I spent this past Monday, a holiday known as “Pasquetta” or “little Easter” in Italy, with friends in Siena, chatting over a long lunch to which everyone had contributed: a winemaker friend of mine from Umbria brought two bottles from her estate and a loaf of their traditional Easter cheese bread, “crescia.” A neighbor brought […]
I like to say that the Fanciulle wines are Tuscan wines for Burgundy lovers, by which I mean that the Fanciulle wines have a delicacy and tanginess which, while natural (and, I think, the most delicious) expressions of Sangiovese, are not necessarily typical. I am also consciously using approaches to viticulture and winemaking learned in
What Makes Fanciulle Wines Special Read More »
Wine lovers, the press and winemakers themselves like to talk about “terroir-driven” wines, a vague expression that I transcribe as “wines with a sense of place”–only slightly less vague–but at least it gives us a starting point. Many of us are used to “varietal wines,” or wines that are made predominantly from one kind of
Wines with a Sense of Place Read More »
The real reason I started Fanciulle Vini was to make the wines I wanted to drink. Over the years, I had finished drinking most of the bottles of a cellar of Burgundy wines I had inherited, and not only could I not afford to replace them, the wines I had gotten used to sipping with
What Happened When I Ran Out of Wine Read More »
Today it’s sunny, windy and cold, and although we need rain at this time of year, the weather is perfect for pruning. I only own a thousand vines—old vines with thick, twisted trunks that produce vegetation at waist level or above, so while I started pruning a week ago, I will already finish today, and
The Growing Season Read More »
“Age is irrelevant,” tweeted a fellow wine professional yesterday, in the context of a discussion of vineyard soil quality. While I applaud her lack of prejudice, and while the age of a piece of land (by land age I refer to the epoch in which the sub-soils were formed) is not linearly correlated with soil
Whereas for the past year or two, we have been delighted to find a glass of almost any wine in our hand come evening, these days, with vaccines, a somewhat milder Covid variant and a bit more freedom in our lives, expectations are on the rise. And now that wine lovers are back in wine
How We Can Become Better Wine Tasters without Tasting 10,000 Bottles Read More »
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
The Wine That Isn’t Read More »
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
Taste What Terroir Means Read More »
