A brief history of a slow, discreet revolution,

fought only by uncorking bottles and raising glasses.

The word "revolution" is a much-abused term, using which we tend to cloak sporadic episodes with historicity, such as revolts, rebellions, coups d'état, power struggles that have left their mark more on people's imaginations than on the societies in which they occurred.

The great changes in the history of humanity have always been the result of a slow process, often culminating in the sparkling of a social, political, philosophical, scientific and war spark.

Only in two cases is the use of the term correct, namely, for the French Revolution and for the Russian Revolution. And in both cases the date on which they are celebrated is not the date of the beginning but the date on which the phase of transformation has reached a turning point, giving events a lightning acceleration to the detriment of those who did not want to accept that evolutionary process and, indeed, opposed it with all their strength.

July 14, 1789 (memorized: 7, 8 and 9) is the date on which the French Revolution is celebrated, that is, the completion of the transition from the centuries-old "feudal" society to the new "bourgeois" society with the transfer of economic power from the hands of those who for centuries had lived on parasitic rents, without producing anything new, to those who,  Starting from scratch and thanks only to his own ingenuity, he was creating innovation and new fortunes, much bigger and more penetrating.

The "Age of Enlightenment", in short, had produced that substantial revolution that lacked only the seal of a parallel institutional revolution: the convergence between the new economic power and a new political power. Something similar happened in the world of Italian wine in the outflow of the '70s, '80s and '90s (again the sequence 7, 8 and 9).

If we compare Luigi Veronelli's first Catalogue of Italian Wines (1969) with the most recent editions of the wine guides, we discover that the pages of that time were mainly populated by wines produced by noble lords and those who wandered around their courts: poets, musicians, jesters, painters, dreamers, some jurists, a notary,  two or three pharmacists and some brilliant alchemists.

Then, those who harvested the grapes handed them over to the "lord"; if it was few, he produced enough wine to meet the needs of the family; If the quantities were more substantial, he gave it to that new entity, in some ways miraculous, called "Cantina Sociale" (cooperative cellar).

In the cellars of the "lord" the figure of the cellarman dominated, a man of long experience accustomed for a lifetime to dealing with a single reality, facing every year the same vines, the same soils, the same microclimate, with the only variable being the meteorological whims of the alternation of the seasons.
In the farmer's cellar, on the other hand, the technology of "mi babbo" ("my father", which was the same as "the father of my father") reigned with often disconsolate results. But that was there and that was drunk.

Among the vats of the cooperative cellar, however, there was a new character, the "oenologist" who managed to perform the miracle of transforming the jumble of grapes of the contributors into something "good" (although, in reality, it was often only less bad and, rarely, "pleasant").

All this gave rise to three distinct markets, the one of excellence (the wines of the lords), that of self-consumption (the wines of the farmers) and the mass market (the wines of the cooperative cellars). It was inevitable that, with the development of new technologies, the acceleration in the circulation of information and the evolution of the market, the worm of pride in one's own product (made or dreamed, it doesn't matter) began to grow even among the humblest vineyards.

In this process, a decisive role has been played by the salesmen of the companies that produced oenological machinery, who should finally be recognized the merit of having been the real protagonists of Italian wine literacy.

Thus, with the same spirit with which the French bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century launched themselves into the invention of machinery, techniques and new products, Italian winemakers have started a real and great revolution, working the grapes on their own and personally accompanying the whole process up to bottling and sale, waving like a flag the label on which their name stood out.

And, unlike the French revolutionaries who, from being "bourgeois" that they were, elevated themselves to the rank of "citizens", many enlightened representatives of our twentieth-century bourgeoisie proudly left the villages and cities to become peasants. This has led to an epochal renewal of our viticulture which, especially in terms of quality, has made great strides in just a few decades.

Obviously, as happened in post-revolution France, some traces (or banners) of the feudal past still re-emerge in the folds of bourgeois viticulture: just read the labels lined up on the shelves of wine shops and you realize that terms such as Castello, Chateau, Fortezza (fortress), Torre (tower), Feudo (feud), Villa, Chiesa (church), Abazia or Abbaye (abbey), Don and Donna, appear and reappear with a certain frequency,  often joined to graphic signs such as crowns, heraldic insignia, seals, gonfalons, eagles and griffins.

And this happens even if the owners of those wineries are furniture or rebar industrialists, builders, lawyers, bankers, stylists, actors, politicians or famous journalists.

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