Events and News

In the twilight of the ancient Caddeo winery of Nurachi a small group of Carbonari squares the vernaccia from every side: the fundamental role of chestnut barrels, the peculiar fermentation process and the hectares dedicated to the vineyard, which were five during the 1980s. Now only one remains. And how families preserve for wedding and baptisms the wine that has become amber over the decades, or about the British experts who enthusiastically studied it. It would have a great success in the markets of China and Japan, because of the organoleptic similitudes. But we never understand the potential of our products. There are doubts about the term "murruai" until Tonino Carta, owner of another cellar, arrives to explain: murru in these parts means white. The ending "ai" carries the sense of the old. The white color refers to the almond. Murruai is the ancient almond aroma that envelops the palate. The more the vernaccia is old and valuable the more the murruai persists over time.

Guests begin to flock between the raw bricks and the uneven ground floor, gathering for "Waiting for wines and other stories" the first of a series of events dedicated to the food and wine productions of Nurachi. "For several years the municipality and the Pro Loco have invited me to organize this event. It falls in the period in which anciently the harvest was celebrated, the end of a season and the beginning of the next. Over the centuries, Nurachi has been a crossroads of products between the coast and the interior of this area of Sardinia. This is why producers from other areas also take part in the event, united not only by tradition but by the desire to offer healthy products ”, says Stefano Soi, architect ‘with less and less enthusiasm’ and owner of the “Agricola Soi” wine company, capable to conquer the markets of Denmark, Canada, Germany and England. Indeed, “Waiting for wines” is a return to the land and to healthy and eco-sustainable agriculture. Among the many it will host the bitter-sweet marmalades of Mammai and Dario Torabi, the punk-rock chef specialized in the re-elaboration of poor peasant food. All of them will tell their own story surrounded by the splendid abstract paintings of Marco Pili, the famous Nurachese painter who has made himself known in the world by mixing colors with the land of Sinis, fragments of Carasau bread and old canvases and carpets.

The slow blues of Hola la Poyana floats around the banquet in the Caddeo Cellar, a meeting place and occasional theater for the rousing tunes of a group of Irish tourists, or the "canzonis longasa" performed by a local child, a voice that perpetuates the old anecdotes of village life, recorded with malice in music and rhyme. Nurachi, Tonino Carta had explained before under the walls dotted with ancient, rusted agricultural tools, is no longer "abarrau", immobile, unchanging. It is again the crossroad of the past: "After studying economics abroad and travelling I returned to my grandmto the food and wine productions be refreshed, renewed daily. We too must renew ourselves every day if we want to carry on a centenary history ", says Riccardo Porta, a young entrepreneur who added to the ancient desserts and pasta of the family company the focacce, fluffy sheets to be declined with changing ingredients and toppings to different Sardinian places. The focaccia with ricotta and bottarga is dedicated to the gulf, and accompanied by the Vernaccia "Terre Sinis" from the Cantina del Rimedio in Oristano.

"These gatherings are fundamental to strengthen our identity and at the same time propose a different idea of the future" explains the mayor Renzo Ponti, who speaks and listens to his people inside the cellar or in the short pebbled space of via Nuraghe, low houses from which the bell tower of the seventeenth-century church of San Giovanni Battista emerges, immersed in the clear summer twilight. A few kilometers away lay the pond of Cabras and the Ramsar site of

Mare ‘e Pauli, su fenu (the reed) for the construction of the ancient fishing boats, the fassonis, and the canes for the music of launeddas