Why did I create the Wine Lovers Academy?
The wine comes from the soil, and that means toil and sweat !
I was born in Greve in Chianti into a family of intellectuals who never forgot their farming origins. And my first professional experience in the wine world started right at the bottom, when I was 16.
I got out my secateurs and put on my boots, and got ready for my first wine harvest!
What a job, bent over the vines for hours, fending off spiders and swatting horseflies!
A couple of years later, I was moving wine between wine vats in the cantina: up to my knees in grape skins, and I couldn’t get rid of the smell of wine for days afterwards.
Wine culture: how I developed my palate.
An innate curiosity and the desire to see what lay beyond the vineyard and the wine cellar next took me to the Wine Shop, where I discovered the breadth, the complexity, and richness of the Italian wine world. I began to study with passion and enthusiasm. I became a Sommelier and then director of one of the biggest Wine Stores in Tuscany.
From wine card to boarding card
I took off my wine store uniform and put on a manager’s tie, exchanged my corkscrew for a passport, and started to travel.
Five-star restaurants, high-tech wine bars, immense cruise ships; from Tokyo to Miami, from London to Shanghai.
I drank wines that have influenced and changed my “Chianti palate”; and new flavors and traditions have enriched it.
The unbearable lightness of wine
And so in the last few years, after travelling and learning so much, a new idea began to take shape in my mind: combining all these international experiences with my Chianti background, and giving life to something new.
Innovation in the current wine culture in Italy is not easy. On one hand, we have the burden of established traditions and ideas. On the other hand, we are tied to a language that is little boring and stiff.
The time is ripe to move in a new direction.
Let’s lift our glasses, let’s lift our minds!
The time is ripe for a little healthy hedonism to guide our senses, to give wine the freedom to express itself in a new, more accessible and exciting language.
We must stop treating traditions as something inherited and unchangeable, and allow them to function as a fertile breeding ground for new ideas.
I believe in this strongly enough to have reached the point where I have abandoned what I call my previous life, and have come home with one aim: to talk about wine my way, and do it in my Chianti.
Welcome to the Wine Lovers Academy
From the fusion between the hedonistic and playful “Wine Lover” spirit with the cultural and educational format of the “Academy,” the first
Wine Lovers Academy was born in the heart of Chianti.
A “hedonistic school”, dedicated to all inquisitive palates.
The innovative Wine Store & Wine Bar, made for those who want to discover the culture and flavors of my region, with a smile and a glass on the lips.
