Adventures In The New World

Wine and dreams. Two words that seem distant, yet touch like the vine and the wind. In the world of wine, dreaming means imagining before the harvest, letting vision guide the hand rather than calculation. But often, this is not possible: many producers, prisoners of a glorious past, have their hands tied. Their history, however noble, has become a cage. Every vintage must repeat itself; every bottle must reassure the person who uncorks it, delivering the same emotion, the same profile, the same predictable perfection. The passionate consumer, in search of certainty, demands recognizability: they want to find their comfort zone in that glass. And so the winemaker, instead of awaiting the harvest as a creative act, lives each season as a task to be repeated. No vertigo, no dream.

Yet elsewhere, where history does not weigh heavy and traditions do not suffocate, the dream begins to breathe again. In the so-called "New World," wine is still an adventure: those who make wine there do not answer to a lineage, but only to their own courage. They are free to chase an intuition, to change direction, to invent. Where there is no history, the dream becomes possible and legitimate.

Perhaps this is the true difference: where tradition is a burden, it is preserved; where it is absent, one dares. But without a dream, wine loses its soul: it remains only a well-executed repetition, a photograph without movement. Dreaming of wine means accepting the unpredictable, recognizing nature as an accomplice, and letting every harvest be a creative act. Perhaps the truest wine is not the one that reassures, but the one that surprises. Perhaps the future of wine will be decided right there, in the courage to return to dreaming.

A Champagne that tells of century-old rules and a Malbec that speaks of valleys and distant lands.

The wine of tradition and rules is certainly Champagne, and one not to be missed is from Nicolas Maillart—the Blanc de Noirs Grand Cru Jolivettes: tense, elegant, complex, and extraordinarily dense and long. The wine of the dream, on the other hand, is Argentinian, from the Matervini winery: Malbec Alteza, a wine with incredible fruit, but above all, a profound call to an extraordinary territory. It is powerful yet refined, rich yet fresh. With an emotional texture.

- Gianfranco Cipresso