Wine, but actually the vineyards even more, are part of our life; they’ve always been there - a natural feature in a certain sense, of our family life. So natural that all the other families in the region had vineyards, larger or smaller in size, and we were always talking about them, at home or not. It was as if life depended on the vineyards, which was true, in a way. Exactly how the vines were doing became obvious in the evenings, at dinner time, when father came back from the fields or the cellars. His face was a picture, and his expression depended on how the wine and the vines were doing. It was only later on in life that we realised that his habitual pessimism was mostly actually there to ward off bad luck and to prevent the gods from becoming jealous of his wonderful land, his good wine and his untiring, and often successful, labours.”
