presents
Under the
Sardinian sky
SSardinia is a land of stories that sound like legends, colours of painted landscapes, mysterious plains, white houses under a blanket of grey clouds, upset by a wind that constantly lifts its orchestra, an inflation of breaths, blows, whiffs and gusts.
Boughs of trees curved over the vastness of the silent landscape inhabited by people with roots in the countryside, the typical farmers’ buildings called stazzos, sometimes with bright-coloured roofs, varnished by the sun and shining like diadems on the surface of an island.
Sardinia is unspeakable nostalgia, made of deeply sweet skies, strips of light blue trapped between the furious edges of the mountains, large crevices that are dark at the bottom, even during the day.
First-hand emotions—archaic ones—populate these territories.
As a land,
Sardinia
is a giver as much as a taker.
A land that requires its small share
of the nourishment of men.
It’s a pact that’s always been honoured. Men and women—with their amber hands and eyes surrounded by radiant wrinkles—feel honoured to give back through their work what the land has entrusted to them.
Myrtle is the child of this place, carefully picked in the cold months when the wet air stagnates under the cloudy November and December sky. In the rosy twilight almost at the frontier of the world, the harvest celebration takes place without the screeching sound of rockets, without the noise of children, without statues carried in a procession, or loud music.
It’s a silent ceremony,
a solemn one,
based on very specific rites.
People appear among the shrubs with the type of respect one pays to a generous nature and begin to pick the buds. After cleaning them from impurities, they leave them to rest in the heart of Alghero in a specially blended mixture of alcohol and water for at least three months, until time has completed its work.
In the meantime, the wind continues to wrap the walls of the houses which are warm inside with life and cosiness. It binds them up like a ribbon, in a tight embrace. The prickly pear hedges cushion the breeze in their green and thorny pads, before the winter goes away and that searing heat comes to varnish the roofs with the sun and blast the fields with furnace-high temperature. The books are full of this poetry, words that describe the vital reality of this nature, where even sharp-edged stones appear to be playing with the grassy brows and the valleys covered with golden genista, running after each other as far as the eye can see.
And finally here it is
the
Zedda Piras
myrtle
a liquor that’s full in its taste
and intense in its aromas.
An authentic flavour, which has
never been compromised by time, but has actually
been enriched by a unique legendary tradition.