About Us
Our story
“Halfway down the drive, we’d already decided this was the most beautiful place on earth”
So it goes that two northern Italians, driving down to Umbria with the standard romantic idea of the place (we weren’t exactly original), and having just bumped along two and a half kilometres of dirt track, decide to change their lives. They simply can’t shake off the idea that struck them the moment they arrived in Preggio. It was June 2006.
Preggio is a tiny village perched on a hilltop, with 35 people living inside the old town walls. The farm itself, though, is out in the middle of nowhere, a few kilometres from the village. When the two northern Italians get there, it’s been abandoned for years. The olive trees are invisible, swallowed up by oak woods. The fields are uncultivated.
Bruno and Elena (those two northern Italians) decide they’ll bring the place back to life, get to know every aspect of it: every plant, every corner, every angle.
And they start clearing. And they get help clearing: from Guido, from Daniel, from Abderrazak, and from the legendary Pasqui — il Maestro. Not to mention Samira and Messaouda and their family entourage.
And that corner of Preggio they’d fallen for slowly takes on a shape they can recognise themselves in.
And then, carried away by their own ideas, they plant the vineyard — which the following year, despite being only one year old, gets called the old vineyard, because by then a second small patch has been planted: the new vineyard.
And since up to that point every decision has been based on enthusiasm and on “shall we try…?”, they decide it’s time to actually get to grips with things. They take every course they can find, work out whether they’re doing things right or wrong, adjust their aim a little, and try to educate their enthusiasm. Or at least they try.
Twenty years have passed since that first lightning-bolt. Every time we manage to look up from whatever we’re working on and glance around, we still tell each other this place is something special.
In these twenty years we’ve decided that we like growing good grapes; that we like tending our olive trees and making good oil (Elena says it’s the best in the world, and there’s no convincing her otherwise); that we love — properly love — working with the bees and collecting the honey they make.
Above all, we love this place. A place that looks like us, often dishevelled, always rather less tidy than we’d like it to be. But for us, still the most beautiful place on earth.