Imagine yourself owning a vineyard. Chartreuse seas, vine-covered hills rolling slowly towards the horizon under blue Mediterranean skies; you relax, maybe with a glass of something in hand.
Then imagine the drink turned into blood; imagine frogs, lice, flies, locusts, and other animals. A walk in the park compares Egypt’s 10 great plagues to life chained to winery maintenance.I should know, as the eldest son and reluctant (future) heir to a first generation estate Winemaker.
Winemaking amounts to “economic suicide,” says my brother — after telling me he’d rather I not write about the family business. Vineyard owners need to deal with a seemingly never-ending series of costs and unpredictable variables.
The times of this land are slow. The production of the wine, from planting to tasting, takes more than three years. Unexploded bombs surprise winegrowers every hour of the day. Grapes are extremely vulnerable to bacteria, with all the nooks and crannies a vine can nestle in and be exposed to heat and humidity. Unlike higher-alcohol beverages such as whiskey, wine is susceptible to serious contamination during the brewing process, which can only be avoided through an almost obsessive sanitation regime.
And, after years of hard work, winemakers are diving headlong into a saturated market.
However, sales at southern European wine estates have been on the rise for years, according to real estate brokerage Knight Frank. Why? “I can think of all kinds of reasons to buy a winery, but purely as an investment is not one of them,” says Bill Thomson of Knight Frank Italy.
Not even Hollywood can pull off the typical corporate-to-pastoral career transition. year 2006 a good yearRussell Crowe rejects coveted City of London finance job, accepts instead Winemaker Life (and a glowing Marion Cotillard) – The film bombed at the box office.
When I was six, Mr. Giusti went through a strikingly similar trajectory, quitting a well-paying job, selling the only property he held to his name, and borrowing money in an Italian town whose name I cannot name. The area purchased a vineyard.
In 2015, former mergers and acquisitions lawyer Francesca Seralvo gave up her career in Milan to take over her third-generation family winery, Tenuta Mazzolino. She loves it, but admits: “I’m working twice as hard now.”
Only double? My brother likened the 2014 harvest to D-Day. “We were covered in mud and the tractor was so bogged down we could barely see,” he said. Most of the grapes are lost.
Weather events can be devastating. In 2017, spring frost came to Bordeaux overnight. Daragh Quinn, who left 18 years in investment banking to join the family-owned brewery in January, told me his story on the phone.
“We managed to save some grapes, but we don’t think they are of sufficient quality to make and commercialize any wine in 2017.” The vineyard had zero income that year. The cost is not zero.
“Winemaking is very expensive,” Seralvo said.First, in decent regions terroir or a title, the cost per hectare of planted land is 2 million euros. Then there’s the vineyard and cellar machinery. A good vineyard tractor can cost as much as a brand new Porsche. A filling machine that runs smoothly can cost 100,000 Euros. Barrels used to ferment wine typically cost €15,000. For wine produced by a small vineyard, you need 15. You may need 300,000 Euros for all machines used in commercial production.
Marianna Giusti and her family in a vineyard in Italy, 1999 © Marianna Giusti
So is all this a disadvantage? not at all. Most winemakers I know—including those who are (ahem) desperate—have a sense of well-being, a sense of contentment with their way of life and their sense of belonging to the land. Seralvo calls winemaking “the most beautiful job in the world”. She enjoys adapting to the changing seasons and enjoying a daily walk across the fields where she grew up.
“The idea that (the wine we make) ends up on someone’s table with family or friends” is what drives Quinn to continue the 500-year-old work on his French vineyard.
“A passion for wine underpins all the work,” my father said, “and fosters a thousand-year-old relationship with the land.”
Somehow, we haven’t lost the house (yet). Growing up, I may have been aware of my father’s insomnia or hypersensitivity to the weather. But there were plenty of sunny days with him driving the tractor around the vines, frolicking in old plastic wine barrels with my brother, wandering the hills, picking fruit. At least sometimes, it’s idyllic.
Now, of course, wine. Undeniably, its deliciousness is unforgettable and intoxicating. I’m just sorry, I promised my brother I won’t tell you what it’s called.
Marianna Giusti is weekend audience engagement reporter at the Financial Times
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