Winemaking – 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 .

Sweet Dreams

This fall, for the first time in 11 years, I was not going to make wine, and so I stopped caring about the weather. Let it rain. Let it freeze. Let the sun come out and sizzle the grapes on the vine. I wasn’t worried about which parcel to harvest. I wasn’t getting up at dawn to walk the rows tasting grapes. My back wasn’t sore from lifting crates, and I wasn’t working late into the night at the selection table. Thank God.

Then I walked into my neighbor’s cellar pungent with the aromas of yeast and CO2, the echoes of tank ladders and loose hoses clanking, the smell of marc, the wine-stained tiles. I almost burst into tears.

As luck would have it, that night at a dinner party, I sat across from a friend, Piero, with a farm in Chianti, who asked me if I knew anyone who wanted to buy a few tons of grapes.

“Why are you selling?” I asked.

“My brother and I don’t know how to make wine,” he said, “let alone sell it. We’re planning to take out the vineyard but we want to sell the last crop.”

I knew the village where he farmed but wanted to know more about the vineyard: “How high?” I asked him.

“400 meters.” That was all it took to fall in love.

Two days later, I went to see the object of my desire: a few acres on a steep, south-facing slope, with—where soil should have lain—layers of splintering galestro, the schist-like rock that is found in the appellation’s best vineyards.

It was a warm, sunny, late September afternoon. I walked the rows of vines planted by Piero’s grandfather in 1970. The vine training method looked like rows of bad haircuts; the grapes tasted diluted. Piero showed me the cramped cellar with its old, cement tanks. I tasted the 2015 and 2014 wines untouched since their fermentations: the musts had been over-worked, but a hint of something noble came through. Typical of the smitten, I was already dismissing potential problems and latching onto hope: the hope that from this vineyard I could make wines as elegant and mouthwatering as the Burgundies I nursed and studied in the evening.

Out of a self-protective negotiating habit, I hid my enthusiasm and told Piero I’d let him know. I knew if I went ahead, the next few weeks would be utter chaos: harvesting from dawn to dusk, a daily visit to the cellar to check the fermentations, taste each tank, pump over the wines if needed. I’d have to find barrels at short notice. I wanted to photograph and film and write down each step of the process. How would I manage my day job? The kids? Maybe it was saner to walk away.

I held out twelve hours before calling Piero to gush about the quality of the site, the charm of the little cellar, the beauty of the current vintage, and to describe how together we were going to revolutionize Italian wine making–show up the Italian enologist “mafia,” open people’s eyes. I explained how the oenophiles would flock to see his vineyard. I ran through the costs for him and the potential earnings (at least three times the yield from selling the grapes, if we split the profits). I called around to find people to harvest the next day, and after lunch, I went back to Piero’s to help him wash the de-stemmer and set-up. I was donning my Wellies, when Piero’s mother, a small, prim old woman came onto the terrace above the cellar and peered down at us.

“Piero!” she hollered.

“Eh,” he muttered, looking up.

“Buonasera, Signora,” I offered. She did not acknowledge my presence.

“Your brother makes a commitment,” she continued to bellow, “And you shit on it!”

“Huh?” Piero said.

I had never heard the particular expression she used, let alone from an 80-year old woman!

Piero’s brother had gone to the Consorzio del Chianti Classico the week before to check on the price he could get by selling the grapes. According to Piero’s mother, he had signed a contract to do so, although normally no such contract is needed and, even if signed, it was probably not binding. He could always have said the boars had eaten the grapes.

But I knew it was too late. My dream would die there.

A few days later, again at a dinner with Piero, he mused on how different people’s values can be. What’s important to his mother and brother (50 years old, never left home, works for a local winery rather than on his own farm), is not to disrupt the day, the routine, the way things are. To resist change, at all cost. And to prevent others from bringing about change as well.

Now that the harvest is over (Piero’s brother didn’t lend a hand), it seems it may be possible to come to an agreement for next year’s harvest. I could officially lease the vineyard and cellar, or Piero and his girlfriend and I could form a company to buy the grapes. I could prune the vines this winter the way I want to, green harvest in July to reduce yields and concentrate the grapes, organize the vendemmia and order my barrels in advance. I’m wary of Piero’s mother–What will it take to win her over? Plus, I’m still just a tiny bit sad. 2016 was a gorgeous vintage and, as any winemaker knows, there’s no one like Mother Nature for making great 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.

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