that was neighboring to him. So he'd never really invested in buildings and cities or studios, or so he always really only invested in this place. And, you know, for me, it's a it's kind of a big deal to keep it going. Actually, in the eighties, he bought this place where now we have the main vineyard He bought this, field with this house that was owned by a music foundation from Austria. Stoke Housing used to come here and play in the summers. He did three summers here playing. And basically, my father bought the place And we got this guy that was supposed to be a big piano player, but then he started doing a lot lot of drugs and and and raising, and raising, goats here in the in the house. And he would never leave. So he he squatted the place for, like, twenty years or fifteen years, but we were owning the place. And we we couldn't kick him out. When my father got the the chance to kick him out, he had Angelogaya coming you know, their friends, he came and he visited the the place. And Angelo Galla started to insist on the fact that he wanted to buy the place. My father wasn't really into the wine, passion, or business. And Angelo kept insisting in the fact that he said that a place like that, it would have been one of the best places to make grapes on the coast. So he kept going for a few years. And then my father and they said, you know what? If he's insisting so much, on wanting this piece of land, it means that there is sort of a something. So he said, you know what? I'm not gonna sell you the place, but why don't you help me build the vineyard? And so it happened, and it started all in the late nineties. My father started the whole thing with wine. It was going, but not going. He had another job. So it wasn't really picking up, I would say. In two thousand and fourteen, I I took over and I changed completely the winemaking process and how we do agriculture. And I did so in all of the farm, you know. Were the vineyards established by then, Rocco? Yeah. The vineyards, when I walked in, they were around, I would say, And what what varieties? Let's talk about the grapes you grow. So they planted Sierra, cabernet Frank, and petit. And then we had another vineyard of Terolfo. Terroldego. I've not heard of Terroldego in Tuscany. Yeah. There's a lot on the coast. There still is a lot, but there was more in the late nineties, early two thousand because it is a wine that at the beginning, it has a lot of fruit, has a lot of freshness to it. It gives a lot of color gives a lot of concentration also. So I think in the nineties, it was kind of wines that they were looking for. Now it's kind of difficult great to grow with the temperatures we have now here. So, basically, what I did is when I walked into the winery, I sort of said, what are we gonna do now? And what I did is I grafted all of the Pety Verdo with Sierra and Kavanaugh Frank. So the main vineyard now, it's only Sierra and Cabanifer. And the vineyard Doctor Aldo, I grafted it with Greco the two four. So now I'm producing only Sierra cabernet franc and Brejorie Tufo. Last year, I planted another vineyard of two hectares of only Brejorie Tufo. And I think it's a great vine and it's planted on the area of Casale. So we have two hills here. On the south side, so towards Bulgaria, we have very red grounds, very loose grounds where I have the red grapes. And on the right side, so north side, on the hill of Casale, which is a hill made of two foot of yellow ground, I planted Greco di two foot. I hope it's gonna be a good project. It's growing great. It's starting now. And, I think it's gonna be a good project. What I think is really interesting for our listeners, Rocco, is that, you know, when you're explaining where you are, you're also talking about wine culture that goes back thousands of years to the etruscans. And yet, in this area when your father came in the fifties, certainly in the sixties, and I'm talking about Bolgari as well. This wasn't this Tuscan seaboard wasn't an area where vines were planted. And so in a way, that vision of your dad in California, you know, you had a a sort of a blank canvas and could really make the plant the varieties and make the wines that you really wanted to make. I wasn't there at the time, but, my father always tells me the story that when he moved here, he would ask the locals, local people, why isn't there any binds here? The usual answer was, oh, we're too close to the water. And he would kept answering, but in California, by the water. I mean, Bordeaux is by the water. And it's not anyways, this area was an area where the big families from Florence would own strips of land that would go from the forest, from the hills, from the forest down to the water. And in front of the water, it used to be all, swamps. Yeah. Yeah. So it was hunting areas. Hunting areas, and areas where they would give the houses or the buildings and the fields to workers that would you know, when you do the crop and you cut in half the crop, I don't know how you say it. The Maitreya. It was all Maitreya area. It was an extremely poor area. All the area of Bulgaria was all visibly owned and worked by the Markeyjani. Where we are it was, like, two families that used to own everything. It was a poor, poor, poor area. I've I've seen pictures of the eighties. When they moved here, when I was born, it was really, you know, dry. It was, I mean, it was a dead area. And so the only real producer here in the area was Antinori. They used to produce Jose Antinari. It was kind of a non easy place to do stuff because if we were completely cut out from everything, it was like a really long drive. So everything started a little bit in the eighties, and he was part of this whole thing of seeing how it will get the area or the interesting one in this area started. And he sort of started a little bit later than everybody else, but I have to say, I mean, the location where we have the vines, it's an amazing place. I mean, it's a amphitheater looking vineyard looking over the water with a lot of mixture we're doing in the summer. Very cold nights. It's hot. It gets really hot, but it's a fantastic place. I haven't studied the culture. I picked up this job on the run. I'm still learning, but it's a place where you feel that the plants are in a happy place. I mean, it's it's good to work here. And is that why you wanted to keep that happiness in the countryside? Is that why you decided to go for a low intervention to sustainable approach to Viticulture? Yes. It has to be. I think each one of us has to whatever piece of land you have, there may be a small garden or a big vineyard, but our goal, our mission on this small period of time that we're here, we have to do the best we can to keep it the best way to have the next person that is gonna have it. Doesn't matter who. We have to take care of it in a way that we don't hurt it. We make it grow in a way. We we make it a better place. So this is a little bit, but it was my project in making wine in the fact that making this place a better place from whatever it was before. I mean, it's a hard thing to do, but it's respectful or whatever lives in this place or whatever it was missing. We introduced insects, birds, or Yeah. A more holistic approach to life, not just wine. We tend to eliminate whatever we think it hurts us, but it's not like that. We need to cooperate wherever is our neighbors. And I think everything has a role. We some have a negative role and some have a positive role, but the ones that have a positive role, have to be there and also the negative ones because most of the times the negative ones are the ones that are hunted or eaten by another positive one. I grew up in the eighties in this place, and I remember all the farmers would, you know, they wanted to share this part. And this is something that is important that the sharing of whatever your area is is important. So what I actually did for the wines that I, that I'm doing now is going a little bit back to what was the real feel of the area. You have to be part of your area. You can't do something. How do you say that in Italian? Okay. In the sense that What I suffer a little bit of the the Bulgaria area is that they it's kinda like Bordeaux. It's it's something that is made x novel in a place where we have the culture of bringing the wine that way. I'm not saying that they're doing it wrong. I absolutely not saying this, but it's it's not considered something that is our of the place. So what I try to do is to go back a little bit. Every Saturday morning, I open the winery and I have the old timers come in with their tanks and fill up the tanks of wine for their lunch or dinner at home. And every time they come and they they always wanna taste the wine. I think it's one of the most satisfactory comments is when they say, oh, this is like how we used to do it back in the days. It's not true. Didn't do it that way. But that feel, that taste, that attitude of making wine, I mean, it's what we do is it's a fantastic gesture. It's a form of art that gets people together. I mean, we do something that that make people say the truth in a way. I mean, we we really play with people minds in a way. I mean, we almost produce happiness. I I don't know how to explain this, but Well, I think that should be the goal of all minds is to make people happy And I think that sense that you're giving of happiness for the wines, but also happiness for the people that drink the wines is evident in the names of the wines, in the playfulness, and in the labels. So tell us a little bit about the wines, and And are you involved in the labels and the artwork on them? Yeah. I do everything. Yeah. The labels, every wine has their little story, and I it's a little bit of a personal thing for me. Not something that I I promote or at least I I don't do this as marketing, but I do this as a sort of a to give the wine his own identity or it's a little story for me that, I don't know, ito Scani, for example, is my base wine, and it's it means people from Tuscany or the toscani family. I mean, it's this is your Sierra. Yeah. It's a ceramic stainless steel. And the logo on it, it was the first logo of my grandfather. My grandfather was a photographer as well. And he made the first image bank in Italy. We used to work for Toyota de La Sarah. He would go and take portraits of soccer players for the newspaper, and then he would archive them in this agency that he built with that logo, and he would resell it to Panini to do the stickers He was kind of a crazy guy. So I wanted to bring him back. I called the rosette with the flying horse as my two sisters, Lola and Ali, and I called it Lolly. For example, the one with the pigeon on it, I have a label with the pigeon with the portrait of the pigeon that I took with my kid's name, Luca Romeo, so it's called New Mayo. So these are very personal things for me. I think why it's a very, very, very, very personal interpretation of a place and a vine a method or a system where maybe it's hot, maybe it's cold, maybe it's windy. We have to sort of improvise in a way, you know, moments or seasons that may change, you'd plan your year, and then it it all just jumps in the air and and your plan doesn't work. You have to replant it that, you know, in the morning because it's completely the opposite of what you thought. It's very similar to what is our family job since ages where, you know, you're working art. And for me, it was one day, it was it struck me like like a lightning. And I was like, wow, this is really exactly what I was doing like before. I mean, I I have to take sort of a portrait of my place with my wines. It's not it's not a question of following, call it fashions or movements. You know, the wine here comes out this way. I mean, I can tweak it a little bit. Everyone has their own taste. Probably if my system would take over displaced she would do a a completely different thing. I mean, if my father did it completely different, I did it different. And it's and I think it's it's like playing an instrument. I mean, Bob Dylan doesn't play the the guitar, like, Mark Noffler. I mean, it's and it's a guitar. I mean, it doesn't really this is the fun part of making wine. It's it's a personal. I like that approach in how in every way you're reflecting yourself, but also going back to your family as well so that close personal tie reflected in the glass so that the wine could be from toscani and from nowhere else. Now you talk as well about linking to the territory. I'd like to turn to food. Is food important to you and local food? Or do you feel that you're making wines that go with you've traveled a lot with cuisines, international cuisines, and what's your relation with food and your wine? So this area, to go back to what I said before, it was was an area of hunting. So here, even if we are by the water, we don't have the tradition of eating fish. Still now, if you sort of ask somebody or an old lady or even the younger generations to cook a fish here, they'll stick onion in it and lemon and a lot of herbs. We have this approach that fish is not really that good. So we are traditionally meat eaters or at least. So what happened here is that we lost all the traditional, for example, white wines that were made with maceration process. And we started to follow a little bit the the French provincial or whatever style of making wine that was a little bit more referred to a fish food market. On the other side, I think it's fun to make sort of a white wine that is more towards the meat approach of cuisine that is this area. So I remember was when it was a kid we had a vineyard behind the house, I remember we would pick the white on Saturday and the red on Sundays and we would put the white in one tank, the red in the other tank, we would macerate them exactly the same amount of days. And then we would pick out the skins, press them together so we would have a nasty rosette to from the press this was the way that we used to do the wines with the farmers that were the neighbors next to us. So they would come and help us to make the wine. And the next weekend, we would go and help them to make their wine, and then we would go to the next house. It was a fun process that but everybody had the same system to make the wine. I mean, I remember when those white wines that were big and strong and that had those tannins, and and it was wines that you would drink during the summer, but never with fish. It was always with whatever. It was the food, there, a lot of chile, a lot of hunting stuff, a lot of. Or porchetta with that style of wine? I think that's the thing that I wanna go back to it is the fact that, you know, what we do in this area is not something that we go look for somewhere else. It's how we grew up and how we how we approach this. You know, I think also in the matter of market of wine, I think an importer when they choose to have a winery is because they wanna take to their city or place or country a tradition of what they found somewhere else. It's, you know, it's I don't know how to if it makes sense, but it has you're sort of bringing, you know, a tradition of something. It's not just bringing bottles or you're bringing home something else. You're bringing home a sort of a like a postcard. Yeah. I think that's really important. That's a very good point. And you really need to be able to convey that message and your importers need to be able to understand what the soul of a place is. Rocco, finally, can we talk about hospitality at Tuscany? You offer a number of really interesting experiences. Tell us a little bit about this. I started this project few years back, and we have around seven houses. Very, very, very small houses. It's like for for couples, I would say. Are these the former Casa colonnike from the macedriya? No. No. No. Not at all. I mean, there is one that is bigger house but has two apartments, but it's, you know, the houses are very small. It's kinda like those when my father used to buy the land, there always would be, like, polite or a pigsty or a little place where they would keep it chickens and a little horse or the donkey. And he would rebuild these houses the same size as these shacks, but, like, with stones, with the real roof and really, really, really nice houses, like, a small miniature Tuscan house. And then we have horses. We do trail rides. This summer, we started doing these events called Madamaro, where We have, like, big barbecues and a lot of music and, you know, wine and cocktails. And I think the really fun part of this job is the fact that we get people together. What we do is to have people have fun. It's important that and it's all tied together by the wine because, I mean, that's the real thing that when you're with a friend or two friends, you know, you pop the bottle and it's, and it's that kind of stuff that warms up the hearts, I would say. And it's, you know, so I think it's more about what I want from this farm is the fact that it has to be a place when the when you go back home, you say, wow, you know, I I was in a place where it was really fun. I mean, it was nice. It was good looking, and it was, you know, it was well kept. And everything worked well. And it's, it's something that you you take home. When you travel, you when you go back home, you're you're mesmerized at whatever you saw, and it's the one thing that I wanna do in this place is to make it really the cool place to be. I mean, it's it's coming along, but it's a it's a lot of hard work. And it's, you know, we do, as I said, prayer rides with voices, and we do dinners, and we organize, you know, like, we have a lot of companies that come and do dinners with their employees, and it's an experience, and I wanna make it a fun experience. So that's what I basically do also apart from all the vineyard work. That sounds amazing. It does sound fun. It sounds like a unique experience. I know how much hard work it is to give people fun, to make people happy. And I know working in a vineyard is, you know, maybe some of the hardest work of all. It's it's constant through the year. Right now, we're in winter. And you're in that cold vineyard pruning all those vines by hand and tying them down. And there's a lot of work to be able to give people the enjoyment. So, Rock, I really have enjoyed talking to you today because You've given an insight not just to a place to Casale Maritimo to the Tuscan seaboard in the provincial Dipisa, just above Bulgaria, an area that wasn't known for wine, but which obviously has massive potential. And Angelo Gaya was certainly astute as one would expect in his observations all those years ago. And I'm really excited to hear what you're doing, and I can't wait to visit you and taste the wines and and to have some fun as well. So I'm waiting for you. Yeah. Thank you for sharing your time this morning, and I know you're gonna now warm yourself up doing this podcast and then get back into the vineyard, but I really appreciate it. So thank you very much. K. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Good to see you soon. Ciao. Thanks. Ciao. All the best. Bye. We hope you enjoyed today's episode of wine, food, and travel. With me, Mark Millen, on Italian wine podcast. Please remember to like, share, and subscribe right here, or wherever you get your pods. Likewise, you can visit us at Italianwine podcast dot com. Until next time.