Fanciulle Style
Through Françoise, a geologist I worked with when I started Fanciulle, I met Rémy, the oenologist for some of the finest wine estates in the Côte d’Or and a rigorous, brilliant wine taster. He can, I have seen over the years, dissect a wine’s flavors, aromas or texture into its distinct components and tell you where any of them come from. He zeroes in on the defining characteristics of a wine in a few seconds and can describe each in precise, illuminating terms. All that is ungraspable about wine falls into place when I taste with him.
From time to time, I send Rémy samples of the Fanciulle wines for his opinion on whether they need more time in barrel, say, or which wines to include in the top cuvée. In 2020, I was sure that a pure limestone cuvée was my best wine, and while it has proven good, the cuvée he preferred sold out first and showed itself to be a more complete and complex wine. Two years ago, I visited some of the wine estates Rémy works with, tasting from tank or barrel and listening to him and the cellar masters review each lot, noting that the southern exposure and iron-rich clay of Pommard’s Les Rugiens vineyard made its wine intense, concentrated, or that the sandy limestone of the Pèzerolles vineyard made for freshness and aromatic complexity.
Late last year, when I was deciding on the blends for the 2022 Fanciulle wines, I noticed a gap in my sensibility.[1] Rémy deemed two barrels inferior—they weren’t balanced, and certain characteristics overwhelmed others—and recommended I not include them in either of the final wines. I hadn’t noticed this imbalance. In fact, one of the barrels had been, over the prior year, a favorite of mine to show visitors. The wine was so open, so generous, so easy; that was just it—it was evolving toward something simple, its tension flagging already.
I wanted to taste with Rémy again, so I arranged a trip to Burgundy. He promised to provide samples from the wineries he worked with, and I would bring my own wines, bottles as well as tank and barrel samples, and of two dozen or so other Tuscan wines.
I had never been to Rémy’s office, which was on a side street a mile or so from the Beaune railroad station on a residential lot in a plain but new white house. Inside were the typical posters that wine businesses hang on their walls—grape close-ups, vineyardscapes and regional maps. Rémy, his friend, Anne, another oenologist, and I sat down at a rectangular table, each with our notebooks, and started to taste samples from the wineries they worked with in the Cote d’Or.
We tasted from south to north, wines from the villages of Pommard, Corton, Volnay, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Vosne and Gevrey. A Pommard Grand Cru had such an intense red rose perfume, it was as if I had put my nose into a flower. A wine from a vineyard with slightly deeper soil smelled of blueberries and cinnamon. A Corton Villages boasted an explosive raspberry flavor and a long spicy finish. Rémy described a Volnay as unctuous and concentrated, a Nuits-Saint-Georges as shapely and more incisive and called the Gevrey Chambertin “large.” Of a Vosne Romanée, for which words failed me, Rémy said the wine could “run on forever”— as if it were coiled, ready to release energy over a long span of time, in terms of both years (it could age in the bottle) and minutes (its sensations lasted on the palate). The wine was “aerien,” its tannins melted away. “Il a tout,” he finally said. “It has it all.” I was left with the impression of wines that broadened my understanding of what a wine could be: the suggestion of so many flowers, fruits and spices; exquisite subtlety such that I felt as if the wine were almost teasing me; myriad changing and evolving sensations.
Then came my 2023 wines. The fermentations had gone smoothly, but I wondered if we had made subsequent errors that the wines would belie. There was the day I had found a tank left open—how much air had the wine been exposed to? And I was worried that the barrels might have bacteria, despite our careful rinsing and regular sulfuring of them. Rémy commented on the purity of the Sangiovese, its freshness, red fruit flavors and fine-grained texture—to my great relief. That was already so much of what I was after! A sample from a ceramic container had soft tannins and blackberry flavors, richness and complexity (those containers are magic; I thought); the same wine from a barrel seemed tighter and dryer (we needed to improve our work with barrels, I knew).
We tasted my bottled wines, too, the 2019s, 2020s and 2021s, and agreed the quality had leapt ahead with each vintage. The 2019s were typical Tuscan Sangioveses in their dark fruit accents, with a nice velvety texture but not as much lift and verve as later bottlings. The 2020s had both dark and red fruit flavors, tasted more precise (I could pick out the single flavors and aromas) and were more complex, and the 2021s were a real turning point. While the Toscano wasn’t particularly concentrated, it was full, its tannins fine and its finish smooth. The Villaggio was more concentrated, with even finer tannins and a supple body. The scope of my wines was more limited than that of the Burgundies we had tasted, yet, my wines struck me as speaking the same language as the Burgundies, as striking some of the same notes. I was overjoyed. I felt I had demonstrated that I was on the right track.
I had sent ahead bottles of Tuscan wines, a dozen each of Chianti Classico and Brunello di Montalcino. These wines are the standard-bearers in my region, and I wanted to understand their strengths and weaknesses in detail. One observation we had made two years earlier at an exhaustive tasting of more than 50 of Tuscany’s most famous and expensive wines, was that Sangiovese was rarely picked at perfect ripeness. But that was too subjective a parameter. I wanted to know if there were even-more-concrete parameters characterizing the wines.
What we found was surprising. A number of the bottles were infected with a fungus[2] that gave them a barnyard smell, suffocated more positive characteristics and left them with a dry finish. Rémy assured me that we would have found the same defects if we had tasted a random sample of French wines. Still, this was a shock to me—some of these wines cost hundreds of euros and were touted throughout the wine world, in the press and among professionals, as the best Italian wines on the market. I knew that part of their success was due to hype, but I assumed their handsomely-paid oenologists would not allow such clunky errors into their wines. There were other problems–overextraction[3] had left many of the wines astringent. On the other hand, one wine was delicate, with black cherry flavors and a soft finish; another lacked a “note magique” but was technically correct. One was “dark, rich, technical,” and another, we agreed, “was fresh and pleasant to drink.”
A 2004 bottle of one of the wines we tasted that day had been seminal in the creation of Fanciulle; its ethereal rose aromas and tingling, pure cherry flavor had made me see Sangiovese’s potential for subtlety, complexity and grace. Likewise, learning about the geology of Tuscany and the components of its soils convinced me of the possibility of making a wide range of very fine wines here, as terroir-driven as the best Burgundies. Already then, I knew my wines would not be like what was already on the market. These wines’ styles had formed over centuries. Nor would they be like the Burgundies I loved—Sangiovese is a different grape, Tuscan soils are different. They would be something new.
Rémy drove me to the train station, and while we were in the car, he asked me which of the wines we had tasted I held as models.
“Honestly,” I told him, “Those are not what I’m trying to make.”
He laughed, and said, “Your 2021s are on the right track.”
[1] The Fanciulle wines are not “blends” in the traditional sense, not mixtures of wines made from different grape varieties or of grapes coming from different vineyards. They are all Sangiovese, and each wine is made from grapes grown on a single vineyard. However, once a vineyard’s grapes are brought into the cellar and fermented in a tank of, let’s say, 1000 litres [260 gallons], that tank’s wine is split across a few aging containers, usually a couple of barrels and some ceramic. Deciding on the blend for a Fanciulle wine means deciding if all those containers’ wines will make it into the wine that will be bottled, because occasionally a barrel is deemed especially good and bottled by itself as a separate label or not good enough, in which case it’s sold in bulk.
[2] Brettanomyces is a yeast present on grape skins. Given an acidic and sugary context, it can produce among other smells phenols (barnyard, Band-Aid, antiseptic), considered defects in wine.
[3] Meaning that during fermentation, the musts had been pumped too much, such that too much or the wrong tannins had been extracted.
I still can’t believe the prevalence of fungus in even the top Tuscan wines. Thank you for sharing this.