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The first time I drank Mila Vuolo’s wine was at a winebar of two friends, Nicola Sessa and Alessandro Vespasiano, founders and former owners of the legendary “Briefmarken Weine” in Berlin. I was fascinated by her deep, full-bodied but very elegant, earthy Aglianicos from Campania. Later on, during a tasting event with her in person at the same winebar, we tried three different vintages. Impressed by her wines and her story, I decided to visit Mila Vuolo’s winery in Salerno as soon as possible. This was a long time before I founded FEMALEMAKERS, and as life moves in other directions sometimes, it took a few more years until we met in Salerno in September 2021.

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From science to winemaking

Mila Vuolo is a former computer scientist. She worked over 12 years in Rome with a telecommunications corporation before she took over the winery in 2003. Her father, a medical doctor, decided to buy the farmhouse near Salerno in Campania including a small farmstead and vineyards of about 7 hectares when Mila Vuolo was eight years old. He bought the house and the farm with the intention to have a weekend hideaway for his big family and to let the farmwork be continued by local farmers growing hazelnuts, olives and grapevines on his piece of land. After her father died, Mila Vuolo decided to quit her job in Rome, move back to Salerno and take care of the farming around the family estate. Family members still come to visit the farmhouse during the summers, she tells me, but she is the business owner and winemaker in charge and lives permanently at her winery, called PASSIONE.

FEMALEMAKERSDOTNET: Mila Vuolo´s FIano grapes.

Start from Scratch.

When she started, she knew nothing about the wine world and wine was not her one and only passion. As a lateral entrant in the wine business, she worked right from the start with a consultant, a trained expert in the science of wine and winemaking . Their connection was established through the friends’ network. Over the years Mila Vuolo became an expert winemaker herself, but she still maintains a vital exchange with her consultant.

WINES FROM PASSIONE

Mila Vuolo produces three wines in her Salerno winery, both white and red, but more of the latter. Her main grape in the hills is the Aglianico, a black grape grown in the southern regions of Italy. This type of grape is considered to be one of the three greatest Italian varieties. Mila Vuolo produces around 10.000 bottles of Aglianico a year. The amount of white wine she makes from the Fiano grape is about 2000-4000 bottles a year. Last but not least, she cultivates a very small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, yielding 1000 bottles a year. When she began working with wine, Mila Vuolo wanted to blend her red grape wines because she considered the Aglianico too “tough” on its own. But in 2003, the year of her first harvest, the summer was rather unique weatherwise; it was extremely dry and hot, she tells me – ideal conditions for the red grape Aglianico, which developed very well. Quite different from her Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in this first year. They delivered a very small harvest and the grapes were not top quality. Due to these climatic conditions, Mila Vuolo made her first monovarietal Aglianico and was surprised by the good results. Furthermore, this was the first monovarietal Aglianico in and around Salerno. The wine was so highly praised that the winemaker decided to continue and not to blend her reds.

FEMALEMAKERSDOTNET: Mila Vuolo´s dog is always with the harvest team.

Offline sales only

As a wine entrepreneur she sells her wines mostly in Italy, but also in the United States, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Her biggest vendors in Italy are located in Milan, followed by Rome and Campania. As leader of a small team of four employees as well as the head of the entire business organization, Mila Vuolo decided not to set up her own online shop. She thought that maintaining additional sales channels would be too much of a burden on top of her already high workload. Since the beginning, her wine business has been running very well, although she had little funding after starting her winery and minimal financial support for machines from the European Union. But, as she tells me, it takes a huge bureaucratic effort to get this funding, especially for small companies like hers.

THE CHALLENGE OF WINEMAKING

When I asked her what the biggest challenge in her winemaking career was, she said it was the initial decision she had to make in favor of or against her future life as a winemaker and living in Salerno again. She talks about that difficult point in her life and about making the life-changing move and quitting her job in the telecommunications industry to take over the family farm and become a winemaker. Nowadays she is very glad for having made that decision to go into winemaking, and she also feels very happy being able to lead the life she does today. Mila Vuolo is one of the rare persons I have met who is not only very satisfied but also passionate and relaxed at the same time.

FEMALEMAKERSDOTNET: Cellar action at Mila Vuolo´s winery.

Farmwork + harvest

Since the beginning of her winemaking career, Mila Vuolo has farmed according to organic guidelines in all her vineyards as well as in the cellar. The winery has been bio-certificated since 2012. She wants to take her farmwork further into biodynamic farming, but first has to familiarize her team step by step with the different processes concerning vineyards and cellar work.

Besides her wines, Mila Vuolo produces between 1000 and 2000 liters of olive oil per year and also a small amount of very tasty hazelnuts. All the harvesting is done by her, the small team of employees and her big network of friends. As I accompanied the harvest for one day this September with my camera, I was really astonished how big her friends’ crew is. They all helped to handpick the grapes with the same passion as Mila Vuolo. As a good winemaker, she insists on handpicking, which guarantees the best grape quality for her work later on in the cellar. Every year at the end of the harvest season, she invites everybody who helps with the harvest to a big meal and a party.

Travelling + wine business

Mila Vuolo also likes to have guests at her winery and to present her wines and the way she runs the farm. But she does not consider herself a real salesperson. Instead of hiring someone for sales in the near future, she would prefer to increase the awareness for her wines and sell them through an expanding network of personal contacts. What she likes most is to bring the bottles herself to her customers – no matter how far she has to travel – and then get direct feedback. Unfortunately, this is not always possible, but she does it from time to time, for example on her recent trip to the westcoast of the United States. For her 50th birthday, in 2015, Mila Vuolo was given travel tickets as presents from her nearby friends and started to visit all her other friends which are spread allover the world. Regarding her hazelnuts, Mila explains, “It is very easy. All you have to do is to keep the trees in good shape. You sell the whole amount at a yearly new fixed price.
The hazelnuts are sold directly to buyers from the chocolate factories in the vicinity. My grapes are much more labor-intensive and demand care every day.”

Mila Vuolo’s heart lies both in the vineyard and in the cellar. But the most interesting period for her is after the harvest, when the cellar work starts and until the wines are bottled. Even if Mila Vuolo, as head of her enterprise, is in charge of making the final decisions, the exchange with her team and a further consultant is very important to her. Normally all the internal discussions she has with her team lead to beneficial agreements and high-quality wines, she says with a smile.

The winemaker does not plan to expand her business. She chose this smaller dimension of her general framework of life and winemaking for a good reason: her work-life-balance in this small-scale enterprise maintains a good equilibrium, she says. But she adds that this does not at all mean a standstill. Mila Vuolo has a few new wine ideas she wants to put into practice this year. And she points out that it is very important for her to start travelling again. Furthermore, she wants to take part in a few special wine-events like the Merano Wine Festival, where she won two prizes for her Aglianico and her Fiano wines last year.

FEMALEMAKERSDOTNET: Mila Vuolo´s Aglianicos maturing in the bottles.

Sustainability all around

Mila Vuolo is very keen on the topic of sustainability in her entire organization. Her winery utilizes solar energy from the rooftops, and she uses lightweight glass for her wine bottles, as well as ecological packaging and biodegradeable detergents throughout the winery. Taking care of the environment not only means using eco labels. For Mila Vuolo, this is an overall attitude to life. She uses rainwater in the whole winery. Her Aglianico grapes are very drought-resistant and therefore well-suited even for upcoming higher temperatures. As a farmer, she already thinks about the climate changes in the coming years. Luckily, her soils have a clay basis and therefore can keep water better than sandy ones. In combination with the drought-resistant Aglianico variety, she is well-positioned to meet the challenges resulting from the steadily rising temperatures.

Whenever she finds time, Mila Vuolo goes to the seaside for sailing or kayaking. That is another passion of hers, she tells me. And finally, with a smile, she puts it this way: “The sea during the day and the wine by night”.

Mila Vuolo’s recipes

Fiano + spaghetti con collatura from Cepara*.

*Cepara is the small village near Salerno where Mila Vuolo originated from.

400 g fine pasta, best spaghetti
8 tablespoons of native olive oil
4 tablespoons of colatura di alici (Italian fish-sauce)
Parsley
Garlic + pepper

“Olive oil, garlic, parsley and pepper are just prepared but not cooked.
Mix them with the cooked pasta. Basta!”

Fiano + grilled pumpkin

And another fantastic, simple but very tasty dish from Mila Vuolo we ate after the harvest in September is this pumpkin recipe using a Hokkaido pumpkin as a basis:

Cut the pumpkin in rather thick slices.
Grill the slices, just for a short time, so they can remain not too cooked.
Let them rest for a while till they are not so hot anymore, then put a first layer in a pot, add salt, fennel, garlic and a bit of hot pepper, then make a new layer and repeat.
At the end, add extra-virgin olive oil on the top layer.
”If you like, you can mix the oil with some vinegar, but I prefer without.”