Marco de Grazia and the Rise of Mount Etna’s Volcanic Wines

Marco de Grazia: Well, I came down here in 1998 or 1999, one of these two years, because I was called here by a producer who wanted to insert his wines in my distribution company. I had a wine distribution company in Florence. Basically, I was a truffle hunter for wine and I would go around Italy, searching out little estates that could make extraordinary wines, and sometimes help them make, improve them or whatever. We became very popular in the '90s. And so, we were searched out by vignerons and up came one from the Etna. So down I went to check the estate out. And then I ended up not picking up the estate, but renting a car and going around the Etna and tasting wines that were never going to be bottled just by small vignerons and I just simply experienced what I experienced in other places. In other words, the very fine potential of the wines. And the prices were right. I couldn't afford much at the time, but here, prices were very reasonable. So I decided to buy a piece of land with a house, more like a summer home, with a small vineyard and find somebody who would do the upkeep in the vineyard and find somebody else who had a cellar that I could make wine in. And that's how it started.

Then eventually, I had various problems, both with the upkeep of the vineyard and with having the wine made in somebody else's cellar. So I had to decide whether I would make the jump and make my own cellar and increase the property, or just drop the ball. And I did the first. And in 2002, I made the first wine. And in fact, that remains, I think, somewhat of a surprise or a milestone, because it was already a single vineyard. My first wine was Guardiola 2002. And in 2003, I did Guardiola and Calderara. In 2004, I did Guardiola, Calderara and Feudo di Mezzo. And every year my wines were sequestered by the Anti-Fraud Association because there was a tiny, little legal issue where, at the time, you couldn't bottle with the name of the vineyard on the label. So they would sequester the wines and they would impound them. I'd pay the fine for it. Then they would release it. Then I would sell them and so on, so forth.

So we fought over that and my wines were impounded and then released and fined and then released for three or four years, until finally, we found a way of being able to do that. And so, that was the beginning of the single vineyards, which now virtually everybody uses to determine the place where their grapes are from or their vineyards are from or where they buy the grapes. And that should determine, as it does in Burgundy and in the Langhe, a type of wine, an identity, a different identity. And that is, in fact, very important.

It was important in the past for the price of wines when the wine was sold in wholesale. I found some old notebooks in which the prices of the different contrada were differently priced when the wine was shipped down to port. And it's important in the present. And it will be much more important as time goes on and as the areas can be even more specific.

Finally in 2005 I was able to make them understand that it was beneficial to put on the name of the vineyard because they had more control against fraud. So from then on I was able to do this in a legal way. They approved of this. And then finally, little by little, we had it approved by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2011 I think it was.

My favorite wines were the wines of the Langhe and Piedmont and the wines of Burgundy. And when I tasted these wines here, I felt not only that there was a potential to make very fine wine, but also the kind of wine that I liked. In other words, something that came close to these wines in character. And in fact, when I bought my first little property here and I made my first wine in 2002, on the back label, which is still there today on the back label, I very boldly at the time stated that the Etna was the Burgundy of the Mediterranean. In 2002, that was rather a big statement. But now, I think so many people refer to the Etna that way.

Marco, what was the wine landscape like in Etna at the time, in terms of the reputation, in terms of the number of people making quality wine?

Well, there were few people making wine, let alone quality wine. There were maybe four, five estates making wine, six maybe making wine. And that's it. The area was virtually in a state of abandonment, which was different, for instance, of what I found in the '80s in Piedmont. In the '80s in Piedmont, over 90% of the wine was sold either in grapes or in wine to co-ops and to negociants, but the vineyards were well kept. They weren't abandoned. Here, an enormous amount of vineyards were completely abandoned. And it was only some of the old folk who still kept these small vineyards going. And then little by little, in the last 20 years or so, but particularly in the last 10 years, the landscape has changed dramatically. Hundreds and hundreds of hectares have been replanted.

One of the problems, which I'm sure you might have heard elsewhere, is that whereas in Piedmont the maintenance of the vineyards was never forgotten, here, we lost a few generations, so the emigration phenomena was huge. And so, today still, it's much more difficult to find somebody who knows how to work a vineyard rather than finding an agronomist. So the actual labor force to form a team is difficult. And one of the reasons I'm very proud of what we do is we have an exceptional team, which we formed throughout the years.

You mentioned Burgundy. What is it about the terroir of Etna that is so unique and so distinctive and can produce such beautifully distinctive wines from different areas?

Well, the terroir here is completely different. It's not really a geological terroir with differences that are in the sub-soil or whatever. It's an infinite series of lava flows, each one different from the other, that repeatedly cover the volcanic area of the Etna and creating different soils as they flow down. And of course, there are differences in altitude. This is probably the only appellation that allows for a difference of 600 meters in altitude between the lowest and the highest part of the appellation. In the Chianti, it's maybe 250 meters. In the Langhe, it's, again, maybe 200 meters, not more. But 600 meters is huge. Fifty meters here makes a difference. So 600 makes an enormous difference. We go as far up as 1,000 meters altitude and as low as 400 meters above sea level.

And the climate changes are completely different. For instance, the east side of Milo was formed in a different way. It was a side of the volcano that crumbled and fell down upon itself and created a terroir that's completely different. And the climate there, that's completely different as well. So the similarity between here and the Langhe and or Burgundy is the question that there is an enormously different amount of terroirs and of climates and of altitudes and exposures as the appellation goes around the Etna like a half moon. It spans kilometers and kilometers and kilometers. And it has all the subtleties that Burgundy has, but it's not only that that makes the two areas similar, it's also the type of wine, the character of the wine, which is the paleness of the color, for instance, or the finesse, the delicate qualities that it expresses, the particular drinkability that it has when it's young and the wonderful way it ages as well. Very few wines of that caliber are drinkable immediately and also age well. Burgundy has that privilege, and so has Etna.

Marco, talk a little bit about the culture here. Sicily has been invaded by the Greeks, the Romans, the Normans, the Spanish, the French, so many different cultures. The Ottomans have sprinkled a little bit of their essence into what has become Sicily and Etna. And I see almost the wine community here reflects that to a certain extent in the sense that you have people like Salvo Foti, who's been here for a long time, but you also have people like yourself or Frank from Belgium. Talk a little bit about the multiculturalism of Sicily and how that reflects today in the wine community.

Well, the multiculturalism of Sicily is extremely important, culturally, for Sicily as a whole, but you can, in a sense, divide Sicily into Eastern Sicily and Western Sicily, roughly. Western Sicily was more profoundly Arabic. From the island of Pantelleria, you can see the light on the lighthouse of Cape Bon. You're 42 nautical miles away. So the Carthaginians and the Tunisians and the Arabs, in general, took the western part of Sicily. They took all of Sicily, but the profoundest influence was Western Sicily, whereas Eastern Sicily was more Greek.

As a consequence, vineyards were planted much more on the Greek side. And you see Greek coins in the museum at the foothills of the Etna, you find grape clusters on the Greek coins, Dionysian figures. So this area here was very, very strongly influenced by the Greeks. That's who, let's say, built the viticulture here just as the same way that the Greeks did it in Campania, in the Naples area. Again, high-altitude vineyards, volcanic soils. They did exactly the same thing, late ripening varieties and so on and so forth. And then afterwards the Romans came in, but they already found a foundation of viticulture, which was Greek. And so, the fact that that might have an influence on who comes now, I doubt that. I think that what has happened here has happened in Tuscany or in Piedmont or in many other places of Italy. Or same thing in France, really.

You go to Burgundy and you'll find people from all over the world, just like you find them here, with a completely different history behind them. So I don't think the multicultural layers of the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Greeks and on through the Spaniards and the Normans had an effect on the interest of foreigners and making Etna wine. I think wine is an enthusing liquid and it carries its enthusiasm throughout the world. Frankly, if you think about it, there's not that many people that travel across an ocean for anything else except art and wine or vacation, but wine is one of those things. And once you fall in love with a type of wine, you might try to make something for yourself.

Marco, you studied philosophy. Is that correct?

I graduated in comparative literature, Greek and theater. Philosophy, of course, because it was part of the Greek heritage.

Has that affected the way you think about wine at all?

Of course, but that's a complicated issue. To try to simplify things, there's a so-called Socratic method, which is what Socrates did. He would ask questions and he would ... He called himself a midwife. So in being a midwife, with his questions, he would draw out, from people, answers or at least thought processes. At least he wanted to make people think. And in order to do that, he had to draw things out of them, not ever put things into them.

Well, there's, I think, two types of winemaking. There's the winemaking in which you try to put things in, in which you try to make a wine that is determined by your character, by your personality. Or there's another type of wine in which you act as a midwife, you try to express what that vineyard gives, you try to ask the right questions to that vineyard so that it expresses itself. So you try to treat it in the best way possible and therefore let it express itself. And that's why I chose to do single vineyards from the beginning, otherwise there'd be no point. So my winemaking is simply that, is trying to draw out of the vineyard what the vineyard's potential is, what the vineyard's character, its personality is, and to try to put that in the bottle.

And in your interview for the Barolo Boys, the film, I think you said, "I'm helping a new territory. I already see the seeds of glory. And at the same time, the future disintegration." That's a very interesting way of looking at the landscape here.

It is. Well, the seeds of glory are obvious in Barolo and are obvious here too now. I think today there are wines from the Etna that anybody would be proud of making. And the growth of that glory is clear as well. At the same time, history shows that there are ups and downs. And again, we go back to a vision that goes back to my studies, but it's clear to everybody, even those who are uneducated, but have some common sense, that are ups and downs in history.

So, as you see the glory, you perceive in that glory already the seeds of what will become later a period of decadence, a period in which there will be confusion as to issues. And there will be questions that are way beyond the point. And there will be people who will be coming in just for the prestige of having something here, not because they are interested in the territory or the terroir. And so, you see that happening. You see a lot of people who are also confused and don't know exactly what they're looking for, but that is part of human nature, part of the way things express themselves in time.

I think Salvo Foti said, "There are people who make Etna wine, and then there are people who make wine on Etna." Do you think that's a fair statement in relation to what you just said?

Yes, I think that's a fair statement. Yes, indeed. I think it puts it in a nutshell. And then within that nutshell, there are millions of different ways of doing one thing or the other, but that's pretty much true.

Talk about the emotional attraction of Etna.

The emotional attraction of Etna is really no different from the emotional attraction of a great wine that you like that is ... Well, let me make a short aside if I may. When I was studying Greek, the classroom was divided into pupils who liked Aristotle and pupils who were for Plato. And that was it. They were on one side or the other, which is okay. Then out of college and into life, I began to notice people and whether they had read Plato or Aristotle, or whether they had never seen them before, or even heard of them. In the Western world, somehow the influence of these two great philosophers was so immense that people would fall in these two categories, either one category or the other. Then all of a sudden, I'm in the world of wine. And there are two categories here too. In France, for instance, either you're a Bordeaux lover, or you're a Burgundy lover. In Italy, either you're a Piedmont lover, or you are a Tuscany lover.

And oddly enough, if you were a Bordeaux lover, you would be an Aristotelian. There was no doubt of that. And if you were a Burgundy lover, you were a Platonist. And the same in Italy. So the loves have the same power. According to who you are, you love in different ways and you love different things. And I don't think it's any different on the Etna. You get the drive from what you love. And what you do learn in time is in every direction. One thing that you learn is your limits, but you learn that your limits are part of the beauty of the thing.

For instance, I've learned one thing, that I don't care about vintages anymore. A great winemaker friend of mine once said he didn't even know anymore what a great vintage was. And somehow, I feel the same way. I think vintages are here for our joy, all of them, for our entertainment, for our happiness, for our pleasure, for the difference of pleasures that they offer. And so, they're not really a limit. They are an added plus in a way. That's something that I've learned. And I've learned also that if you work well ethically with great care and with great passion, every vintage will deliver something very beautiful. And I think that's a wonderful thing to learn, that no matter ... Well, of course, if you get a hail storm that destroys your harvest, there's nothing you can do about that. But outside of something as dramatic as that, very fine terroir will deliver always something fine.

Talk a little bit about reflecting back on the modernist era in Barolo and what your thoughts are looking back on that now.

Looking back, it was a revolution and we were conscious that we were doing something that was very, very important. We had no idea how important it was and it became, because it wasn't just simply a matter of new barrels like most people speak of, it was a question of being much more organic in the vineyards, producing much less in the vineyards, knocking down grapes if it was necessary. We had to do that at night sometimes because they thought we were crazy. And some producers had huge problems with their moms and dads because of this. There was a generation gap that was incredible and very, very painful in many, many ways. It was an attempt to put Barolo and Barbaresco on the world map as great wines.

And again, there, we took Burgundy as an example. We saw that it was possible to make a Barolo that was gentler than it was before, that was more sharply defined. To give you an idea, it was a question of survival. After the war, Italy was in very bad shape, particularly the agriculture and viticulture as well. Piedmont was extremely poor. You can't imagine how poor it was. In order to survive, as soon as non-organic fertilization or systemic sprays came out after the war in the '50s and the '60s, everybody used them. They used them because it allowed them to produce a lot of grapes that wouldn't rot.

But that was a question of survival. The producers themselves didn't even have the right to price the grapes. Nobody wanted Nebbiolo grapes. When I was there in the early '80s and until the mid-'90, Nebbiolo grapes, Nebbiolo Barolo grapes or Barbaresco grapes cost less than Dolcetto grapes. If you would buy five cases of Dolcetto, they'd give you a case of Barolo for free. That was the reality of the matter. So they had to produce, they had to overcrop to survive. And most of the grapes were sold anyway. So what we were doing went against the grain, using different barrels, cleaning up the cellars, trying to make sharply defined wines, producing less to get more substance. If a wine has to age, it has to be substantial.

Doesn't have to be big, that's not the point. We weren't looking for big wines. We were looking for fine wines. And if you overcrop, you can't get that. It was a lot of different steps and it was learning as you go. I'm still very, very, very proud of that. And if Barolo now has the recognition that it has all over the world, a lot of it is due to the little guys that I was working with who followed me around the world promoting wines. And of course, we made mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. The only people who don't make mistakes are the ones who don't do anything. Then you learn from your mistakes and you do better all the time.

So Terre Nere, my domain here, is organic since 2002, since the first vintage. I applied the same things, very short pruning, all the things that were applied in Barolo with the difference of, of course, the climate here and all, so on and so forth, which is very different. In their own way, they were all applied here. So it was very important for many reasons, for the Barolo and Barbaresco, for me, for the producers themselves and for how I was able to apply these techniques here.

And to follow on from that, maybe just talk a little bit about the climate here. I think something like 60% of the producers are farming organically. That's the number that I was given. There's also, I think, less monoculture. You have a lot of different fruits and vegetables and it's a completely different landscape than in Piedmont. Do you do have a climate here that is more favorable to organic viticulture?

Well, let's take that one by one. Organic. I'm not sure if we have a climate here that's better than Piedmont for organic. I'm not sure of that at all. There's odium, there's mildew there ... You name it, we've got it. You have to remember, this is an island within the island of Sicily. It's in a huge, huge volcano. The climate here, it rains five times as much as in the rest of Sicily, five times. And there's one little town where it rains 10 times as much, where you can't even make red wine.

So first thing is I'm not sure if this climate is easier than the climate of Piedmont. In certain parts, I'm sure that it's more difficult. That's one thing. The other thing, I don't know the percentage of people that are organic here, but what everybody should understand is that until the '50s, the entire world was organic. There wasn't a choice. So it's not that impossible. It's not that hard. It's just not forgetting what you had learned before or recapturing it. That is the real truth of the matter. You can be organic anywhere, virtually. You have to pay sometimes a little bit of a price for it, but if you're really careful ... Not even that. When the harvest is really, really rainy and you get rot setting in, you can't stop that in any way. Organic working is preventive. So once you catch a cold, you can't take an aspirin. There's no aspirin for it. So you want to avoid the cold.

I'm working, for instance, in the consortium. I'm the one who's working on the sustainability program. So I'm trying to do a contract now with one of the companies that certify organics to work with a whole consortium here so that the little guys can afford to be certified through a process that's very complicated and costly and needs technical help. So the little guys, the very little guys can't afford it unless we do a collective contract, which is what I'm working on now. And I think by the end of the year, we'll have that. And that will mean that everybody that wants to be organic seriously, and that is willing to be tested by certifying entities, will be able to do so. But it's the only future anywhere, here or anywhere else. So sometimes, you have to take a step back to take two steps forward.

Talk a bit about the diversity of plant life on Etna.

Well, here, again, there wasn't that much difference in the Piedmont of 40 years ago. Forty years ago in Piedmont, you had people who had the vineyards in the positions that were unlikely or impossible for the grapes. They would plant peaches, they would plant poplar trees or anything else that they would like to plant. Here, we have the same thing, but we've had a longer period of decadence. For instance, there was no such thing here on Etna as an olive grove. The olive trees were planted all around the vineyards where the vineyard ended. So you could plant olive trees and you could have the olive oil with your wine, which are the two basic elements, aside from bread, of the Mediterranean. Piedmont is no longer Mediterranean in a way. It's too far north for the olive tree.

One of the differences in the landscape here, of course, that I forgot to mention is the lava. Once you have a lava flow here, like the 1981 lava flow, that'll take 300, 400 years before that lava breaks down into plantable soil. And there's nothing like that anywhere else. And so, in fact, indeed, here you have changeable terroirs, not anything that me or you will see in our lifetime, but there will be in a few hundred years. In the area which was submerged by lava, it'll be a new terroir and nobody knows what that's going to be like until it exists, which is an interesting way of looking at things.

Obviously, the landscape changes in that way, very much so, but I believe that in the end, in another 20 years here, there will be so many more planted vineyards that almost all the plantable surface will be vineyards and olive trees around them or a few fruit trees here and there. We have six or seven cherry trees, apricot trees, this and that. It's just to have fruit to eat. And I think that will stay everywhere.

And you're making honey now.

Yes, making honey. That's part of our sustainability project. It's very important to us. We make it and we sell it at cost. And the people who buy it, sell it at their cost. It's a way of showing the importance of the bees and the keeping them, in an organic world, healthy, because they're dying by the millions. In Italy last year, we had a crash in production of 95%. That was due not only to pollution and to insecticides and stuff like that, which was bad enough, but also in the north, it rained during the flowering season. And here, it didn't rain for four months. So it burned the flowers and these poor ants had to be fed. I mean, poor bees had to be fed. We have to be very careful. They are extraordinary animals. And they produce an extraordinary thing, which is honey, and which has been part of our lives since thousands and thousands of years, an extraordinary product. And they are the sentinels of our health, of the health of where we live. So that's an important thing for us.

What's your view on some of the traditional forms of viticulture on Etna, particularly the alberello and the palmento?

Until tractors, the vineyards were alberello. There's no question about that, everywhere. But it's most important, obviously, where you have steep hills, where you have terracings, where tractors still today can't go. So alberello is a wonderful way of growing vineyards. If you look out the window, I have alberellos right up on the terracings there. So interestingly enough, in order to replant these alberellos, I had to remove fruit and olive trees. Every so often in the world, you have crises in wine, and here there were several. So they would plant other fruit trees in the place of grapes, because grapes take an enormous amount of labor. Olive trees don't. Whereas on the terraces, you have a lot more work, because you can't use a tractor and you have to work by hand or push a little hand push tractor. There is where they were abandoned first, obviously, because they were too expensive and they couldn't break even with the cost of the grapes.

So it's definitely a good way of raising grapes. But on the other hand, if you have a flat land, there's no problem in using guyot or using any other kind of system that you would want to use.

And what about palmento? Is that something that you feel still has a future, or is it something that is part of the past of Etna wine?

No, palmento is a very sophisticated lagare (Portuguese traditional large, open vats, typically made of stone). I was talking to a Portuguese woman the other day, she comes from the Douro, from the Porto area. And I was trying to explain the three level palmento that we have here, as opposed to the one level lagare that they have there ... And it's a very sophisticated, ancient way of making wine. And it works perfectly well. Nothing can be said against it, except for one thing, that you cannot make a lot of wine in the same surface. If you have tanks of whatever kind, you need a lot less space for wine. So if in a palmento you can make, let's say, 50 hectoliters of wine, in the same space, you can make 200 hectoliters of wine or more. So it's a difference in that way.

In many ways, the palmento is ideal because it has a very large surface for the grapes to ferment, open surface. So the oxygen that the yeast need in order to turn into sugar, to ferment, is there and available. In a tank where it's more closed, it's less available. The pressing of the grapes by feet, or turning them over with your hands is very delicate, more delicate than pumping over. The fact that you're going down by gravity is also very good, because it's the least damaging. It's not a big damage, but it's the least manipulating of the wine possible. And then as it goes into the last tier, you just ... Well, there are some very, very old palmentos, which actually, they directly go by gravity into the barrels, but those are huge and very, very old ones and very unusual, but you still find them.

I have at least five palmentos on my property. One I just redid perfectly and there was nothing much to redo because it was solid. I just repainted the walls, basically. It's there for everybody to see what it's like. It was used until I bought it, until I bought the property. Many of them are still used today and they're perfectly functional. So if you have a small property and you want to use a palmento, perfect, no problem at all. The question is depending how much quantity of wine you need to make to make it work.

Nerello Mascalese, it is the important grape on Etna. How would you compare it to the great grapes of the world?

Well, there was a grape producer in Burgundy who said a thing that I think was very wise. He said, "Pinot Noir is not a great grape. Pinot Noir is a great grape in Burgundy." So Nerello is not a great grape. It's a great grape on Etna. Outside of Etna, it doesn't deliver. I'm not saying that Pinot Noir doesn't deliver outside of Burgundy, but I haven't ever tasted a Pinot Noir outside of Burgundy that can compare with great Pinot Noirs of Burgundy. So the great appellation is the best place for its variety. Otherwise, people would be planting Cabernet in Burgundy and Pinot Noir and Bordeaux. And it wouldn't work. So I think the best thing about Nerello Mascalese is that it took whatever it took, centuries and centuries or millennia, to find the right grape.

And it's not the only grape, because there's also Nerello Cappuccio, there's Nerello Mantellato, there's some ... They used to mix in some white grapes with the red. And in the old vines, you still find them. There are wines that like solitude, grapes that like solitude. There are wines and grapes that like company and enjoy company.

Nerello Mascalese is just the right grape for Etna, for red wines, just like Carricante is the right grape for white wines here. Then you can add a little bit of this and that that's been added here for forever and ever. But comparing it with another grape, that doesn't really make much sense to me. Yes, I can say that, for me, there's a kinship between Nerello, Pinot Noir and Nebbiolo. There's some kind of kinship there. How, I don't know.

If you taste them separately, one reminds you of the other. If you taste them together, you see how different they are, but that they share something ineffable, but that's there. It's like two brothers or two sisters. Sometimes they don't really look alike, but you can tell they're brothers or sisters. It's something like that.

What are your hopes for the future of Etna?

Well, the hopes for the future of Etna for me, or my personal challenges, are to improve as far as possible our red wines. I think that improving our red wines, we have a limit to how much we can improve our red wines, but I have less experience with white wines. So I think that there's going to be a larger margin of improvement with the white wines. So the white wines right now, I have a keener interest in what can be done with the whites in the different areas. And I can't wait.

For instance, I planted a vineyard in Milo. I can't wait to get the grapes there. And I planted a vineyard in the highest part of Calderara. And this year will be the first year of production. And I know it's going to be great grapes. I know it's going to make the Calderara, the Bianco Calderara that we already make, that I already love, I think it's going to improve it. And on the other hand, we have new vineyards coming into production in San Lorenzo and in Calderara. And I think they, in time, will improve our wines as well, our red wines. So yes, making them as fine as possible, that's what I'm looking for.

Is there anything I haven't asked you, Marco, that you wanted to add that we haven't discussed?

I think one thing that is interesting, you mentioned a lot of different people from different countries coming here. They're coming also from Italy now, from Northern Italy. They're coming to invest here from Barolo, from Tuscany. And just recently, I heard the Tuscan company just bought in the other day.

Tommasi just bought in.

Tommasi bought in as well from the Veneto. There's all kinds of companies coming in from all over the place, buying. Obviously, there's a reason for that, but ... If you ask in Rome how many columns are there in St. Peters, don't ask a Roman. You ask a tourist and they'll be ... Roman lives there. He breathes it. He sees it every morning. He doesn't care to count. Sometimes people from outside have a more objective view. They have the distance. They're interested in details. And they come and they take a look and they fall in love or see the potential or something of the kind. I think that's one of the reasons for so many people coming, I hope. Anyway, I hope it's just not economics, because it's very difficult to make wine here. To make good wine is even more difficult.

Well, going back to the revolution, remember, there's a great movie by Gillo Pontecorvo called the Battle of Algiers. And there's a moment, I can't remember exactly the words, in which these revolutionaries were trying to take Algiers back to the Algerians from the French. And they're on a terrace at night and one of them says ... He's all excited about the revolution. And the wiser revolutionist says, "It's very, very difficult to start a revolution. "It's more difficult to win a revolution, but after you've won it, then that's when the really difficult part starts, when you have to rebuild."

And so, here, it's the same thing. You start a revolution and then the hard things start, how to not let it fall apart. And so, people come in here, they have to have an understanding. They have to want to improve what's been done. That's the important thing. People that come in and if they come with that in mind, or with that attitude, with that strength, boy, they're welcome.