Librandi - Calabria - Amordivino

Calabria

Librandi

The Librandi winery covers an area of 6,500m2, and receives grapes from 230 hectares of vineyards in the classic 'Ciro' territory referred to as the "feud". The Librandi winery is a modern enterprise founded in 1950, but the family has been working with wine for centuries. Four generations of wine-growers lie behind Antonio and Nicodemo Librandi and their nephews Raffaele and Walter, who believe in keeping to the principles that inspired their forefathers: a great wine requires love and dedication to the land and its history. The Librandi brothers run the winery themselves so as to stay in close contact with their land and their wines, without giving up the benefits offered by advanced techniques and administrative systems.

The history of Cirò dates back to ancient times, when Greek colonists disembarked on the coast at Punta Alice, looked about them, and determined to make their new home in this agreeable land, so generously laden with fruit, where the scent of tamarind and citrus fruits blends with the perfume of oleanders.
This strip of land bathed by the Ionian Sea, where fertile plain rises gently into hillside, was to become a major centre of the culture of Magna Graecia. The colonists' amazement at the sight of the expanse of vineyards that can still be seen winding across the plain under the permanently blue sky that blends into the blue of the sea led them to call the land Enotria: the "land of wines".
Wine-growing was already well-established in the area, and when the Greeks planted new vineyards on the hills around Krimissa, the old name for Cirò, they confirmed the land's vocation: from then on wine became essential to the history of this part of Calabria. The Krimissa vineyards were famed throughout Magna Graecia.
Classical writers tell us that the best wines produced in the land were offered to the winners of the mythical Olympic Games, and that Milo of Crotone, top athlete of antiquity, drank libations of Krimissa, the ancestor of today's Cirò red.
It was to restore the glorious tradition of one of the ancient civilisations that laid the foundations of our culture, arts and philosophy of today that Cirò was selected as the official wine and symbol of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
The strip of land extending beyond the Ionian Sea and the Alice plain to the Krimissa promontory still merits its ancient name of "land of wines" today.