Collisioni Festival is a tribute to Food, Music, Art, WINE and a reminder to where Will Power, Dreams and Visions will bring you when you believe hard enough
Huge well-organized Street Party in the heart of tiny Barolo
Collisioni Expert Panel
Visions and Will Power
Nike says: #Justdoit
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From July 16th – 19th I had the huge privilege of being invited by Ian D’Agata to be part of his expert panel at this years’ Collisioni Festival together with another 60-70 wine professionals from around the world (sommeliers, journalists, buyers and restaurateurs). Our purpose was to taste, evaluate and hopefully like the many hundreds of wines presented during the whole period of Collisini Festival (from July 12th – 19th). What I hadn’t seen coming was it being an eye-opener making me remember what can be accomplished when you truly believe in your product and yourself.
Huge well-organized Street Party in the heart of tiny Barolo
Collisioni Festival is a tribute to food, music, art and wine founded by Ian D’Agata and Filippo Taricco – making these 4 arts come together under the heating sun of the Langhe in mid July. Well, it’s actually a huge very well-organised street party in the heart of tiny little Barolo village (very charming) gathering thousands of appassionati together with some of the best wine producers of Italy, big musicians as Robbie Williams (in 2016 Elton John guest starred and in 2015 Sting), Italy’s Renato Zero, grandi and very sympathetic chefs like Antonino Cannavacciuolo, Joe Bastianich (he was there with his band), actor Matt Dillon, Chinese born (Nobel Prize winner in 2000) writer, artist and critic Gao Xingjian and many, many more.
I loved the Festival. The food, the music and especially the atmosphere and think if it’s such a success today it can only be because the founders worked they’re butts off to make it become so (last year more than 100.000 people visited). They seem to manage to make all ends meet by a huge contribution from partners and sponsors (I doubt revenue from ticket sales would ever be enough), big names like Lavazza, Algida, Regione Piemonte, Danish Tuborg and a significant number of others, including numerous wine producers opting in hoping to get heard in the crowd – and thankfully Italian wine producers are getting heard here; a fair 80% of all the wines I tasted myself were wines from houses I didn’t even knew existed. Had I not attended the Festival they would for now have remained unknown to me. According to Osservatorio del Vino there were 310.000 wine-producing companies in Italy in 2015 reaching a total volume of around 50 million hectolitres. It’s therefore difficult to keep track with all the wonderful different wines and producers Italy has to offer.
Collisioni Expert Panel
I loved being part of the Collisioni expert panel, which is actually subdivided into two parts with the board on one hand and all the others on the other. The Collisioni board are hardcore experts Ian D’Agata, Stephen Spurrier, Monty Waldin, Levi Dalton, Michele Longo, Michaela Morris, Fabio Ciarla, Samuele Callistri, Laura De Pasquale, Bernard Burtschy (and I hope I haven’t forgot anybody). On the other hand are all the rest of us, like I mentioned earlier, wine professionals from around the world. Our daily programs were very intense and lasted from early mornings to late nights, consisting of 3 highly efficient and interesting unit tastings lasting 1,5-2,5 hours each with approx. 50-60 wines per unit. Talking grapes, from the rarest and probably most non-known zones, are Valcalepio’s Moscato di Scanzo, Valle d’Aosta’s Fumin , Pecorino from Abruzzo and sweet Primitivo della Manduria from more known Apulia. I enjoyed the tasting of the Basilicata’s Aglianico del Vulture tremendously and the samples from Sicily, but all the wines I had were basically minimum acceptable, many were good and some much more than that, they all deserve a description and to be written about, so I will publish all my tasting notes within the next couple of weeks on my webpage under the section “Tasting Notes”.
After the day-program, at night, we were escorted to different wineries where we not only had great opportunities to explore our viticultural horizons, talking with producers, enologists, marketing people and more but we also had exquisite 4 and 5 course dinners established right there, in a kind of middle-of-the-vineyard-experience, and everything just worked smoothly. I was quite impressed by this, exquisite experiences. I loved the visit and dinner we had at the beautiful estate Poderi Luigi Einaudi in Dogliani owned by late Luigi Einaudi’s (Italy’s first President of the Republic in 1948) grandsons, two wonderful and very generous brothers. It’s mainly big brother Matteo Sardegna who’s in charge, and remember, wine is personal – if you fall in love with the wine makers you’ll get an instant crush on their wines too, of course Einaudi is now to find on our wine list at lenoteca.dk. Also the visit at Rivetto – owned and runned by an energetic, enthusiastic, inspiring, biodynamic and biological growing ‘wild’ young man was fantastic (Rivetto winery was certified “biological” in 2016). We had a walk through the vineyards, listening to his philosophies of wine making, his dreams, his vision of the importance of biological and biodynamic farming to be in sync with nature and said ‘hello’ to the oldest vine I’ve ever seen and touched so far, a Barbera vine from 1944. The trunk was thicker than thick, it was beautiful.
I missed out on many other great evenings during Collisioni due to my late arrival, in particular the miss out on the Nascetta vertical tasting followed by dinner almost made me cry, I heard so much fantastic about the whole evening and was so sad not to have arrived in time to make it. But then again you can’t be everywhere and you certainly can’t get it all! I enjoyed every mouthful and every intensive moment of all the rest.
Visions and Will Power
While it’s obvious that Collisioni Festival should kind of ‘just’ make me think of what I can do to continue to push Italian wine the hardest I can, it had me go deeper and remember how far we reach, lift and make things work, when we truly want to. And when we lift together.
How we can make things happen by ‘simply’ insisting on our dreams, believing in them, ourselves and keep explaining to others why what is so important to us should be too for everybody else. And of course it works exactly the same the opposite way, if we doubt we can do it, we won’t.
It’s surely cliché, been said and heard millions of times before what I’m mentioning here again, but it doesn’t make it any less true and it doesn’t explain why so awful many of us don’t just “do it”, every b….. day. I tremendously hate to say it, but (at times) that’s still so me too. I get a lot done for sure, but I could do so much more. I probably only use approx. 15-25% of my core capacity. Holy Mama! That’s not a lot. The rest of the time I’m mainly working too but I don’t really get anything important done – what I mean, I don’t make a significant difference and that bothers me immeasurably (thank God). I think about what I ought to do, how, why and if I’m really sure that I’m good enough to do it? Am I really the right person? Do I have enough experience, shouldn’t I first be more like him or her, gone through more education and one hundred other doubtful, very less productive, stupid questions. For way too long, at least until recently, this mind-set blocked me from being what I am and what I’m capable of. And I still fall back into my old habits. When you break the code it turns out that those “stupid” questions of doubt towards yourself weren’t that stupid after all, everything’s surely a process and doubting your capacity is only human, humble, healthy and forces you to reflect. It’s just not constructive to keep on the dubiety-path for too long, the only thing thats certain there is that it’ll for sure keep you from doing. Which is how millions of people act every day – they don’t do it, they don’t live their dreams and they don’t get to become what they’d really like to simply because they don’t believe enough in themselves. That’s not ok!
Nike says: #Justdoit
Having a purpose and an agenda is everything. Allowing yourself to wake up any random morning and understanding “I need to do this” – “I can do this”. And do it. Remembering, before anything of any kind starts, there was nothing. I often think people forget that. When I fall into doubt-mode, remembering this is what re-boots me
Anything starts from scratch at some point. So did Collisioni, so did you, I and everything else. #Nike says #justdoit. Shall we?
Are you, yourself doing it? Believing in you and moving those mountains?
I can tell you, I am doing it. I’m doing wine and I’m doing life design.
I am wine and my life design. Collisioni made me remember that and how long it took me to get started. And that any moment is the best to get it on!
#wine #collisionifestival #justdoit #gogetyourgoal #lifedesign #puthappyonrepeat #vinitalyinternational #italianwineambassador