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Anna Maria Abbona History
My great-grandfather Giuseppe cultivated vineyards as a tenant farmer. His dream was to own the lands, but life was too short to fulfill it. My grandfather Angelo took care of that. He was a farmer and a grafter (perforce during those years after the vine pest) and he established our company in 1936 with the cultivation of MAIOLI vineyard, hoping to enlarge the property, which was very small for such a large family.
My father Giuseppe succeeded him. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who moved to the city during the rise of industrialization in order to work in a factory, he was fond of his own vineyards, he took care of those which belonged to his father, he purchased and cultivated new plots of land. Unfortunately those years were very difficult for quality wines. For this reason my parents renounced to the idea of vinifying so the produced grapes were processed by the nearest wine growers' cooperative.
The only daughter of a family of farmers bound for generations to a hillside in the southwertern Langhe as a child, I did not think I would stay on the farm and my parents acquiesced to my desires to pursue art studies.
1989 was the year of the big change for the company, when my father told me he wanted to uproot some of the vineyards. In that period my husband and I had different jobs even though we both came from families of wine-makers. After a short time we decided to return to our origins and to work in the vineyard in order to produce only quality wines. With the support of my husband Franco and the help of my parents, we laid the foundations of what is now the Anna Maria Abbona winery.
It might just be a suggestion, but in my life, "looking far ahead" has been the constant that has marked my time and evolution.
Perhaps my somewhat too lively character and great curiosity about the world induced me, from a young age, to “skip steps” to see what was next. Even when I decided in 1989 to leave my job as an advertising graphic designer to return to the dolcetto vineyards planted by my grandfather in the 1930s, I had a vision, one that projected far ahead of what was the moment.
In fact, the moment was anything but favorable for wine: 1986 with the methanol scandal had marked the consumption crisis and the discouragement of small winemakers. I could see, however, that this crisis would bring a rebirth of small producers, of what at the time could be called “artisan wine,” and more attention to those who vinified their own grapes: it was to be the revenge of the peasants!
In those same years, meeting a Swiss girl with long blond braids made me think that our land and our old farmhouses were worth more than we thought and that we needed to orient ourselves to foreign tourism. I began to study German.
AIS tasting courses in the early 1990s catapulted me into the world of fine wines-it was a fantastic world of great confrontations between producers, lots of tastings and study trips to areas of great wines. I fell in love with wine and its many nuances, and with my husband we continued to buy old land and vineyards.
Old vines make a difference, my husband kept repeating, and therefore separate vinification of each vineyard was essential to know all the potential we had. From this philosophy was born our complex range of wines, each an expression of a particular terroir and microclimate.
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