Female: So, we are here at Jackson Triggs in a gorgeous, sort of the fermenting room, I guess it’s what you call it.
Marco Piccoli: Yes. This is the production cellar.
Female: Yeah. This looks fabulous. I mean, you must do a lot of work down here.
Marco Piccoli: Well actually, we produce 100,000 to 120,000 cases a year.
Female: 120,000 cases a year.
Marco Piccoli: Yes. With all the brand. Yes.
Female: So, Jackson Triggs is a pretty big producer.
Marco Piccoli: Yes. We are very big.
Female: Nice.
Marco Piccoli: And we’re very, very focused on quality. All the wines that are coming out of this facility are being QA’d which is very, very important. And our first focus is actually coming from the vineyards. Very, very, very, very important for us is to focus on how the product comes from the vineyard. That’s the first importance there.
Female: Well, I should introduce you. Everyone, this is Marco Piccoli, the winemaker at Jackson Triggs Winery. And I know, anyone hasn’t been here. This place is actually great.
Marco Piccoli: Yes. It’s a beautiful place.
Female: Beautiful place. It really kind of makes you feel like you are sort of out of the country.
Marco Piccoli: Yes, it is.
Female: Its urban barn, very much of an architecture, right? And you come inside and it’s just massive inside. So I guess in a winemaking perspective, what brings you into wine? What instinctively sort of started your passion for wine?
Marco Piccoli: I think passion of wine for me started a lot of years ago. I was a kid, almost everybody makes wine at dawn.
Female: What is it? The breakfast of champions.
Marco Piccoli: Breakfast of champions. A glass of wine has everything at 3:30 in the morning. But, yes it started with my grandfather who had a vineyard and making wine. And after we had—you know, you get a little bit old and you don’t care about those things anymore. And when I was 19, I went back to work in a wine industry. I know those memories. The smell of the wine, of the moist and all of these kinds of things that brought me up. You know, all of the memories that I had when I was a kid. So it has been something that I decided, okay, this is what I want to do in my future. This is what I would like to be. I would like to be a winemaker.
Female: So at 19, you knew that you want to be a winemaker.
Marco Piccoli: As soon as I started working in a wine industry, I knew that that was the job for me. As you said, I am from Italy, from the Northeast and Friuli is the name of the region. And yes, we have a beautiful culture in terms of white wines. We produce a lot of white wines. And being from that kind of culture definitely helped me to understand really what winemaking is. I understood the importance of the origin of the grapes, the origin of the soil, the temperature, the climate and all these kinds of things. And also, another very important thing for me has always been the tradition because behind the glass of wine, there is history. There is not only the work that you did to make these like 18 or 16 months. 18 months of aging in barrel is not probably about the soil. Everything is behind it.
Female: Yeah. And the work that you put into it, right? So now that you are a winemaker, you understand that there is so much work that gets put into a glass of wine.
Marco Piccoli: Yeah. You realize just afterwards so there’s no match of bigger parties.
Female: Well, it’s really making people—I think that’s part of what visiting a winer really does to someone which is that you come and you enjoy a glass of wine, but you really realize that there is so much going on on the vineyard, there is so much going on at production, there is so much going in your head. I mean, there is just so much more to appreciate than just buying a bottle of wine like really knowing where it comes from and then having the ability to storytell about that wine. It is a huge advantage too.
Marco Piccoli: That’s true.
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