ARMS & BRAINS

""As I remember, we always had vines around the house and wine had been made in the Zidarich household since time immemorial.

Moreover, the memory is still alive in me of the days when my grandfather and then my father Giovanni made wine. I helped them harvest the grapes from those four vines of ours. Yes, thinking about it carefully, there weren't more than four vines in a vineyard that wasn't more then six thousand square meters overall. But notwithstanding we made wine for the household and could also spare a few liters to sell to our friends.

I liked that work. As soon as I could I would run into the rows of vines where every day I felt the growing pleasure of stepping on that red soil. I was young, but I clearly knew in my mind that, as far as it was possible, I didn't want to follow in my father's footsteps. He had worked hard but had never been able to take one step forward in his life, hardly managing to survive.

I felt sad at the idea of waking up at dawn and, taking my lunch pail, traveling for more than an hour to get to the factory down in Trieste, repeating the same actions day after day with distressing routine and habit. From the house and from the vineyard there's a stupendous view of the whole Gulf of Trieste, and sometimes I look down toward the sea and my eyes meet those industrial premises that populate the coast: that was the last place in the world I would want to work; no, I would never want to go back there. I liked what I was doing too much and couldn't give it up.

So after school I set out with the aim of earning a bit of money to bring home in order to expand, with my savings, that little piece of land we had and to add another four vines to the existing four. I was only twenty when I decided to let everything go and start out as a vine-dresser in a land where only few courageous people had succeeded. I knew only one of these characters - Kante - whose cellar is not far from mine. Many considered him a bit weird, maybe because he was the only winegrower in the area.

My father never said anything about that choice of mine, nor did he try to put obstacles in my way by confronting me with the difficulties I would certainly encounter by continuing the adventure, though he well knew I would come up against them. In fact I remember Giovanni backing me up with silent solidarity in my adventure, helping me in all ways and with the unconscious desire to see the fulfillment of a dream of his that he had never had the courage to tell me.

His way of helping me was marvelous. His work always aimed at important things and his advice, as much as his knowledge permitted, was always in line with what I had set as my goal. Most of all, with time, he became my friend and confidant, playing a role that is difficult between father and son.

In 1988 I started to replant my father's half hectare; then "four by four", I planted many other rows of vines over a space of sixteen years and a bit of progress has been made.

Today those few square meters have become more than six hectares. To many this might seem little or perhaps even ridiculous, but for those who know the Carso and what it means to make a hectare of vineyard to grow on rock, it's another story. If you haven't lived through a similar experience you can't understand what sacrifice is involved in being a vine-dresser on this border land, what stoicism it takes and how much self-abnegation there is in the work of a man who, alone, breaks the hard rock one meter deep, fills the pit with red earth brought up from the bottom of the valley and plants the vines which, after years, may produce grapes.

It's tough and not always gratifying work, a job that keeps you for whole days and months in the vineyard, that makes you sweat and hope, that disheartens you when you're tired and exhausted and impels you to talk to the vine, to the water and lastly to the rock, trying to understand it and shape it, to make friends with it and make it a companion in the adventure you have decided to live to the full and that will surely last all your life.

So you start in with pickaxe and hammer and you dig down beyond that meter of rock so you can plant vines, and you realize you're going farther and farther down, into the bowels of the earth, to build your cellar in those rocks. There, dozens of meters underground, deeper and deeper, following the veining of those rocks where one day you'll lay your wine to rest peacefully in a place where it will feel protected and guarded.

A job which, I can assure you, is indescribable if you have to do it with the only means at your disposal: arms and brains.

Hands that split and arms that stiffen and then hurt in the evening; a head that becomes empty from tiredness and the heaviness of a sacrifice that seems endless. A numbness that enfolds me, but it disappears as soon as I get back home and find my wife Nevenka and my children Jakob and Martina waiting for me.

I take courage from these smiles that give me new strength to commit myself here in the Carso, seeking the highest quality from these vineyards that fight, as I do, on this very difficult land.""

- Friuli, land, people, wine (2004)