Just hours after the sad news of the death of Ampelio Bucci, the pioneer of Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi, Daniele Cernilli remembers him with these words.
It has been a few hours since the news of Ampelio Bucci ‘s passing and the memories are getting stronger. We were friends, beyond the fact that he made wine and I wrote about it.
Long phone calls at least once a month, then when we presented the guidebook in Milan, at the Principe di Savoia, the fact that he always came was also a reason for me to get away from the tasting. We would chat at the hotel bar and stay there for hours. The last time, at the end of September last year, he told me that he had sold to the Veronesi of Signorvino, and that he was glad he did. He had guaranteed himself a“buen retiro” and was already thinking about something else. To the arable part of the farm, which he had kept, and to flour. To a tractor he had been able to buy.
Ampelio Bucci’s words
“Maybe I’ll make some pasta, who knows.” But changing the barrels, those old, large, Slavonian oak ones, was out of the question, and he tried to prevent the new owners from doing so. ” Old, and large, barrels, if you handle them well, if they have no bad smells, in short, represent the history of the wine that was contained in them. A kind of memory of the vintages, of the wines that soaked their staves, and that fatally reminded the new wine of what had happened to its predecessors.
They had shared the same “home” and something went to enrich it. So my Verdicchio Villa Bucci, Castelli di Jesi Verdicchio Riserva, first of all, is what it is. In my opinion only Valentini, among the producers I know, has the same awareness, and his Trebbiano wines “live” in a similar way. In fact, I tell you what, Valentini’s Trebbiano resembles Verdicchio “.
I want to remember him like this. Lively, visionary, cultured, intelligent. I loved him and I am very sad today.
