The founder of the Enopoli, the wine growers’ cooperative, and the So.Vi.Ve of Roncade
The Memory of his students years in a letter to a classmate
Piero Graziani, my father, passed away in May 2020, when he was 92.
Some time ago, the son of one of his very dear friends and classmates gave me a letter that my father had written to him a few years earlier, remembering some experiences they had spent together.
For nine years- it reads- we had been together and had shared with the “royal” Enological School of Conegliano the war, bombardments, raids, the civil war, starvation, and everything else that that miserable period had involved.
To attend lessons that our school gave, every two months by bike, from our respective villages, Roncade and Zero Branco, we would meet each other on the banks of the river Piave in Susegana.
We would glance at the Sacro Fiume Piave in leaps with our means of transportation, looking for the most gravelly points.
When the war ended, we found accommodation in a boarding house and studied there until we got the diploma. We received many visits from Ricci (Romano Ricci, the future founder of Maia in Pieve di Soligo), Innocenti (Lino Innocenti, the future senator of the Republic and President of the Provincia di Treviso), and the wine poet Piero Berton who came and visited us to learn organic chemistry where the two of us were considered by everybody the best…and it was exactly like that!
An intense and brilliant career began for the enologist Piero Graziani. Supported by the Agricultural consortium of Treviso, he put his body and soul into what turned out to be a masterpiece of collaboration; that is the creation of the big project of the Treviso winemaking cooperatives, known as Enopoli.
In the mid-50s works began in Roncade and then in Motta, Campodipietra di Salgareda, San Polo di Piave and Roncadelle. A system that managed to create and run a net of almost 4000 winegrower members and with a wine potential of about 600.000 quintals of committed wine grapes. So Treviso winemaking cooperatives became the largest technological-viticultural center of the Provincia di Treviso of that time and one of the early centers in Veneto.
The project expanded until it included the entire supply chain with bottling in Roncade(in the space where now the supermarket Lidl lays) under the So.Vi.Ve brand of hundreds of thousands of bottles fine Cabernet and still unknown Prosecco.
Piero Graziani leaves us an important legacy of duty and self-denial, a beacon for the younger generations.