American Graffiti, an act of love towards a generation

Combined with the Greco di Tufo “Colle Serrone” from the Di Marzo winery and the music by Donald Fagen, Ritmo di Vino chosen “American Graffiti”. Directed by George Lucas in 1973, the film is at the seventy-third place of the best one hundred American films of all time.

We must admit it.

Choosing a movie to combine with the Colle Serrone di Di Marzo was difficult.

At the beginning, the joy of this Greco di Tufo from Di Marzo Winery pushed us towards a specific title: Easy Rider, by Dennis Hopper. So lively, cheerful and  pungent, the Greco produced by Ferrante di Somma seemed to have the taste of the hippie culture.

Rebel in its sharp taste which is typical of this wine, Colle Serrone showed a roundness that recalled the character of that particular culture. 

There was something, however, that did not convince us that much. Easy Rider was that Easy Rider was a film of countertrend. A film that celebrates the culture of hippies as an alternative to the bourgeoisie typical of those years.

Even the non-necessarily positive aspects of the young people of the time are amplified by that culture, perhaps because Hopper, despite being a rebel, operated also in a period when progressivism was still unpopular.

In times when McCarthyism had ostracized characters like Dalton Trumbo, the writer who wrote Vacanze Romane and openly called himself Communist, Easy Rider appeared to us as a breaking movie but not too much.

So we decided to leave Hopper’s film for a future game, perhaps when we find a wine that “breaks” into reality with a tradition.

Greco di Tufo is tradition, that’s true. It is one of the DOCG wines of Campania. It can not break with the past, it would be an artifice.

And, moreover, Di Marzio makes his Greek from a consolidated continuer of a well-established tradition. Dating, moreover, to 1647.

Colle Serrone, on the other hand, is American Graffiti. And it’s Fagen’s music that took us from the wine to the film.

The DJ of Fagen is a sort of Wolfman Jack, the one to whom Richard Dreyfuss turns to locate the blonde on the Ford Thunderbird. She told him “I love you” just once and shocked Curt Henderson’s last night before he left for the college.

American Graffiti is an act of love towards an era, towards an adolescence that ends. To the four of Mel’s Drive In is also the end of a decade.

The ’50s, with Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis and rock’n roll greet the stage of the twentieth century, bringing back many memories but becoming a decade that is a milestone in history are over.

So did Ferrante with this Greek. His Greek. The act of love for a vine that has always been part of its history.

Post Author: Ritmodivino

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