Two-thirds of the way down the ‘Rodovia (highway) Fernão Dias’, which extends for nearly 600 kilometres from São Paulo to Belo Horizonte, the road runs alongside the Rio Amparo, on whose banks kilometres of coffee estates stretch out.

From his home, a light-blue-and-white wooden colonial house, Henrique Cambraia manages the Samambaia fazenda that for generations has been in his family, and for generations has produced coffee. It is a cold place, where in the evening a fire always has to be lit in the fireplace.

It is winter in Brazil whenever I travel to the state of Minas Gerais to check on the progress of the harvest, and well I remember one morning at the beginning of July in the early 2000s, when no sooner had I left the house that I had to go back immediately and put on all the clothes I had brought from Italy. There had been a ‘geada’ (frost) during the night, though luckily neither the harvest nor the quality of the coffee were impaired; the only consequence was a major jolt in the prices of coffee on the New York Stock Exchange.

Henrique’s mentality is open to experimentation and he strongly believes in the importance of a constant training and in the involvement of the whole team that works on the farm, as well as in an environmentally sustainable farming.

During our last visit, he explained us how he decided, along with his staff, to reposition some coffee plants in order to improve the interaction between the plants and the soil. Thanks to his dedication and the time he invested in research, his multi-awarder coffees have been judged, in several international competitions, as among the best coffees produced in Brazil.