Aurora has risen, just like the dawn, from the dreams of young friends who in the late 1970’s saw the “land” in their future. A choice was made together about life and work, of quality, and consistent with a great respect for mother nature.
Today, after almost 40 years, Aurora is both a point of reference and ready to embark on new challenges. ow begins the time of the new generation; now aged 25 years and the same age as those who began this venture, the first being a total challenge fraught with unknowns but rich in possibilities. Now one can follow the trail already blazed which has also been followed by many other wineries and has given life to a newly realized association: Terroir Marche.
The youth are the vital sap; young men and women who are ready to work with the land, the climate and the elements of nature. In the world of wine, paradoxically, one must evolve to stay true to oneself and even “conventional” producers are changing. Today Aurora has 32 hectares of terrain with 10 hectares of vineyard, 2 in olives, one in fruit trees (mostly apricots), 5 in rotational crops and the rest in forests and the regionally characteristic erosive formations called calanchi. The most important production is wine, in reality it’s not that we produce the wine, it’s that we know how one to make it well by giving proper relevance to all the important elements which go into its making: the land, the vines, the moon and the sun, the wind and the rain and the work of our hands.
Organic! The decision was made quickly even before the beginning; when we talked about what we wanted to do in life, how we wanted to work. It wasn’t called organic back then, they hadn’t yet invented the name Organic Farming. We had a vague idea of a few small farmers who wanted to return to a simplicity in the way they farmed. For us, it was a way to work the land without polluting it, we tried to maintain unaltered the passage of climate and weather to make healthy food and protect the health of those who consumed our products, including ourselves. It was and is important to observe the nature around us, our terrain , the plants that emerge spontaneously and learn how to integrate all of them. We decided then to transform our harvested fruit and we weren’t in a hurry we tried to understand what our limits of intervention were to have food, especially wine which was healthy, genuine and enjoyable.
We started to get to know the experience of other marchigiani in 1980 and a few years later were co-founders of The Association of Organic Marche Farmers. After a generous contribution from the association, in 1990 the Marche region issued the first rules for organic agriculture, shortly followed by the first directives from Europe. Ours was a choice to go beyond just the rules which were in some ways seemed designed to increase the number of “organic” producers, but at the same time those regulations disappointed many farmers who wanted to farm simply and organically.
Aurora is the founder of TERROIR MARCHE, a consortium of winemakers who want to promote and increase the appreciation of organic and biodynamic cultivation and transformation in our lives. The Consortium proposed to protect the territory as well as develop a sustainable and united economy. A group of farmers and winemakers with many years of experience in the production of organically certified winemaking has given birth to this consortium. Farmers who have an absolute and strong tie to their territory, a group of men and women who have in common an ethical agricultural activity which has at its core: man, land and work – The Terroir.
