How did Federico Graziani, the child of an accountant and a shopkeeper, become a champion sommelier and a star Etna winemaker? Margaret Rand finds out.
A butcher walked into a bar… This should be the start of a joke. What would the punchline be? “And the barman said, ‘Why the hatchet face?’” A joke, however, it is not. (Not even an unfunny one.) It is a milestone on the journey of Federico Graziani—from teenage sommelier, to fully fledged producer on the slopes of Mount Etna. We’ll catch up with the butcher later–being a teenage sommelier is enough to start with.
Graziani wasn’t born into wine; he grew up in Ravenna, where his mother had a shop and his father was an accountant. At 14, he decided to go to hotel school, and for the sommelier course his parents had to give their consent for him to drink alcohol. They gave it, he says, “but they weren’t happy.” They wanted him to be a pilot, and when he started working in a restaurant, they pointed out that he would be working when everybody else was on holiday. “This was correct. When I was in London, I worked four days and had three days off. In Milan, I did 14 shifts a week, and there were no breaks in between. This was at the end of the 1990s, and it was like that. I started at 9am, worked until 1pm, had one hour off, and then worked until 1 or 2am.
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
