Markets —
Explaining Gaglioppo to people who have never heard of it
Three years of fairs outside Italy taught us the problem is not the wine. It is the first sentence you say while you pour.
For a long time we opened with “it is an indigenous Calabrian variety”. Nobody knew what to do with that: half the room nodded out of politeness and the other half asked whether it was like Nebbiolo.
Now we say something else: “it is red, but it is pale, and it should be served cool”. That sentence defuses the wrong expectation before the glass even reaches the nose, and since we started using it the number of people who come back to the table at the end of the day has more than doubled.
The rest — the Greeks, Krimisa, the athletes of Olympia — we save for afterwards, if they ask. It is a good story, but it does not sell a case. Serving temperature does.
A third of production now goes abroad: Germany and the Nordics above all, Japan for the past two years, the United States not yet — not for lack of interest, but for lack of volume.
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