A Glass at Home: Caitlin Macy
The following is the first in an occasional series visiting Fanciulle wine in the homes of the people who drink it.
Who: Caitlin Macy, sister of owner-winemaker Jem Macy
Where: New York, USA
Years Drinking Fanciulle: Since the first vintage in year 2019.
In Italian, fanciulle means young girls or young ladies, a word that has meaning for the Macy family: “Jem has two daughters and I have two daughters, and most of our cousins are girls,” says Caitlin Macy, sister of Fanciulle’s owner-winemaker. Jem and Caitlin—the latter is pronounced the Irish way, with a sh sound instead of a t—grew up in Groton, Massachusetts. Jem was a day student at Groton School and Caitlin was “a bit of a rebel” who didn’t play team sports and went to Kent in Connecticut for its equestrian program. As adults the sisters are “very close—it seems like an understatement to say that,” Caitlin says, though she’s a self-professed wine-consumer rather than an expert. Caitlin lives on Gramercy Park in Manhattan with a husband and two rescue mutts . She’s a novelist, working on her fifth book in a light-handed, comedy-of-manners vein, this time “a retelling of a classic novel” that just might involve girls or young ladies. She recently took a break by telephone to discuss the Fanciulle wine. —Valerie Stivers
Valerie Stivers: Tell us about your personal history with wine.
Caitlin Macy: I’ve picked up a little, but what I love is that I don’t have to bone up on wine. Jem was an art-history major, and when I go to a museum with her, I feel I can relax and put myself in her hands. It’s the same with wine. She’ll quietly order the bottle that I want to drink. To be honest I find a lot of the wine world to be off-putting, pretentious and name-droppy. I’m happy to just be a consumer.
VS: And tell us about your relationship with your sister.
CM: We are only a year apart, so when we were younger, we massively fought but also massively made up. In our adult life we are very close. We’ve always had each other’s backs. We overlapped in New York City for a couple of years before Jem moved to Europe. I worked in publishing and she was a legal assistant, so she’d lend me $50 every few weeks before I got paid. And then I’d lend it back to her. In some ways it is a loss to me that she has lived in Europe for so long.
VS: How do you fit Fanciulle into your life?
CM: I buy a fair amount of wine, and the main wine I buy is from my sister. I think people think the fix is in, but I do pay for it! I’ve donated cases of it for charity auctions—it’s always popular. We have a lot of dinner parties so we’ll serve it there and also at bigger bash-type parties a couple of times a year. I had a party this summer, outside at our house in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut, the kind where you’re chilling a ton of rosé and a ton of white. Yet when I have parties like that the Fanciulle always goes. I used to bring bottles of it to dinner parties, but I’ve stopped doing that. It’s too special to just be whisked away.
VS: Do you cook when you’re entertaining at home?
CM: My husband and I both cook and somehow it all works out. My husband grew up in Barcelona so he likes to cook Spanish things. We have a paella party outdoors every summer. Or we’ll do Julia Moskin classics from The New York Times. My own favorite cookbook authors always seem to be English–Ottolenghi, Simon Hopkinson, (Roast Chicken and Other Stories), Violet Bakery, Nigella…
VS: What’s your palate like? What do you like to drink?
CM: I prefer white in general. I’ve been told by my sister that what I like is a dry, saline white. For red wines I’ve learned from Jem what I don’t want. I do not want heavy, Californian, high-alcohol Cabernets. A lot of the fancy wines that you’ll be given as a gift—I do not like. I know I’m not here to endorse my sister’s wine, but I’ll just tell it to you straight: Fanciulle is a very well-made, delicate red. That makes it sound like it has less flavor, but by delicate I do not mean insipid. It’s like a small oil painting as opposed to a giant wall-mounted neon display. What I want is something made not to wow you, but to quietly impress you—and that you can drink all night.
VS: Is there a family connection to Italy?
CM: We had no connection. If anything our second country was Spain because of my husband’s history there. But now I try to go every year, and, not unlike the wine, the place has crept into my consciousness. The dry heat and the desert climate de-ages you 20 years. You have so much energy, you sleep so well. And that one patch of Tuscany has really come to feel like home. This summer while visiting Jem we went to eat at a little family-owned restaurant, and after dinner I took a picture of my 17-year-old daughter sitting on the steps because I had one of her sitting on the same steps when she was two years old. It’s a heavenly place to visit your sister.
To learn more about Fanciulle Vini, click here.