Wine and the happy eggplant. Starting over after Coronavirus

Luis Sepúlveda and the idea of happiness

"The four men looked at each other. Fatter, older, balding and with a grey beard, they still cast the same shadow of what they had once been. 'So, shall we play it?' Asked Garmendia, and the four glasses met in a toast on that rainy night in Santiago". We salute with his own words Luis Sepúlveda, one of the greatest writers of our time that this cursed virus has taken away. And we do it while in Italy we're preparing, after 60 long days on pause, for a slow return to normality. "Sometimes wine is the liquid manifestation of silence", wrote the Chilean author in another of his stories, where wine always represents an element of intimacy and hope, a source of truth in language, "since words are like wine: they need to breathe and enough time for the velvet of the voice to reveal their definitive flavour". In recent years Luis had focused a lot on achieving happiness, which he identifies with a chain of collective elements, including creating a book together with Carlo Petrini, "An idea of happiness", published in 2014. The concept behind it is exquisitely South American: we can be alive and happy only if others are too. "There is no happiness without empathy", he reiterated strongly in his interviews, a simple concept that we still feel vivid in these days where our health depends on that of others, even thousands of kilometers from our home.

Sustainability and ethics

Sharing, sustainability and ethics were the three driving engines of his work, combined with the unique ability to listen and tell stories. Stories that were often bathed in wine, to naturally prepare ourselves to listening and projects us towards each other. Wine is there when you have to celebrate a victory, a degree, an anniversary, a personal achievement, and it's there is when you have to start over, like in the case of the four old men from Santiago in the book "The Shadow of What We Were". Well, the time has come for all of us to start over with twice the energy and passion, to restore colour to our work, to return to embrace and look people straight in the eyes, not only via zoom.

Food and wine: time for a new start

We return to restore flavour and sounds to our cities, resume love stories, clandestine or not, to fill, even if gradually, wine bars and restaurants because our primary and vital need is to exchange. This is the place for wine. Which never more than today takes on a particular meaning, with its nature that proceeds with full sails and is charged with symbols and values that it's up to us to exalt, putting to fruition different points of view and tastes. From this month we inaugurate a series of new sections in our Wine Travel Food, given we too will remodel ourselves in the race. We chose to start from the soil, in this case on the cover we have the red and generous soil of Manduria, in Puglia. All we need is a freshly picked eggplant and a glass of wine to be happy and to say forcefully that we are very ready to play. And to raise to all the challenges that time will give us, even the most difficult.

by Lorenzo Ruggeri