▷S1E5 Horse-crazy: Roberto di Filippo on Traditional Farming in Umbria and Romania
Bebe, Diamante, and Pioggia are a team of Italian horses who practice organic viticulture in Umbria with Roberto di Filippo. Roberto got into working with horses when he and his wife Elena opened a second winery in Romania with their partner Roberto Pieroni. Naturally, he made friends with a couple of Amish farmers to ask for advice. Roberto tells Rose Thomas the whole story as they taste and discuss wines made from the local grapes of Umbria and Romania's Danube Delta.
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I call the sargarantino aroma the dark aroma because it is not so fancy like a fruit team or low or something like that. You can smell the underwood, smell wet ground, hummus, truffle, mushrooms, so it's... I do, I find the truffle now. Yeah. Oh, I wish I was eating some truffles right now. With this that would be amazing. Let's see please. It's a good pairing with the Sergantino. It could be wild boar with truffle. Excellent with Sergantino. Life is good, right? Salute. Cheers. I’m Rose Thomas Bannister, and today I'm very excited to be talking with Roberto Di Filippo. Roberto has been practicing organic viticulture for over 30 years. He and his wife Elena run the Plani Arche winery in the central Italian region of Umbria, but not just Roberto and Elena work on their farm. In the field, they are also joined by a team of horses. In 2010, along with their partner Roberto Peroni, they started a winery in the Danube Delta region of Romania. Roberto, welcome, we have so much to talk about. Thank you so much, Rose. I'm proud to be here. Real quick, before we start the interview, if you're a fan of the Modo di Bere podcast, please take a moment now, go to Apple Podcasts and leave the show a 5 -star rating and write a review. It really helps with visibility for the show and I really appreciate it. We'll be here when you get back. I like to start the interview by asking my guests about a local drink and a local saying. I'm excited to talk to you about the grapes that are local to both Umbria and Romania, but But let's start with a saying, "Modo di Bire". I bet you know some about horses. Something about horses? Oh, it's so. It is my passion. I started to work with them 13 years ago in Romania. And I was not so interested with the horses before the period. Simply, in Romania, we started to till the old vineyard, the Chaucer's Courage vineyard, with the horses, and I've seen the horses with the plow on the back. So, as my maker and farmer, I said, "Oh, that's interesting !" And so I started to study the horse management, the horse, the working horse, and I was in touch with the French vineyards, with the amish people here in pennsylvania in ohio and so i started also to produce some prototype to work with the horses and after years and years and also with some but accident i've broken twice my legs working with the horses and it happens when you are working with a one tone horse it could happen but anyway I started to produce some prototype and now as we are in Italy, we probably are the leader working with the horses and we are so efficient that it is cheaper to work with the horses instead of the tractors. So we also calculated this with the University in Perugia, university in Siena, that's very interesting. We have a lot of benefits because it's more environmental friendly and also we consume less oil and the energy is renewable, it's more well -chapted with the horses because they just consume, hey, that's it and then it's charming it's also a good promotion for the winery the people likes to see that and the horses are also multifunctional we do not only work with the horses we also arrange some carriage tour in the winery and so michel and the regal Rigolteen has been my winery and we had a nice tour around the vineyards. Oh, I am... I also find the horses very charming. I want to know everything about them. How many do you have? What are the names of some of your favorite horses? I have three horses in Italy. It's Diamante, Bebe, they are about 10 years old, and one younger it's a Pioggia and okay I started to train them seven eight years ago so I was a beginner also the horse was a beginner and during the training I was one horse baby which is my favorite escaped with one huge trunk on the back and I've broken my leg. - Oh my goodness. - Yeah, yes, but, you know, it's, it is difficult to recover the sabbath in Italy. We lost a rabbit to work with the animals, with the horses. In France, they are a bit more user than us in Italy. And here in the United States, you have the amazing and also freaky, the Amish people. you have to consider them an heritage for you because they are keeping this habit to work with with the horses and anyway to recover this habit you have to be stubborn otherwise if you have the first problem and you give up immediately you don't have any results and after seven years we were able to till 40 acres with the four horses. Now I have a small binary, we can manage in Italy 10 acres with the horses and okay it is nice, we love it and it's very relaxing to dress the horses, it's a kind of right to dress the horses and go to work in the vineyard. It's a slow return you cannot compare with the tractors, because with the tractor for instance you can manage two or four actors per day and with the horses you can manage the half. But the quality of the work is much better this is really a pleasure to work with them. How did you get in touch with the Amish people to talk to them about their traditions? Simply turning around in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, then I remember I stopped in a touristic place with the Amish people in close to Berlin in in Ohio and I started to chat with a guy. And I said, oh, I'm an Italian farmer. I work with horses, and we had a good mood together. And we started to talk about horses and hardness, and it was not so difficult. I wasn't in touch with them for a long time. I had a few days to stay in Ohio and Pennsylvania. So, I hadn't days and days of touch. But I was lucky because I was able to drive the Amish horses. They are really well -trained, probably the best one, and you can see that they are in touch with the animals, and also daily, is completely different from or edit. You really seem to have cared a lot about preserving and recovering lost traditions to the point of even putting your body on the line. Let's talk about tradition. When I open up the Plani Archea website, I see beautiful pictures of you and Elena standing in a hole in the ground with the clay amphorae plowing these fields with the horses, crushing the grapes by foot. What is gained by using these methods in place of modern technology? Oh, I think wine, it is not just business or beverage. It's also, it means also tradition, stories. You know, I've seen the wine business a lot. I have 37 years of experience in my business. In the beginning wine was just food, beverage, daily wine, nowadays more hedonistic, so you and the customers you are looking for a lot of things around the bottles. It means the story, the grape, the terroir, and so we want to recover the ancient technology. We have a winery in Romania, we will talk later. Anyway, because we are in close to the Balkanic and Caucasic area, we started to study also the Georgian wine. The emphora underground is a Georgian old ancient technology. It is a 6 ,000 years old technology, So they make this maturated orange wine, kept underground for six months. So we do this in this way. And I made a lot of experience, right, wrong, making the orange wines. At the end, I started to study on the website the Georgian protocols on wine making. And this is why we have this small production of wine made in a Georgian style. That is so interesting. I think those wines are remarkable. How did you choose the name Planyarque? Planyarque is a Latin name. It means "Valley of the Rock" of the castle. And this is the place where San Francis made a historical priest to the beard and about it we have two version one is the official where the guide Saint Francis made this famous priest so thank you God for the nice sky nice birds and blah and blah and the birds state stand silently on the tree listening St. Francis. Then there is also an apocryphal story about him and saying that St. Francis turned around the towns looking for food and money for the poor people and at the end of the tour he got nothing. So he was really angry and going with the birds he said because the human beings are stupid I prefer to talk with you because you are listening me so probably the both stories are true but because we like to think alternative we use this name and also because the Planiarchy the place where the the priests of the birds were done and the praise of the birds? The praise, yeah, the praise to the birds. How do you say? Yeah, yeah. That's Dan. And so it's, we have also vineyard close to this place. This is also another reason because we have this name. What an amazing, what an amazing history. I study local sayings, deiti, modo di dire, and I wonder if you have one to share about horses? Oh, "matto come un cavallo". What is it? "Crazy like a horse, matto come un cavallo". You are crazy like a horse, you are "tu sei matto come un cavallo" because you know, especially you have a bloody stall on the jumps, the race and this is a mode of the deer about the horses. So is this you would say to someone who was being really really rowdy and and running around a lot yeah nice nice I love it how many languages do you speak do you also speak Romanian yes not very good but I speak Romanian I was lazy lazy to learn Romanian in 12 years Roberto can you tell us a little bit about the wine grapes that are local to Umbria in Umbria there are the most famous at this moment are the three grapes. One red grape which is the Sagrantino from Montefarco, the name comes from Sacramento, probably because it was discovered by the monks in Umbria, and then we have the Grechetto which is a white grape, a bit tannic, golden color, and then we have we have the Trebbiano's Pulettino, which is another white grape. And it's totally different from the other Trebbiano, right? Yeah, yeah, you know, it's very famous, the Trebbiano from Tuscany, from Abruzzo. It is not a clone of this Trebbiano, it's completely different, much more complex and fruity. We have some Sogrentino here, right? Shall we taste that together? Yes, why not? It's a quick pleasure. Grazie. You're welcome. Thank you. What is the vintage of this wine? This is 2018. 2018. It has a dark color. Really pretty nose and the color is some typical from sagrantino so you have the ruby red with a mix with a tin of brown because the wine is very tannic. The nose is really pretty it's pretty it's it's fairly subtle There's this wonderful freshness to it like just and something a little bit like mushroom. Yeah, really I called Serpentine aroma the dark aroma because it is not so fancy like a fruit team or low or something like that You can smell the underwood smell wet ground hummus I do. I find it truffle. Yeah. Oh, I wish I was eating some truffles right now. With this that would be amazing. Let's see please. It's a good pairing with the with the Saganantino. It could be wild boar with truffle. Excellent. With Saganantino. Life is good, right? Salute. Cheers. Pretty dark palette too. Yes. Serotonin is probably the most tannic wine into the world. It is very important to have quality tannins, otherwise it's undrinkable. And on my experience, if you want a good grape and good tannins, you have to work very well into the vineyard. So it's a natural farming, it's very important. If you use, if you pump the production with a chemical fertilizer, systemical treatments, you have bitter and harsh tannins. So I like to say that to make a good Sagrantino, you have to be first at all a good farmer and then a good when maker. So we, it's much more important what you are doing into the field, into the vineyard instead of the winery. Yeah, the tannins are definitely really present here and I, they kind of linger. I can sort of feel them still in the battle with my mouth a few minutes longer but They're very fine tannins. They're very well integrated with the wine and I can feel the force of them But it's not like they're trying to to rip my tongue apart the way that I'm more unbridled to use a horse term Tannin can be no guys if you're interested in tannic wines Definitely try a sauer -grantina. It's it's a really cool delicious wine. I'm looking at the bottle now too and there's this beautiful drawing of one of the horses. So this, besides wild boar, I feel like, do you think this is kind of the ultimate steak pairing? Also, also brusse it over cooked meat. You know brusse it, brasato? Brasato, no. Yeah, brasato is when you cook the meat for a long time. Oh, braised, braised meat. Yeah, and maybe with wine, spicy, with pepper, truffle, you know, so it pairs very well with the sagrantino. You have a kind of sweetness in the meat, it pairs very well with the with the tannin. I find some darker fruit, but I also find this note of like an espresso almost in the toast. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I would love for you, Roberta, to educate us a bit about vine training. Can you explain the different training methods you use and why you choose them? The trellis, the guillo and the... Oh, yeah, the training of the vineyard. How do you say that in Italian, the vine training? Forme di potatura, the shape of of the plants. Anyway, we are using mainly Cordon and Gullio. They are very popular, but it's very important to divide long pruning. It means Gullio, it could be Sylvaux, and short pruning. Normally it's Cordon, but also Alberello, little tree, because when you have a short pruning You have only two, three buds. And the maturation is similar from the first and the second and the third. You have almost the same sugar and the same acidity. When you are using a long pruning, you could have seven, eight, nine, ten buds. And you have a different quality of grapes from the first buds to the last. The first has high sugar and low acidity. The last one has less sugar and more acidity. So when you harvest all together you have more freshness and fruitiness and this is very useful on the white wine. The craquetto, for instance, we only use the craquetto in the Trapianus palletina, we only use the gullo, even because another difference is the productivity. The red grapes they produce also on the first buds so you can have a short pruning. The white wines they produce on the last buds so you need a long pruning. Anyway the plants likes the vineyard the vine likes the long pruning because it's a kind of plants in it in Italian we call them liana. I don't know how do you call it in English. So it's a long plants and they like to escape. Now we are used to put the plants in only three feet, so it's really too short for a for a vene, but it's okay with you try to adapt the plants to your needs of farming. Thank you so much for explaining that to us. I would love to ask you a little bit more about La Zapata, the winery in Romania. How is the terroir different in the in the Danube Delta than where you farm in Umbria? Let's say in Umbria, we have a Mediterranean climate. The soil is clay calcareous And so we have one complex, say, powerful in Romania. It's completely different because the soil is sandy, limey. And we have also rocks underground, because we are on the matching mountains, which are the oldest mountains in Europe. The climate is continental. anyway it's cold in winter time, it's dry in summer time and the wines are less powerful but much more elegant and when you test my Italian and Romanian wines you feel a big difference. I like it because it means that I pat the terroir because sometimes you the the winemaker the trend is to make the same wine in all around the world so maybe you test the wine coming from I don't know France and Sicily made from the same winemaker and they are similar I think it is wrong we have to respect the terroir we have to extract a personality from the terroir. In Romania what has your experience been like coming in as an outside investor who's not from the area? Let's say there are many investors not so much, not like in Italy, planting vineyard from Romania and from abroad. We tried two had an ethical, solid investment. For instance, when we planted the vineyard, we decided to work with the local people and to use the local material stuff. Our colleagues from Italy, France, Spain, they planted a lot of vineyard using the European funds. And they bought the poles from France, for instance, the plants from Italy. They hired the Italian or Spanish company to plant vineyard mechanically. What we did was to use the poles, for instance, from Transylvania, Romania, the plants from Romania. And then we hired 20 people from the village and we planted together side by side 20 hectares of vineyards. So 90 % of the European funds remained in the territory. So we started also to have a connection with the local people, with the measure and year per year we became the point of meeting for the territory, for the county. I think it is good because it's an ethical way to develop an area. That's so interesting. Tell me a little bit about the wine culture in Romania generally. In the recent years they have no big culture of wine. They have a tradition of production. Many years ago they were the fifth country producing wine. So it means after Italy, Spain, France, maybe Germany, then Cuba, Romania. And they sold mainly the wine in the Eastern country, Russian, but also Cuba, Japan, and they had a long tradition of wine even during the Roman Empire and they also have a tradition of drinkers. At the time during the Roman Empire they in the Roman they made a load saying that they have to destroy vineyards and wineries. It was the first century after Christ. So it means that already the Romanian people had the habit to drink too much wine. Oh, so it was a temperance movement. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, they have vineyards, they have wine. And now they are trying to produce a quality wine. The investors have made them nice wineries. We are just missing in Romania small wing growers and artisan wine wing growers like we are. And especially we are missing, they are missing mainly the personality into the wine. They planted a lot of international grapes like cab, or Marlowe, or Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and they didn't work with local grapes like Fethiasca regala, Fethiasca alba, Babesca Fethiasca negra, Grassa di Cottonari. There are many of local grapes. Tell me some more about those grapes. Those sound really interesting. Oh yeah, it's the most important white is probably the Fethiasca regala which is a cross between two grapes and if they did this cross maybe a hundred years ago one is the Fethiasca alba the other one is Grassa di Cottonari which is a kind of of Muscat. Then other interesting grapes are the Bapiasca. We produce the Bapiasca, which is a red grape with a big berry, like a chili jollo, like ganem gamay, and then the Fethiasca negra. Then they have imported a grape from France, the Alicote. You know Alicote is a burgundy grape, it's a secondary grape in burgundy, it's not so important that the quality is soft and not really good, very acid with the citrus aroma. In Romania we are a thousand kilometers south around the burgundy so we have a better, probably terroir for the Ligotea and we produce an excellent one, very fruity, jammy, you can pair very well with the seafood. And in Romania, in my area, we are in the Dobrga, on the Danube Delta, they produce, they make an excellent seafood from the Danube. Let's try this aligoté. How do you say thank you in Romanian? Mursu mesc. Mursu mesc. Mursu mesc. -Mursun mask. -Can I see the bottle? -Da. -Da. -Yes, it's the language in Romania is 80 % Latin and about 20 % Slavic, Russian. -Interesting. I see this beautiful picture of us Heron on the front. It's really nice. Okay, so let's taste this oligotate. I am very big on the local grapes. I think that's really cool. I love it when people will preserve and protect the local grapes and keep them from going extinct. I think the biodiversity is so interesting. The diversity of wines that can be made from these grapes and that's part of the reason why I'm so obsessed with Italian wine, but I try not to be dogmatic in my life and to understand You know things move around grapes move around people move around at some point somebody had to make a new tradition just to take the The wine grapes out of the forest and and start to cultivate them So but this is the when we're speaking about international grapes a lot of times that that that term is used to indicate French grapes that were very popular and then got planted all around the world Yeah, I guess all the Aligotay isn't one of those big popular grapes. As you said, it's a very secondary grape in Burgundy, but it is interesting to me when a grape is taken to a new place and there is something discovered about the terroir that it's really kind of found its home. So I'm really interested to try this Aligotay in short after what you told me. Let's see. I I think I might have still a little sagrantino in my glass, but it's got an interesting It's being down. It is. Yeah. Hmm. What am I finding on the nose? Is it beautiful? You have apple, you have this kind of fruit, ripe fruit. It's a very pungent nose. Oh, okay. I'm I'm got a little bit in my mouth now. That's delicious. I see What you mean? Aligote can be very acidic, but there is a, and I still find that beautiful freshness, but there is so much more ripe fruit. Also yellow fruit like peach apricot. Maybe even some star fruit, like a little bit more tropical fruit almost. It's got a great texture to texture to it. Indeed, thanks to the soil, also the rocky underground for sure is very important or kind of way making. We harvest everything by hand and in cases and we press the whole grapes and so we take care a lot about the quality of the grapes and also we are very very delicate on the winemaking and consider that we use only wild yeast with this wine so it is not a technical wine and it is so clean and the aroma is unfulty just to say that you can through wine and feel threat also in a correct way. - It's very beautiful. There's almost a note of kind of like some tea like on the finish, like a black tea or it's yeah, it's got a really pretty finish. I get some notes of like cherries or even it makes me think of cherry blossoms. It's very, very pretty. There's some beautiful light, lightly floral notes to it. It's really complex. Bravo. - Thank you. - I had no idea when my friend, Michelle, mentioned that you were in town, that I was going to be drinking an oligote from Romania. Thank you so much for bringing this to me. - We are proud also because it was an art effort to start making wine in Romania, when we started we didn't start with a technological place, we built up the winery, we had no electricity in the beginning, just a noisy generator, no water, we just had a tank and so we washed the things in a bucket and anyway We were able to get some prize in this condition. What does it mean? It means that it is important not only the technology, but also the technique. The difference is the technique is your skill, your education, your knowledge, your experience. Technology is very useful because it makes your life easier Sometimes, not every time. So we want to put the human beings in the center of the winery. It is against the mainstreaming, because you know, all the modern management try to take away the people, the human beings out of the production. So we think we have to make one step back and we have to recover ourselves. Having that experience of being forced to work without much technology, besides the horses, what did you learn from winemaking in that way in Romania that you brought back to your production, to your winery in Italy? Oh, making wine is very complex, so you learn from anything. This experience was probably the first thing, okay, I learned to use sources at I bring this knowledge in Italy. About wine, it was important to learn how to work in a delicate way with the grapes to have an high -quality grape, an high -quality wine. So harvesting almost everything by hands to value the people working into the vineyard and so step by step we went ahead to observe the herbs in Romania to observed the soil, it was to grow up continuously in Italy and Romania. During these 12 years, I doubled my experience. I made two harvests in one year, in two completely different places, and so any experience increase your skills, your knowledge, your experience, making wine and not only you learn also you, it was very nice also to know all the ethical groups and not all but a lot of the ethical groups in the Dobroga in the region where we are in Romania it's a really a multi -ethnic place we have 28 ethnical groups over there and so it's a kind of melting pot of people and so I met Russian people, Ukrainian, Lipovian, Macedonian, Gypsy, Romanian, Bulgarian, Italian, Greek so it's crazy and any of those has a different personality. It seems crazy But from all of those ethnic groups, I add something on my knowledge, on my experience. One of the most important are the Georgian, don't forget it. In this place I started to study the Georgian technology, the Georgian protocol. So how to make the orange wine, how to make a long maturation, why you have to make a long maturation three, four, six months long until the springtime and so it's I think I have a wider point of view after this experience so I have to say thank you Romania, thank you Italy because when I'm over there I can watch my Italian winery from a distant point of view. And this is very important. - Oh, that's beautiful. That's definitely what I'm, the kind of knowledge exchange that makes me very happy. I'm so happy that you told us about it. Roberto, thank you so much for coming and speaking with me today and sharing your beautiful wine with us. Could you please spell out the names of your websites for us so that our listeners can connect with you and also put this information in the notes for the episode? - For the Italian website, it's www .planierche .it. And the L -A -S -A -P -A -T -A dot com. Dot com. Dot com for the Romanian website .it for the Italian. So you can see this crazy and freaky Italian guys making wine in a lost place in Romania. I remember when we started to build the winery in the village in the middle of nowhere, because it was not in the village, but in the countryside, they said, "Oh, they have to be crazy." And now, after 12 years, they are looking a lot of people coming in the winery and with a lot of life around us. So, sometime you need to have a vision, you have to be a visionary, and simply you have to have a dream. Crazy like a horse, right? What was that? What was that? Absolutely. What was that saying again? Matto comei un cavallo. Matto comei un cavallo. Okay. Grazie Roberto. Grazie a te. Thank you Roberto. Thank you to all of our listeners and wherever you go and whenever you drink always remember to enjoy your life and never stop learning. Okay. Thank you, Rose. Thank you. where you can also read the blog. Music for the podcast was composed by Arcilia Prosperi and performed by the band O. You can purchase their recordings at oumusic .bandcamp .com
Music composed by Ersilia Prosperi for the band Ou: www.oumusic.bandcamp.com
Produced, recorded and edited by Rose Thomas Bannister
Audio assistance from Steve Silverstein
