Early in 2021, after a protracted search for a piece of land with old Sangiovese vines and the right kind of sub-soils, I bought a two-acre vineyard. Except I didn’t: according to ARTEA, the regional agricultural database, the land where the vineyard stands is a wheat field. Before buying, I explained this to the owner …
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 …
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 …
It was Franco, Podere Leccio’s cellar hand, who eventually gave voice to his and Sig. Bernardi’s opinion of the Fiorentino, when I pointed out, a few days into October, that the Fiorentino still had not harvested. “He picked the white grapes,” Franco said. “The red ones he sells to someone else. Last year, whoever it …
I first heard the Fiorentino mentioned by Sig. Bernardi, the foreman at Podere Leccio, 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 …
After the harvest, when the grapes have been picked, brought into the cellar and fermented, and the wines have been racked off the skins and moved into barrels, the weather stops mattering, the cellar work ebbs to a day or so per week and a sense of plenty and of ease sets in. I no …
