Goodbye to Philippe Daverio, a friend of the world of wine and WineNews

The friendship with Philippe Daverio began in the early 2000s, when the director Alessandro Regoli interviewed him for the first time, laying the foundations of a relationship that has lasted until today. Since then, Alessandro Regoli recalls, “every time we met, we found ourselves smiling about how the places where we found ourselves were a pleasant synthesis of our common passions and professions: wine and art”. That art that one of the most important Italian historians has made known to the general public, thanks to a culture, as he liked to repeat, “made of knowledge of things but also of experiences”, passionate about works and artists more known among the insiders, with authority and sympathy. But with the world of wine that, with the multiplication of our meetings from Verona to Gavi, from Bolgheri to Montalcino, from Valpolicella to Montefalco, from Siena to Milan, has seen him in recent years more and more a pragmatic disseminator. All occasions in which, with kindness and friendliness not always easy to find among the most well-known personalities, he indulged in our interviews, satisfying all our curiosity, really on everything. Meetings, then comparisons and exchanges of views, once the microphones were turned off, on culture and Italy, full of stimuli and suggestions to communicate and tell them, and in which, while I answered his wine curiosities, he taught me to appreciate even more art, from antiquity to contemporary art. We were waiting for him in Montalcino “happy to see those hills again”, “mysteries” of his schedule permitting, and where, not only for Brunello, but above all interested in the stories and art of the territory, we would once again converse about beauty, with a great intellectual of our times”. Those of Philippe Daverio, were real pearls, to keep well in mind. Like when he lent himself to a game of association of ideas between the territories of Italian wine and their beauties: a journey between Valpolicella and its ducal villas, Barolo and Cavour, Bolgheri and “La cavallina storna”, Montalcino and the relationship between man and earth, Chianti Classico and the Italian garden, Montefalco and the frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli.