“il Signor Kurtz”
- Marco Durante
“il Signor Kurtz”, a reference to the antagonist in Joseph Conrad’s literary classic Heart of Darkness, is the wine-vision and quasi-alter-ego of one of Italy’s most thoughtful, capable and exciting next-generation winemakers - Marco Durante. Marco has a small vineyard at his home in the small village of Vallupina, on a hill near lake Trasimeno in Umbria. After spending much of his adult life, as Marco puts it, as “a wine enthusiast, as a taster, even a scribbler and sometimes a divulger”, he shed the shackles of his day job and knocked on the door of Danilo Marcucci at Conestabile della Staffa and pleaded with Danilo to take him under his wing. He was Danilo’s right-hand man for a number of years.
”il Signor Kurtz” is Marco’s introduction to the world as a headliner in his own right, though performed with Marco’s trademark humbleness toward the power of nature, the voice of the grapes, and spontaneous decision making based on the conditions of fermentation (and his own emotions at the time). Marco has a distaste for the predictable and the banal. He wants to let the wines sing with their own energy. He embraces tradition, yet leaves himself unchained by it to propel his winemaking into the future.
His winemaking is totally natural - spontaneous fermentations, aging in neutral vessels, no sulfur additions and no filtering or fining.
In Marco’s own words…..
– I'm all about essentiality: doing things with a pure, disciplined, incisive gesture.
– I hate shortcuts: the use of technical aids that simplify the processes, the obsessive tension towards a defined stylistic objective. I like the discipline that frees the process.
– I hate predictable wines, like those that fall victim of fashion, technique, fear or expectations. I love magical wines that draw energy from themselves, as if they had a life of their own.
– I never chase a wine project: I have ideas but the ingredients that outline the profile of the wine are the vintage, the grapes, the spontaneous fermentation and my emotions of the moment.
– I love to make wines that are free to bring along all the energy nature has given them. And if their destiny is to fall into their abysses, I do not like to stop them. I love to contain them before they become folklore or, even worse, slovenly.
– I have a physical relationship with wine. My body and my mind are always with my vineyard and with my wine, they are part of the vineyard and part of the wine. This is the privilege and the dimension of my life choice.
– I love tradition, I hate rhetoric. I hate roots that enslave you. I love to look ahead with my feet well planted on the ground. I love the wines of the future when they respect Time.
– I love to think of my wines always in relation with my table: without food there is no wine, it is as simple as that.
– I love to challenge my limits and the limits of wine: I use no other "rope" than my nose, my hands and my heart.
– I love Kurtz, because Kurtz has the courage to be Nature itself, but also Energy, Horror, Magic. If you put Nature inside a cage, if you bring Kurtz home, Nature disappears and Kurtz dies. And everything becomes a SYMPTOM.
My Mr Kurtz, the ending to my journey through fear and courage and towards my destiny was wine. Wine is my life. Mr. Kurtz is a metonymy: I AM WINE.
We are thrilled to be able to represent Marco’s wines. Welcome to the future.
