The following is translated from the YouTube intervew with Teobaldo Cappellano. Translation provided by former Crush Employee Bill Shube.
We have one terrible defect here in the region, with regard to the social set-up. All of a sudden we have Estates. The estate had always been a very tiny thing in our region.
Previously, the only Estate was that of Marchese di Barolo, and they had 450, 500, 600 hectares of vines, and then woods. But 600 hectares in Tuscany, or in Sicily, [is nothing.] You're talking 5000 hectares or more there.
And all of this 'property' [gestures outside], has been around since 1690 and began to take shape even earlier, in the 1500s. The Roman subdivisions of all these regions here, they still remain, effectively --not much has changed. And this has formed our character, at a very fundamental level.
There's a story, I don't know if you've heard it, where a farmer walking around in the area finds a lamp of a fairy, a genie, and the genie says, "Tell me your one wish, but know that whatever you ask for, your neighbor will have double." He thinks for a minute and finally says, "Take away one of my balls."
This is truly a way of life for us here, because [previoiusly] my competitor wouldn't have been a landholder, so I wouldn't have been a farmer-winemaker, so I've lost the aspect of democracy. It's absurd, because in dictatorship, it's as if there can be more democracy than in an area like that where everyone has a landlord. But my competitor is also my neighbor, because he'd come to help me with the harvest, out of his own goodness, and he'd profit from it, too.