NasoDVino
- Apr 14, 2021
- 3 min read

The persistence of memory.

The persistence of memory, a surrealist paining also known as "The soft watches", or “The Melting clocks”

WelDrunk,

What does the famous painting by Salvador Dalí have to do with a bottle of "Villa Capezzana" 1931?

As a matter of fact, 1931 is the year the famous Spanish painter completed this famous work of art in Paris, while in Carmignano, at the Capezzana Estate, skillful hands were busy transforming bunches of Sangiovese and Cabernet into this equally glorious masterpiece. Now this cannot be a small thing and perhaps not even a coincidence.

What is time after all? Does it exist for real? Are there people and things that can withstand the test of time as the clock ticks life away, and in so doing are they able to annihilate time to immortality?

Philosophy can be a little bit of a mind blower, so let’s leave it aside and concentrate on the tasting of this "Villa di Capezzana" 1931.

I am in awe and solemn silence.

I dive and get immediately sent back to when I was a child, the very first time my father took me to fetch mushrooms. The intense but fresh smell of the wet undergrowth, of damp soil, of dirt. The first porcini mushroom, so fragrant you can't resist but putting it under your nose and let it flood you with a totally new sensation, sturdy clear rich unforgettable (all without commas, to be read as I have perceived them, all in one breath). Shivers. Emotions.

Leather, tobacco, coffee.

Then back to the woods with shades of laurel, wet fern. Fresh sensations to prove that this guy here still has a few years ahead of him.

And the persistence, not of memory this time, but of taste.

I am sure this elegant ninety-year-old will outlive many other exuberant youngsters.

We then moved to 1968, and 1981, with frank notes of incense that brought back the owner, Filippo Contini Bonacossi, to when as a kid he served as an altar boy and switched the wine with vinegar to the poor priest who then drank it during mass.

This is the great power of wine.

It is able to take anyone anywhere on a time travel, back to those emotions that are frozen in time. So real, so intense, so sincere. Unique and unrepeatable.

Our vertical tasting continued with vintages 1998, 2008, 2016.

A common thread led throughout the tasting. The elegance and persistence that never age. They evolve here at Capezzana.

There was a lot going on in 1931 other than the painting "The Persistence of Memory". While in Spain there was the Catalan Republic, while Kurt Gödel defined his “incompleteness theorem” (and what is it anyway?), while the Italian army was at war in Libya to create a colonial empire, at the very same time in 1931, Guglielmo Marconi from Rome sent a radio signal that lit up Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, to prove the reliability and importance of radio communications. All in 1931! That is why I do not believe in coincidences.

90 years later, thanks to Marconi, and also and above all to Filippo Contini Bonacossi, we are here with about 20 bloggers, winebloggers, enobloggers, wine tasters, winelovers, lovers, enowinebloggertasters and so on. I was forgetting the influencers, even the influencers.

Everyone, in their own way, communicated live, in real time, their feelings to the world while tasting.

The paradox of time that reappears in all its violent virulence once more.

It took several decades of rest in the cellar at peace for this bottle to get to us, while the world outside was busy with a world war, with sending the man on the moon, with 8 different Popes, and now it took everyone here just a handful of seconds to communicate the glorious magnificence of this outstanding wine to the world. (I must exclude myself as it took me over a week to write this article).

Then once again what is time after all? Does it exist for real? Are there people and things that can withstand the test of time as the clock ticks life away, and in so doing are they able to annihilate time to immortality?

All I can say is that I am certain that talking about the wines of Capezzana, publishing more or less beautiful photos and communicating sensations, will never even come close to tasting them.

Such emotions can only be felt to be able to say that you have experienced them, well beyond any spur-of-the-moment instant social flash.

One last thing, perhaps the most important, I saw some bottles from the first vintage of 1925 in the cellar. I am sure that in 2025, to celebrate the centenary, at least one of those bottles will be lovingly uncorked.

I want to be there!

(message/menace/promise not even too obscure to Filippo Contini Bonacossi)

Top 5 tags:

#tenutadicapezzana

#nasodvino

#carmignano

#wearewine

#centenary

Thanks to:

@tenutadicapezzana

@filippo_continibonacossi

@sara_winelover