Donna Elvira

Region: Campania

My mother, Donna Elvira, was a strong, hot-headed Italian with a huge heart that she wore on her sleeve. She was the core of our family. My father was Austrian, a reserved man of few words. My belief is he never got over the Second World War, it was something he never wanted to talk about. He taught me the meaning of respect and hard work. They met in the UK in the 1950’s, married and spent the next thirty years working hard and saving money. They eventually retired to Italy to grow and eat organic produce and enjoyed a simple, slower pace of life where the sun shone 250 days a year. At this time, I was twenty and my brother was fifteen.

I had kept in contact with a beautiful English girl, Kay, and after a couple of years writing love letters to each other she moved to join me in Italy. We got married and had two wonderful children, Sara and Turi.

I can still vividly remember the first time I tasted Aglianico wine. The smells and colours around me, convinced me that is what I wanted wine to taste like, that moment has remained with me as it does today.

Time went by, the children got older, and we realised there was something like a magnet pulling us back to the UK, where both myself and Kay were born. So, in 1995, we came back. After a period of readjustment, we were fortunate to have built up a successful business thanks to modern construction methods which I had learnt whilst working in Germany and Rome.

We never really forgot our time living in the Campania region of Italy. The land that Sophocles called the land of Bacchus God of Wine and the Romans called Campania Felix, or the fertile lands, stretching from Mount Miletto, 2050 meters above sea level to the beautiful Amalfi Coast. So, for family and life reasons we decided to go back and finish our love story with Campania.

In 2010 we bought our first lands in the sweet spot for these grapes: 400-450m above sea level, south-facing. We cleared the land of the boulders from the volcanic eruptions of Vesuvius and Vulture of the late stone ages. We lovingly planted our first vines and spent the next ten years pruning, tying, cleaning them and more importantly, learning, the same way you learn when you have your first child.

Today we are humble and proud to present our first wines that were made from our love of this land.

Thank you to my family who always supported me, my cousin Pino who put this idea in my head, and Mirco without whom this would never have been possible.

Tony Fink MMXX