tuscan wine – The Truth About Tuscany

Lush

One of the best aspects of our move to Villa Pera, which will become home to the Fanciulle Vini winery as well as to me and my family—is that the caretakers who have lived there for the past ten years have agreed to stay on. Lush and Hana, who came to Tuscany from Kosovo (a country of 95% ethnic Albanians), were around when Maria, the oldest of the four siblings who grew up in Villa Pera, was living in the tiny guest house, overseeing the olive orchards and renting the main house to tourists. While Lush has been helping me move in and get to know the gardens and farmland, his thoughts on the previous owners arrive in bits: Maria’s energy, love of the countryside and can-do spirit, non of which subsided as she grew more and more infirm; her brothers’ skeet-shooting talents, a nephew’s devotion to Catholicism and his recent marriage in the villa’s tiny chapel.

Maria’s brother, the only remaining of her three siblings, told me that Lush and Hana were hardworking and loyal, as did Lush’s friend Adamo, a retired policeman who lives next door and comes over often to tell me about the property, the neighbors and the village nearby. Lush officially started working for me on September 1–-my colleague and I were delighted to have a strong extra hand for the vineyard and cellar work–-and immediately proved true to his reputation.

Lush also works part time at a convent down the road, pruning olive trees and tending the vegetable garden, under the firm direction of Suora Rita, with whom I went to speak last summer to agree on Lush’s schedule. His wife, Hana, cleans houses and cares for an elderly woman in Siena. Hana had a son, who died in infancy, then five daughters, and then another son, who now lives in Switzerland with a wife and baby girl, to whose baptism Lush and Hana went the second weekend in September. It must have been on their long bus ride north that Lush caught Covid. He had been vaccinated, so I discounted his sneezing and coughing, until he offered to get a test, which came back positive.

I wrang my hands: 2021 was the year I had organized the harvest perfectly. The grape suppliers had agreed to the quantities I wanted, the refrigerated van was rented, and most of all, the team was in place. My cellar master, Marta, and I would be helped in the vineyards by my handy neighbor, Alessandro, and by Lush and his wife, and in the cellar by my daughter’s nanny, whose small, fine hands are the quickest de-stemmers around.

As the grapes ripened and I waited for my suppliers to give me the go ahead to come and pick, my daughter’s college graduation day also approached, but I wasn’t worried. What were the chances that the harvest would start on the one day I would be in Milan? And even if it did, Marta would be here to coordinate picking, transport, de-stemming and the early hours of fermentation, and Lush would drive the van.

Once Lush caught Covid and I realized Hana could therefore not work either, I asked around for reinforcements. Lush had a friend whose daughter was happy to help, and, felicitously, I found an intern for the autumn who would arrive in late September, in time for the second half of the harvest. As luck would have it, a supplier called asking us to pick our grapes on the day I was to be in Milan. I realized there was no one to drive the van, panicked and called a friend to vent. Claiming no prior experience, she nonetheless offered to drive the van, and she and Marta made a plan to start for the vineyard the next morning at 7.

I was on the Frecciarossa on my way from Florence to Milan at 6 am the next day when Marta texted me that she had a fever and chills and that she thought it was Covid. She would get a test, but the results would be back that evening and the day was obviously shot. The train ride was excruciating: cell phones don’t work between Florence and Modena, while the train goes through the Apennine tunnels, and I sat there unable to communicate with the outside world, speeding through the dark toward Milan, stewing over my lost grapes, my sick team and my bad luck. I turned to my boyfriend and told him how everyone had let me down.

“You wanted a bicycle, Jem,” he said. “Now peddle.”

It was not the sympathetic comment I had been expecting, and his grin infuriated me, but I knew he had a point.

When we pulled out of the tunnel, I called the supplier and postponed picking until the next day, when I would be back in Tuscany; my friend renewed her offer to drive the van; Lush’s friend’s daughter and our nanny would help in the cellar; somehow, we would manage to get the grapes in this year.

The next week proved challenging: Marta had not caught Covid but a nasty flu that kept her in bed with a fever and an upset stomach for a week. My friend and I harvested on our own what I had planned to harvest with a team of five or six: one night I was still in the vineyard collecting the crates of picked grapes well after dark, the rows visible thanks only to the headlights of my jeep. The hand de-stemming I swear by made the evenings in the cellar endless. My family fended for itself at mealtime, and all of the other work I do for the winery—marketing and sales and paying the bills—came to a temporary halt.

At the end of that week, on a cold, bright Saturday morning, I drove up into the Chianti hills southeast of Castellina, to Piccioni, a farm that had agreed to sell me a small lot of its grapes. The sub-soils in the area interested me, and it hadn’t been easy to convince them to part with their grapes. I was going to have to harvest alone. Marta was still out, so were Lush and Hana, and everyone else needed a day off. This is what “peddling” feels like, I said to myself as I drove the van through the gate.

When I got to the hilltop vineyard, waiting for me were Rizan and a colleague, employees at Piccioni, ready to lend a hand. We distributed the crates along the rows of the vineyard plot and began clipping the bunches. As usual, we got to chatting to pass the time. Rizan, it turns out, was also from Kosovo, and I told him about Lush—what a talented and hardworking person he had seemed to be, how disappointed we had both been when he came down, inexplicably, with Covid.

“Lush,” said Rizan, “is the Albanian equivalent of Lucio,” the Italian name for light.

Taste What Terroir Means

Tuscany has some glorious terrains, with the potential to make wines on par with great Burgundies. We’re also blessed with an indigenous varietal—Sangiovese—that can make wines that are headily aromatic, lusciously tangy and ethereally delicate. All of that starts in the vineyard—actually under it, with a deep understanding of the nature of the land.

Yet Tuscan wines historically were not and for the most part still aren’t being made with the terrain foremost in mind, the way those in Burgundy are. To begin with, estate owners don’t necessarily know their land well, because they don’t farm it directly: centuries of sharecropping kept estates large and their owners far from the soil. No wonder that today there is little consensus as to which soils produce the best grapes and even less awareness of just how rare those soils are.

A few years ago, I inherited a cellar of wine from Burgundy, mostly Côte de Nuits, mostly Premier Crus with some Grands Crus and Villages thrown in. The bottles came from a group of two-dozen or so domains, wineries such as Mugneret-Gibourg, de Vogüe, Pousse d’Or, Raphet, Arlaud, Magnien, Dureuil-Janthial, from the 1990s and early 2000s. These bottles became my education in wine: they calibrated my palate to delicacy, subtlety and nuance. As anyone knows who has been lucky enough to spend a few years drinking exclusively Burgundy, almost anything else starts to taste clunky and dumbed-down by comparison. All too soon, I had finished most of the Burgundies–and could certainly not afford to replace them! I wanted to go on drinking wines like those—I was spoiled. I couldn’t imagine NOT having a glass or two of these beauties in the evening–so I took the rather radical step of deciding to try and make wines like them.

I had tasted Italian wines which I classed with top Burgundies: aged Sangioveses from Castell’in Villa, from Sugarille (Gaja’s estate in Montalcino) or from Soldera, that had that mouthwatering tanginess, delicacy and persistence which I loved. I had also experienced these sensations tasting some just-fermented Sangiovese in 2009 at a winery in Chianti Classico that sits on an outcropping of pure limestone. I knew the potential was there in the local varietal and in the soil. Thus, the concept of Fanciulle (fan-choo’-lay)Vini was born.

Make no mistake: the geology of Tuscany is known. Based on a geological map of Tuscany made in the 1960s, I was able to identify half a dozen different sub-soils that seemed promising in terms of their potential to grow grapes with complexity and a distinctive taste. I researched and, over the next several months, contacted wineries that had vineyards planted on these soils. I negotiated to buy grapes from them, which I fermented in small tanks, side-by-side, in my own cellar, so that I could be sure the wines were kept pure. Two years later, I can now taste the wines that emerged from these different soils—some of them 60 million years old, some of them only 2 million; some limestone, some sandstone, some mixed—and perceive immediately the impact the terrain had on the taste of the wine. And you can too: there is no mistaking our leaner, more austere Vigneto Primo–made from grapes grown higher up, on rockier soils–for our Villaggio–a plusher, fruitier wine made from grapes grown lower on the hillside, in clay-rich soils. When the 2020 wines are released in March of next year, you will be able to taste wines made from grapes grown on three additional terrains, all with extraordinary potential, yet none exactly like the other.

Traditionally, Tuscan wine has been made in an entirely different spirit, one that focuses on recipe, for example, on which kinds of grapes are allowed, on which containers (steel or wood or cement, or the current trend, terracotta “amphorae”) can be used for fermentation or cellar aging and on how long after the vintage the wines may be bottled and sold. These “recipes”—the rules that govern winemaking in various Tuscan and Italian appellations—were established to preserve a recognisable style that sold well, but today, the result is lots of safe, pretty good wines that taste alike. Of course, appellation rules exist in Burgundy, too. And yet, when I ask a Côtes de Nuits vintner a question about her wine, she responds not by telling me about her cellar equipment but by talking about her soil, her terrain. The best winemakers live and breathe their land: they—and not just their employees—are in their vineyards daily, year round. They speak of their soil and its variations with a reverence I have not encountered elsewhere.

Tuscan soils merit similar treatment: winemaking centered on them–born of them, literally and figuratively–will yield wondrous wines, exciting in their individuality and faithful to their origins .

The Fiorentino

I first heard the Fiorentino mentioned by Sig. Bernardi, the foreman at Podere Olmo, where, in the fall of 2019, I was borrowing some space to make my wine–not in Olmo’s wine cellar but in its former stalls, a long room with a stone floor, double-chestnut doors at the entrance and a half-moon-shaped window at the far end. For water, I filled buckets from an outside spigot, and, for the electricity, I ran an extension cord from Olmo’s wine cellar through the back garden and in through the half-moon window. By harvest time, the fermentation tanks I had ordered had still not arrived, so I bought three waist-high basins from the hardware store and was fermenting grapes in those.

Sig. Bernardi and Franco, the cellar hand, helped me put most of my grapes through their de-stemmer, an old, violent machine that thoroughly mashed skin, pulp and seeds with its giant corkscrew blade. In the Olmo cellar, Franco did most of the work: he hooked tubes up to pumps, climbed on top of the 200-hectoliter cement vats to check on fermentation, weighed and mixed sulfur dosages and sprayed down the tile floor at the end of the day. Sig. Bernardi puttered around outside, in a long Royal blue lab coat and a green wool hat, feeding the chickens and rabbits, occasionally passing through the cellar to point out that Olmo’s owners had ignored his advice and harvested too early—or a few weeks later—too late. Occasionally, he would peer around the door of the stalls and ask if my wine had finished fermenting yet. I held up a pitcher of must for him to taste.“It’s not very dark,” he pointed out. I handed him the pitcher, but he backed away. “For heaven’s sake!” He couldn’t taste it, he said; his doctor had said, no wine.

Sig. Bernardi had first gone to work as a teenager on a wine estate owned by an infamously talented but difficult noblewoman, referred to as “the Principessa” in the wine trade. Sig. Bernardi called her that still, in the same way he called Olmo’s owner “the Marchese,” using the landowner’s no-longer-recognized title. He was a small man, with fine features and that cruel sense of humor typical of Tuscans of his generation. He denounced Franco’s working methods, Olmo’s owner’s agricultural decisions and the current growing season–absurdly hot, dry, rainy or cold–and its miserable results. In addition to raising chickens and rabbits, he operated the tractor on a piece of land between the vineyards and the farm buildings, deaf to any interruptions while aboard.

He took an immediate liking to my younger daughter, recognizing her for the animal-lover that she was, and took her out to see the elaborate entanglement of wood, wire, earth, straw and cement that were the rabbit cages, and the biggest, oldest, mother bunny, allowed free in the vineyards during the daytime, but brought in at night—otherwise, Sig. Bernardi explained to her frankly, “the wolves would eat her.” Sig. Bernardi spent the weeks following the grape and olive harvests trolling the vineyards for pheasant, rifle slung over his shoulder.

One morning in October, I went to Olmo to check my wines, ran into Sig. Bernardi outside and asked him how the harvest was going. He pointed to Franco and Alessandro—the game warden at the Marchese’s other estate–in a vineyard down the hill, working their way up with crates full of grapes. The Marchese harvested by machine, but he had sent Franco and Alessandro back into the vineyards to collect any grapes the machine had missed or dropped. “What about the vineyard on the opposite hill?” I asked, wondering why they had skipped it. “Ah,” said Sig. Bernardi, “that isn’t the Marchese’s. It belongs to the Fiorentino.” As I stood there, Sig. Bernardi pointed across the valley and told me who owned each of the vineyards we could see. The Fiorentino’s stood out, because the rows were ridiculously far apart, and the vines were tall as trees.

That was my first glimpse, my first impression: what a funny old vineyard it seemed to be. (Watch the blog next week for a post about negotiating with the Fiorentino.)

Lessons in Wine

For a number of years, I worked as a buyer of Italian wines for a US wine importer. Annual trips to wine regions were a tradition. A few years ago, we had managed to gather a group of ten of our best clients, buyers from some of the most important restaurants and retailers in the country, for a tour starting in Sicily.

We were in a rental van, heading north on the E6 toward Messina. Jay, the owner of four important restaurants, was driving, and his assistant, Alec rode shotgun. I was giving them the lay of the land in Sicilian winemaking, leaning through the middle of the two front seats and going through my points, kind of loudly to get over the sound of the road, ignoring for the moment, the clients farther back in the van, whom I thought I’d educate later.

They were all arrivistes, I was saying, all the newly-trendy wineries that the press couldn’t get enough of, all the names being bantered among buyers as the hottest new properties, had no Sicilian roots at all. The families actually from here, families that were bottling wine before the turn of the millennium, were only a handful. That was my first point, to separate for them the natives from the newcomers, which struck me, as an importer, as essential.

“Salenti, that’s the guy,” interrupted Jay, leaning forward and looking over at Alec, an up-and-coming sommelier at the hottest of Jay’s four cash-printing restaurants. “He’s got incredible wines, Alec.” Inevitably, a journalist—not a frequent visitor to Sicily—proved to be the source of Jay’s discovery. “Had dinner over at Sam Binnel’s place last fall. He opened Salenti’s ’02 Lavaria for me. Talk about terroir. 90 year old vines. Blew me away.”

“Salenti’s actually from Milan,” I carefully rejoined. Continue reading Lessons in Wine

Wine Writing 101

The Italians have terroirs and varietals as noble as any in the world, but prefer to keep them hidden: hundreds of millions are spent on consultants and equipment, often with financing from the Italian government, to avoid the straightforward, even simple, approach of the best winemakers (for example, some Burgundians), who make their wines themselves, focusing, first, on viticulture and second, on the handful of cellar elements that make all the difference. And the Italian wine press only acts like the crowd around the emperor, admiring his new clothes. Evie, for one, would like to change all that:

Evie is a new writer at the popular wine-lovers’ monthly, Passion for Wine, and, after an initial trip visiting wineries in Italy, she’s back in her New York office pitching her first article to Deborah, a seasoned wine-world editor.

wine glass Evie: How can I establish credibility with my readers?

Deborah: Say you’re Italian.

Evie: But I’m not.

Deborah: You like Rome, don’t you?

Evie: Well, it looks nice in films.

Deborah: There you go.

Continue reading Wine Writing 101