Santi Vivanco

I was born in Logroño in 1973, a couple of years after my father returned from Requena (Valencia) to study oenology, a place where his passion for collecting everything that had to do with wine started. For me, wine had always been much more than aromas, flavours and textures. Much more than the vineyards and lands where my father and my grandfather took me. I was interested in the human side that had been behind wine and the 8,000 years of history it had shared with man.

In that sense, I am a humanist. So I studied Law, looking for that human relationship with history and rules. There I discovered the classics, philosophy, ethics. I fell in love with poetry (I am a poet), Neruda and literature, art and its techniques. The more I read and studied, the more  I realised that the history of man was full of wine. And that it was necessary to value it. In 1998, I started to work on the dream of my father and our family, the construction of the Museum of Wine Culture. I wanted a space which, after visiting it, anyone would understand that relationship as a close and special symbiosis between wine and man. In 2001 I created the Foundation, with the idea of having a tool to disseminate and delve into all this heritage. Paraphrasing one of Neruda's poems, "wine, spiralling, swirling (...) never has a glass been able to hold you, nor man." Wine is always more. That is why I have devoted and will devote my whole life to tell it and pass it on.