I love philosophy, but my approach is the most natural possible approach. I’m sitting on the best possible land for a vineyard, surrounded by woodland, which is a land of oxygen. The terroir, the driven flavors of terroir, they’re all there. One of the reasons I’m using barrel, an old-fashioned way of winemaking, is because there is nothing to tame. If I have soft tannins, beautiful fruit, and terroir-driven flavors, why should I cover it up with oak?

Secondly, because of my experience in astronomy and the history of astronomy, I use the moon for the “travasi,” the racking.

Moving wine from one barrel to another.

Yes, for racking and for planting or pruning in the vineyard, because the moon has been used for thousands of years, and until the invention of chemical laboratories, the moon was the winemaker’s method.

You studied astronomy, didn’t you, when you were younger? Where did you end up doing that? It wasn’t in Montalcino, was it?

No, it was in Venice. In Venice, when I was younger I had many young people question themselves and say things like,”What is time? Why we were there before? Why we are here now?” We have no idea what’s going to happen next. I had the Marciana Library in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, which is the best and the first mobile library in Italy. The librarian was a friend, a family friend, so I had free access to it, so I’m self-taught. In fact, they call me technically an independent researcher.

To go back to the moon and the wine, that allowed me to reduce a lot of the sulfites in the wine. The reason is that liquids, women, fish, and all sorts of creatures on the planet use the moon as a biological clock. If you touch the wine at certain moments, the wine is stronger and less subject to crisis. How you cure the crisis is with sulfites, so the better you handle the wine with the moon, the fewer sulfites you need to stabilize the wine.