The E & V Story Concept
In the latter days of August, when the vineyards around Maeli were in full conspiracy with the sun and the harvest had begun its great annual taking of the grapes, I ventured into the Euganean Hills to seek out Elisa Dilavanzo, the bold winemaker behind Maeli Wines. Expecting, as one might reasonably expect at such a season, to find her vanishing beneath the burden of baskets, tractors, telephones and the thousand urgent demands that accompany the gathering of a vintage.
Yet, despite the tumult of harvest, she found the time to stage for me a tasting of all five of her Yellow Muscats, as though the business of picking grapes could, for a brief while, be suspended in favour of a more curious expedition into the nature of the grape itself.
One after another the wines appeared, each seemingly determined to contradict the last, until the conversation itself began to wander beyond the well-trodden vocabulary of wine and into stranger territories, which was precisely where I hoped it might go.
For instead of surrendering to those predictable adjectives which have become the weary currency of wine conversation — tension, generosity, elegance, complexity, and all the other respectable words that can be summoned to describe almost anything poured into a glass — Elisa began speaking of the Dark Side of the Moon, of Jekyll and Hyde, and of wine as something possessing contrary natures, hidden chambers and personalities that refused to sit obediently upon the tasting sheet.
At that moment the five wines ceased to be merely five interpretations of Yellow Muscat and became, in my imagination, five characters entering the same stage by different doors: one sweet, another wild, another austere, another seemingly composed yet harbouring some deeper mineral mischief, each carrying within it a different answer to the same question.
And I confess that I found this infinitely more intoxicating than any procession of approved tasting notes, for here was a winemaker speaking not merely of what the wine was, but of what it might become in the mind of the drinker.
Thus, while the harvest raged beyond us and the vines surrendered their precious fruit to the hands of those who would turn it into another vintage, I found myself drawn into a rather different harvest altogether — the gathering of ideas, images, contradictions and stories — and I left Maeli with the distinct impression that Yellow Muscat, like certain wandering knights and troublesome gentlemen of literature, is most interesting when it refuses to behave according to expectation.
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