the Wine Cellar
The wine cellar is, in the first place, an incubator in which to protect something that is just being born and must not be neglected.
If the priority is the quality and harmony of the space, so as to keep the wine on the track of life and resonance, more attention should be paid to the materials that go into the wine cellar than to its appearance.
At one time, people used to take great care where they constructed a building; a house, for example, is a place to sleep, and when asleep and no longer protected by our individuality, the nature of the subsoil, its folds and its geology, will have an effect on us; on the basis of what we felt on the day we stepped over the threshold of this incubator for the first time, we hope this is not just a superstition, but something real that will participate in the life of Bakkanali.
and Wine-Making
We decided to work primarily with containers that do not affect the flavour of the wine in any way, and so we ferment and age the majority of our wines in concrete, some in steel. Only the grapes from the Poggioferro vineyard are fermented in open wooden vats, allowing us to work with whole bunches of grapes. The idea is to emphasise the texture of the wines of Mount Amiata, which are often characterised by a low pH and energy-packed blood-like sensations, eliminating all that is superfluous from the wine. We believe that true art is a matter of removing, not adding things.
The task of agriculture is to transform kinetic solar energy, the energy of light, into the potential energy stored in human food. The light of the sun is the basic raw material of agricultural industry. Light and warmth are the essential conditions for plant life, and consequently also for agriculture. Light is the raw material from which agricultural products are made, and warmth is the force which drives the machinery — the green plant. The provision of both raw material and energy must be maintained. The dynamic energy of the sun's rays is transformed by green plants into potential energy in the material form of organic matter. Thus our first concrete task is the continuous creation of organic matter, storing up the potential energy of human life. Light and Heat are cosmic factors, water and plant food terrestrial factors. The cosmic factors come from and across interplanetary space to act directly on the plant, whereas the terrestrial factors act only through an intermediary, the substance of humus.