If you try to google these simple words: Bread is good or bad? The answer will be unanimous. Bread is bad. Can you believe that?

I wanted to call this chapter: Give us today our daily bread, because for me bread is religion. And I have been thinking a lot about how something so sacred, so important in all the cultures of the word, how such an important font of nutrition in the whole world, has possibly in the last years become bad for us. Bad for our health, bad for our diets, bad for our culture.

I reckon there is such a snobbism and even a lack of respect in what we call “The First World” in saying that “Bread is bad”. And this has being said by the same culture that changed the production of bread in the last fifty years into a massive chemical product.

I was last year reading an Italian book about the night Maria (Marie) gave birth to Gesú (Jesus). I was stuck on a part where it says it was a sin for Jewish to cut the bread with the knife, such was the respect they had for bread.

My dad and I (for much of compliant of my mum and my wife) always break the bread with the hand before dinner. My dad would often do it inside the bakery even before he pays. As soon as he got bread he has to break a piece and eat it. Bread is my culture is the most important food we have.

It’s been proved that the first form of Bread, which was a not leavened dough of crushed grains and water was created around 30.000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic Era, and became common food around 10.000 years ago and changed the history of humanity in a way as before humans were all forager and hunter. It contributed to the creation of towns and civilization as people start to settle, while before were all nomads.

I wanted to match bread with another sacred (and often devilized) thing: The wine. And I wanted to match something so simple and true with a young wine we have on our list which is one of the most famous natural wine in Italy. A wine made in Sicily by a 30 something years old brave Sicilian woman who in her twenties drop her studied in Enology in Milan and came back to her Sicily, rent a little piece of land and start to make natural wine learning from the old people of the village. The wine is the SP68 by Arianna Occhipinti. The wine is amazing in a whole different way and took me a while to understand it, as more commercial wines (which I also like anyway) are made to please our palate with all the notes we look for in a pleasant wine. This wine is just the expression of a woman and her land. It doesn’t want to be perfect, it wants to be true, and it’s amazing how being so light and simple at the same time has so many layers, the floral, the fruit, the finish, it’s like if it stay longer in your mouth and your memory. To me it’s an emotional wine. A summer red wine. It transports you to a dry summer night in Sicily, the smell of Mediterranean Sea, the olives trees, the orange trees, the cricket singing, like it hugs you in warm arms. And there is a old wood table on the dry grass and some bread on it and olive oil, like us today.
Salute.