There is a month in Italy in which we know we have made it. You stop looking at the sky with apprehension for fear whether pregnant with rain or angry with hail or too pale with a shy sun, it is a month with warm colors and smells like grapes. The queues of cars, in the countryside, become silent and patient to the respectful following of slow carts carrying bunches of grapes. The day the harvest begins, a new year begins and it means that everything has gone as it should. “Pinot Noir, this year, has half a degree more. It means that it is stronger, and that there has been more sunshine. And at this moment, when the world is upside down, I see it as a wish. A beautiful omen. Today closed their harvest, Giancarlo Aneri, had begun on September 8 with the usual family lunch between the rows, because for them it is like cutting the ribbon at the inaugurations and because every row, every single bunch of the production speaks about her: the family. Starting with the names. Each farm is named after the granddaughters of Giancarlo Aneri: number 1, Lucrezia, number 3, Giorgia, number 5, Ludovica. Then there is the organic production, number 7, dedicated to Leone, the only male and last born. While the wines produced are baptized like his sons, the Pinot Nero Alessandro, the Amarone Stella, and like his wife: the Pinot Bianco Leda. “I like the idea that everything is founded, that one day I can leave them a company that talks about us, tells our story and I like the fact that we all build it together” explains Aneri. “In Legnago we all live in the same building, Sunday lunches are board meetings… But we all have a sense of what we do. My little granddaughter made me smile when I came back from the United States, and she once ran up to me radiantly: “Grandpa, we received two very important orders, 6 bottles from Paris, 12 from New York”…”. Ludovica’s commitment and enthusiasm moved her grandfather, but, of course, the orders that arrive at Aneri are quite different. Suffice it to say that two of the company’s “historical” clients are Esselunga and the Elior Itinere group, which provides the restaurant service on the Freccia Rossa and which, because of Covid, commissioned Aneri “disposable” bottles of wine of 200 centiliters. “I like to say that it is the clients who choose us but that we also choose them. I am happy to say that I only work with clients that I like. And that I have received immense satisfaction from my clients, both for the duration of our relationship, which makes them family people, and for the fact that we have been chosen at crucial moments for them” says the founder.
“Obama and Trump toasted with Aneri on election day, including Putin, on many occasions. The president of Juventus, Andrea Agnelli, (and I am from Juventus) every year sends a magnum of Amarone with his signature to each player for the Scudetto won. And I have a six-liter Amarone magnum in store for Mario Draghi, to thank him for his work at the ECB, but then Covid broke out…”. It has the sound of a bottle just opened Aneri’s voice when he tells about his work “But do you want to put the luck to take care of what I take care of? In front of a glass of wine you can stay for hours, just think if you sold some iron canisters, after “send me two trucks”, everything would end there…”. Instead he makes wine. He harvests and reproduces every year the life that is born: the bubbles that bring smiles, the Amarone that seals and frames. Prosecco for the available men, the noble red for the powerful men. It is an optimism without escape his, even now, in these shady months. He is convinced that what he does is the most beautiful job in the world “And then I do it in the most beautiful country in the world. Believe me: the Italians do not stop. In front of nothing”.
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