Noelia Ricci: an organic vision of wine-growing

The balance between production and environment is the key to undertaking organic wine-growing. And the Noelia Ricci company has followed an organic conversion path since 2018, whereby sustainability has become a guiding star behind change. The Noelia Ricci project began in 2010 from an idea that soon turned into a vision: respect the natural vocation of the Predappio area and return to the origins of wine-growing as once practiced by farmers in the Romagna region. The company is keen to pay homage to family history and honour the name of Noelia, who in 1980 was the first to grasp the potential of the slopes of the Pandolfa Estate. Located at the feet of the Apennines bordering on Tuscany and Romagna, the estate possibly took its name directly from Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, known as "the wolf of Rimini" and a great patron of the arts. We talked to Marco Cirese, the producer and owner of Noelia Ricci and the fourth generation of the family. He decided to take up the strands of the wonderful story that this company is keen to share through its constant relationship with the local area. In 2021, after a gradual conversion process, you became an organic company: what difficulties face a company keen to switch to organic production? Our transition was slow and gradual. I started thinking about it in 2013, when we produced our first vintage. We took all the time we needed and, when we felt up to it, we started the process. We did so because we believe in our land and in what we do. We didn't encounter any particular difficulties because we took it easy and didn't rush things. We tried to do everything necessary, respecting the vines and the surrounding environment as far as possible. We have to think about walking down the rows and observing the vines, capturing any kind of signal they try to send us, be they positive or negative. Monitoring is essential if we are to understand the state of health of a vineyard. We need more time to spend in the field, we must pay more attention. I believe that ultimately it is passion that drives us to do all this! The attention we pay to what we do doesn't necessarily have to increase. It simply demands more awareness of what we are doing and why we are doing it. What are the first aspects to bear in mind when going for sustainability? We have and are still trying to be more sustainable by striving towards a less intrusive impact on the environment by using the bare minimum of copper and sulphur to defend our vines against major fungal disease. We focus a great deal on natural protective products to help vines develop more resistance to disease. We use natural antagonists to combat pathogenic fungi and insects. As regards vineyard management, we try to avoid trampling the rows as far as possible to prevent excessive compaction of the soil. It must be free to breathe. Another important practice that helps us is grassing, at times spontaneous, where the range of native grasses forms a beautiful continuous carpet. On other occasions, we also sow a mixture of medicinal plants to ensure complete nutritional integration for vineyard, while also promoting the biodiversity of the environment and a different approach to our work. Our approach creates micro-porosity, exchanges of oxygen and a whole series of positive interactions, since the roots of the plants we sow are able to explore different layers of the soil. They break up the clods of soil and are largely responsible for enriching organic matter, involving all kinds of micro-organisms and useful species, such as earthworms, which perform truly silent and organic tillage of the soil. Earthworms ingest soil and when it is expelled, it is enriched with many substances. Following nature and in relation to the needs of the vineyard itself, one can decide either to bury these substances using the green manure technique or simply chop them up and leave them to dry on the ground and create a mulching layer. This is especially useful during particularly hot summers in creating a protective screen on top of the soil that helps retain humidity - which is absolutely necessary at the hottest times of day. We try to work the land as little as possible and only in the period after the harvest with deep sub-soiling and decompacting. The aim is to loosen the land that has been trampled on throughout the growing season and store as much water as possible in the deeper layers, in the hope that it may suffice for the next season. How does your company help promote your local area? We do this by focusing exclusively on native varieties, such as Sangiovese and Trebbiano and by managing vineyards while always trying to do something less rather than more. In the cellar, our wines start off from spontaneous fermentation with native yeasts. We process our wines in purity to ensure that they reflect the territory whey the come from. How are you responding to climate change? We try to get as close as possible to natural agriculture, integrated with other crops and plants in our setting and with the surrounding woodlands. In this way, we seek a connection between cultivated and spontaneous plants. We believe that this is the best way to tackle climate change, first of all by respecting the woodland and consider the vineyard as something made up of a broad set of plants and not merely a single crop. Which countries do you currently work in? Do you have any plans to expand into new markets? Today we sell 40% of our wines in Italy and 60% abroad. We are active in Europe, in France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, UK, Malta, Czech Republic and Lithuania. In Asia we sell our products in Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. We also recently moved into China and Taiwan. Elsewhere, we cover California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Vermont, Canada, Australia and Mexico. We would also like to move into Korea, Vietnam and Thailand- We are working on this and hope that Vinitaly will be the ideal occasion for new meetings! Looking forward to seeing you in the Bio Show Hall F - Stand 17BIO.