I couldn't start this story any other way than by remembering how it all started.

Exactly 5 years ago, at the beginning of 2016, I found myself dissatisfied and frustrated with my life and my work, and it was not long ago that I had first looked at bees with attention and discovered the vital importance of these little creatures. At that time, I just tried to bring that poetic vision to my work as a designer and photographer, so I offered a client in the hospitality business a branding project that aimed to emphasize the importance of preserving bees.

At the end of 2016, I found a book in a second-hand bookshop called "The Life of the Bees" by Maurice Maeterlinck, and after reading this book my life started to change dramatically, but I still wasn't fully aware of it and my first project regarding sustainability was still far from being something with deep knowledge. In 2017, after the hotelier's refusal to produce the hotel project I offered him, I developed the Bee Home Hostel, a hostel designed and built according to the fundamentals of the social life of bees, which besides being decorated with re-used materials, had a design that resembled the hives. At Bee Home, the relationship and service were also based on the social life of the bees, as well as healthy eating and the practice of acroyoga, as a reference to their flight. But the Bee Home closed its doors in early 2018 and the reason it didn't work is linked to the fact that it was a beautiful idea with wrong the purposes.

In April 2018, before the end of the project, I returned to Lugano, in Switzerland, empty of ideas but with a profound hope that I would definitely find my way. That same year, after a few months of travelling, my then girlfriend Juliana and I decided to live together by the lake of Lugano in a small Italian town called Campione d'Italia, and there we founded Apis & Co Studio, a design and photography studio for the gastronomic sector. But unlike my former Cookery Photo agency and the Bee Home Hostel, our current business has as a priority the encounter with healthy food cultures and businesses, which respect the environment and nature. And it is in that moment that everything has its true beginning. In that same year, we visited the first organic farm in the region of Ticino, Switzerland, where we lived, and it would be impossible to talk about biodynamic agriculture without going through this very important beginning in our journey.

The Bianchi farm is the only one with Switzerland’s 100% biological recognition in the Ticino region. They received us with great affection on our first visit and gave us a tour that would change our life completely. After a year in contact with the Bianchi family, in contact with their plantations of wine grapes and honey bees, in addition to other organic and biological products they produce, we could see up close the affection and dedication for cultivation with respect to nature and the absence of chemical additives in the soil and in the plants, which gives plantations an unparalleled richness. All the time, during the entire grape harvest, the bees were around, and that humming is the most beautiful melody I have ever known. In 2019 we believed we had discovered a lot and we were in love with organic wine, but I confess that the best was yet to come. I usually say that Lugano is the city of my heart, perhaps because it was where I realized I would live in Europe forever, and it was in a Lugano bar that something unusual happened.

An unforgettable encounter

In 2014 it was just over 2 years since I had returned to Brazil after 5 years in Europe, and I had just arrived in Buzios, in Rio de Janeiro, with my first Branding Design and Food Photography agency. I read an article by a journalist from southern Brazil, the Brazilian region where wines are produced, called Lis Cereja, and she spoke of natural wines and biodynamic wines, and I, being a wine drinker, and having already been in Bento Gonçalves in Rio Grande do Sul and tasting the wines there, felt like a complete ignorant because I had no idea what she was talking about. But as I mentioned, at that moment I was years away from understanding what these wines were.

And it was precisely at this bar called Indipendenza, in the centre of Lugano, that I was introduced to my first glass of natural wine. Alessandro, one of the owners of the place, with his gentle passion, was the one who explained me a lot about wine, and what an unforgettable encounter that became, I still keep the bottle of Vino Del Poggio Navel, my first natural wine! But a few months passed before we became closer and the conversations about wine became longer, and in one of those conversations I asked him why he didn't have a bottle of Bianchi’s wine among those he offered, and his answer would bring me to that moment of today: with the same kindness and passion with which he introduced me to natural wine, Alessandro explained that Bianchi had an excellent wine but it was an organic wine, and Indipendenza only had natural and biodynamic wines in his list, and that was the moment I realized how big my ignorance about these wines was, and how much I wanted to discover.

After dozens of questions Alessandro explained the differences to me and I left there determined to go after the knowledge about these natural cultures and crops. And then, in this pandemic period, I took the opportunity to move to Liguria, in Italy, and here I dedicated myself to finding natural and biodynamic wines. These searches take me to discover the beautiful and inspiring story of Stefano Bellotti of Cascina degli Ulivi, the first wine producer in Italy to transform his conventional farm into a biodynamic farm.

Biodynamics

Well, this is where everything changes, the inevitable question for those who listen for the first time is: what is biodynamic wine? Well, to answer this question it is necessary to talk first about what biodynamic agriculture is.

It was the philosopher Rudolf Steiner who in the 1920s developed this agricultural technique that resembles organic agriculture, but which contains more profound and philosophical concepts. It is enhanced respect for nature, elevated by the ancient sensitivity to believe in the forces of the stars, and it also has unique composting techniques that include medicinal plants and peculiar ways of making such preparations. These are applied to the harmony created with different species of cultivated and natural plants from the same soil, animals and the natural cycles of the moon and sun, thus producing humus and guaranteeing a soil rich in everything that is necessary for a healthy, sustainable cultivation, and mainly that it does not degrade nature in any way, because under no circumstances are any chemical additives or pesticides used.

Biodynamic Wine

Technically there are many videos, texts, materials and even advertisements about this type of wine. I leave everyone with their own curiosity to seek more about this philosophical production technique, but as a wine lover, curious and passionate about nature, I will just narrate my encounter with all of this.

As a lover of Dionysus' drink since I started my journey in this universe, since discovering these different types of wine I have been tirelessly learning that all I wanted to do was to taste how different these wines were in flavour from the many others that I had drunk over these more than 23 years. Well, biodynamic, natural and organic wines have organic production in common. However, between these three types there is also another difference, which as I said, I discovered while tasting a natural wine in a wine bar in Lugano. Organic wine allows the addition of sulfite, and very few are considered by control entities to be 100% biological; natural wine, as its name says, does not allow any kind of additive or alteration, and goes through a simple and unclear filtering, maintaining rusticity, aromas and even residues; and biodynamic wine is also natural, but it also has organic preparations to fertilize the soil and the plants, and the philosophy of production of Rudolf Steiner.

Drinking a natural wine is a never-ending experience, I believe that any wine lover after trying a biodynamic or natural wine for the first time can prove what I am writing: you don't want to drink another type of wine after discovering these. As I said this is the first article in a series of texts rich in information and learning, I will write throughout my discoveries everything I have been learning and what I have already learned so far with biodynamic wine. Here in Italy this is closely linked to Stefano Bellotti's wine, which left this world in 2018, but which has done so much for the biodynamic movement in Italy, being a pioneer in this agriculture since 1984. As himself explains:

“Unfortunately, today we have completely lost the notion of agronomy. Agronomy is a science of the living and, as a science of the living, it is a whole science of observation, of listening, of relating. Instead, today, agronomy is mistaken for a technique. It gets confused with a technology. This represents a disaster. Even in organic we see that there are soils that are not very vital. The capital of the human species on earth is one. It is not oil, it is not money that does not exist in nature, but there is only one capital which is humus. Because without humus we cannot survive. We are looting it wildly and indiscriminately. We are destroying it. It still allows us to live but we are plundering it. The good thing is that humus wants to be on earth! And if we get to work well, it regenerates.”

This love and respect that Stefano presents us goes beyond wine, and drinking the wine produced by Cascina degli Ulivi is a privilege, because in addition to the quality of the product the wine is a mirror of its creator, a sip of this respectable way of seeing life and that natural philosophy.

We will continue our relentless search for knowledge, meeting great thinkers and all those who respect this planet and are committed to preserving it. In our next article on wines we will talk about the natural ones. See you later!

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