Edited by

Francis Falcone

 

And with Paolo Cianferoni

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Sunday 17 November at 15.00

at Back to the Wine, Fair of Faenza (RA)

“Chianti Classico is a school in the woods, the best, just don't suffer from car sickness. Curves upon curves that make the goals far away, forests that touch the sky everywhere, wild boars and roe deer that rub the grapes, dust from a warm wind, light that gathers on the mountains and opens up in the soul.If you want to learn something about Sangiovese, we don't need Chianti winemakers,you need to go to Chianti Classico.And be crushed by its beauty. It is there that some of the most sensational red wines on the planet are produced. Many still ignore it, but the day will come when we will open our eyes to the most extraordinary denomination in Italy.

One is overwhelmed by the beauty of Chianti Classico. Mountains of oaks, pines, chestnuts; and then cypress trees, villas, villages and castles, farms and estates. All without breath, all without any solution of continuity. And yet the stone farmhouses, often identified with old towers and grouped together to form castles, following the circle of ancient walls, each born in the right place, in a miraculous architectural harmony. It then continues among the parish churches scattered in the dense scrub, often hidden from view like lost jewels. And once you enter the cold aisles of those ancient buildings, cold even in these hot days, embroidered with frescoes that emerge and Romanesque capitals in gray stone, you discover the other face of Chianti Classico, the interior one, which smells of shadow and mystery, smells of incense and undergrowth, and preserves jealous memories.

And in our memory, which is not jealous, remains the severity of the rock that happily marries with the vine, the olive tree, the cypress, the broom, the orris field. The gray that penetrates the green colors it and makes us love. The love of good winemakers for Chianti Classico is enormous, and good Chianti producers are so many, you really get lost being spoiled for choice. We admire several dozen of them. But on this occasion we like to remember the passion ofPaolo Cianferoni,winemaker in Caparsa, in the municipal area of Radda in Chianti.

The Italian term passion, as well as similar words in other European languages, originates from the Latin verb patior, through the participle passus. Its original meaning (to suffer, suffer, endure), tells of a condition and experience characterized by being subjected to something or someone, even before this state of passivity is connoted in a positive or negative sense. Here, Paolo Cianferoni is among those who evoke, in an immediate and certainly positive way, the meaning of passion and of a "passionate man". So passionate about his land, that he appears to our senses almost like a martyr among the vineyards, imprisoned on the heights of Radda and almost stuck - like a vine - in the alberesi and galestri of that so harsh Chianti area.

Without ever abdicating his mandate as an independent farmer and in full harmony with the pathos mentioned above, Paolo has always produced, from 1982 onwards, wines that are subjected in all respects to the environment that generates them, passive wines in the sense of more exasperated devotion to those places and to the vine that makes the difference there: our beloved Sangiovese. The Caparsa estate was purchased in 1965 by father Reginaldo, a professor of agricultural economics who came from Bagno a Ripoli and who loved writing (Veglie a Porcignano is an unmissable book for anyone who wants to know the most intimate stories of Chianti Classico). Fifteen years later, the first vinification: a happy baptism, if it is true that Chianti Classico Caparsino Riserva 1982 is still today a wine with earthy grit, like its creator after all.

Sunday 17 November, at 3 pm, at BACK TO THE WINE in Faenza, we will have the opportunity to test first-hand the greatness of Chianti Classico, Caparsa, Caparsino and its interpreter, Paolo Cianferoni.

We are waiting for you for a historic vertical tasting.”

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Francis

 

20 seats available, 30 euros the participation fee.

For reservations:fra.falcone2003@libero.it