Behind the vine

Katia Nussbaum - San Polino - Montalcino, Italy

When do you think you fell in love with wine, enough to make a career of it?

My trip into wine wasn't a typical trip, because wine happened afterwards - wine was a collateral. I’m from London and in my late teens, I went traveling with a good friend. We went to India and I met this Italian man doing interesting things and my heart was robbed.

My partner was living in Montalcino and I came here to join him. We happened to be in wine area, and looking for work in my early 20s, I ended up going around wineries practicing Italian.

We were living in a house in the middle of the country and it was very isolated. In the middle of the 1990s, Siena province opened up registers for vineyards. My partner was born into a farming family, and we had an organic olive farm already. He was granted the right to plant a hectare of Brunello and a hectare and half of Rosso di Montalcino. I was always helping in the winery, translating, leading tours with foreigners, but I came full-time into the winery 2006 after working in the state school system for many years.

It's been a really, really exciting journey. It's like when you learn a language, in the beginning it's confusing, you can't tell where one word ends and another begins, and then you learn the vocabulary and the grammar. You tentatively start, and so it is with wine. You go into prune, and you're thinking 'what am I looking at?', you don't have the framework for it, and then one day you wake up and you find you've been dreaming in that language. You see it. The system. That happened, and then you feel more comfortable.

What story does your wine tell?

Before anything else, I want people to feel that they are really enjoying a great wine. It has to be a work of art that stands on its own before you go into its story. Then, they can choose to go on and discover our context because there's an absolute encyclopedia of information that follows. It's like a person, you have your character you present, but then you have an enormous story that makes you who you are.

As a story: I want them to taste a terroir wine. I have my own project: Entangled Wine - I see how the bottle of wine is nothing but a result of a process. A tangible form of the iceberg down below - the microorganisms, the bacteria, the roots. It's all about the vineyard. It's all the mosaic that comes together and you find a pattern. My aim for the winery is practice adaptive agriculture and ecological management so the wine is truly a database of its microorganisms and land.

If the wine gives you joy it means the work that we're doing to practice sustainable agriculture to counter climate change is working. We want to be a part of the Climate Action Movement. This is how we do it.

What misconceptions about wine do you think people should forget?

People have to realise wine is not intimidating. When people say, I need to smell 4 things and this is what I’m meant to get, that's terrifying! There’s a wonderful wine writer Tamlyn Currin. She says 'she puts her nose in and closes her eyes and sees where it takes her, what it reminds her of'. And it can be anything. You can smell wine and think of when you were on holiday in the mountains, why does it do that oh because it smells fresh. Whatever you think about something or see in something is valid. You go from the impression it gives you to why it would give you that. Not the other way around.

Another misconception has to do with the cost of the bottle - that wine is expensive for no reason. If you go into a shop and it's super cheap, that means there hasn't been a 1 to 1 relationship with the bottle and the producer. That's not winemaking. That's industrial production. When you're seeing a bottle of wine that's more costly, I see it as the profit going back into the projects of the vineyard.

What great things about wine do you think people should remember?

Behind the wine we have all the people and the work in the field that's all done by love.

The moment of alchemy is one moment. The transformation of fermentation is only 10 days, but the whole process is winemaking and it comes down to every single detail of our passion. People who come to me with a winemaking experience, they're surprised because I put them in the field and tell them to remove leaves from the vine. The pruning, the tours, the bottling: you have to remember all of this is part of the winemaking.

Also it’s great that you should be able to contact the people who make any wine. Any winemaker would be overjoyed to receive a letter of gratitude, or advice and then you're being instrumental to winemaking and their passion.

What is a piece of advice you would give to a woman interested in breaking into the wine world?

Women have been part of the invisible for so long, but you have to appreciate all of the things you can't see that impact wine too. Every single winery you see, would have a woman who is fundamental. They may not be on the legal records but they were and are there. In Montalcino, there are a lot of women. It is a land of mansplainers, but I don't see any difficulty in women winemakers. There are women oenologists. The genders aren't binary, so why does it matter who I work with? I have good friends who are women winemakers and I believe women should claim their place here - visibly.

Who is a woman in wine you admire and think everyone should know about?

Donatella Cinelli Colombini of Casata Prime Donne - and she only employs women in her winery.

Where can women find your wine?

You can shop directly on our site, as we ship worldwide.

In the UK, you can also find us at Waitrose.