
NR1 & NR2 - Chapter 7
How did we and the wine get here?
The thing with adventures is that they do not let themselves be planned. So inevitably, our plan to have the wines in Belgium by November proved in vain (as we suffered some mishaps with the bottling – see Chapter 6). That did give us more time to work out the details: our website, our branding, our sales pitch and our packaging. Every piece is designed to help tell the story of the grape, its land and its people – simple but colourful, straightforward but playful, just like our wines (big shout out to Kristel from Somekind, my friend and creative genius behind all that magic).
By October, our Argentinian wine was bottled, labelled and ready to be shipped. Armed with the certainty that our wine would make it out of Argentina and into Belgium and the unadulterated enthusiasm of someone who’s doing something for the first time, I opened the website and started selling. With every box sold, my confidence in Nova Radix’ mission grew. Allowing wine lovers to help preserve native grapes by buying our wines in advance was resonating so loudly that we sold all of our wine in a week.
And then it suddenly hit me: Nova Radix was real. It was no longer an idea, a dream or an excuse to design cool merch. It was no longer a sabbatical project, a hobby spun out of control or a distraction from real life. We now had a promise to fulfil, expectations to meet and a mission to complete.
As I am writing this, I realize it has been almost a year since I said goodbye to the corporate world and my lawyer life. The road I started walking the evening Emi called me in London in December 2023 led me to Argentina, to finding myself again among a fantastic team at Corazon del Sol (forever indebted to Luciano), to winemaking with Emi (without whom none of this would have ever happened), to dreaming up Nova Radix in Emi’s car, to coming back to Brussels with an open heart and clear mind, to Piemonte for more wine- and friend-making (stay tuned for that next adventure), and to this new Nova Radix community (thank you for being here with us from the very beginning).
I learned so many things along the way but probably the biggest lesson is this: just as impossible it is to force vines to ripen grapes faster, so it is impossible to force ships to sail faster, and so it is impossible to force growth as a person. All you can do to get somewhere is to patiently nurture the soil, catch the winds and steadily put one foot in front of the other, trusting the road and those who walk it with you. I guarantee you it will be worth every drop.