The Prince and
His Magic Cellar
by Eric Asimov, The New York Times
Rome. In a secluded back room of a hotel not
far from the Trevi Fountain, a dozen glasses
of Italian white wine sat before each of a
small group of tasters. All were used to this
sort of thing and, really, how exciting are
most Italian white wines? Six were made from
malvasia di Candia, ordinarily a workmanlike
grape not known for producing great table wines,
yet these were astonishing.
The oldest, a 1978, was dry
and fresh, with aromas of flowers, honey
and minerals. The
flavors seemed to linger in the mouth forever.
The wine in the other glasses was sémillon,
the backbone of great white Bordeaux but practically
nonexistent in Italy. Yet these wines were
even more astounding than the malvasias. The
oldest, a 1971, had the lively mineral flavor
of a fine Puligny-Montrachet.
The older the wines got, the younger they
tasted. They seemed almost magical, and indeed
the story of these wines has a fairy tale quality
to it.
Once upon a time there was a prince. By most
accounts he was not so much charming as eccentric.
His name was Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi,
prince of Venosa, and his family, which can
be traced back at least 1,000 years, includes
two popes.
The prince lived on an estate, Fiorano, on
the outskirts of Rome near the Via Appia Antica,
the ancient Appian Way. There he grew wheat,
raised dairy cows and made three wines, one
red and two whites, from a small vineyard.
The vineyard had been planted with the local
grapes that make the sort of nondescript wines
typical of Latium, the region centered on Rome.
But in 1946, when the prince
inherited Fiorano, he replanted the vineyard
with cabernet sauvignon
and merlot, long before these Bordeaux grapes
became familiar in Italy, and malvasia and
sémillon. The prince practiced organic
agriculture in an era when others embraced
chemical sprays. He kept his yields ridiculously
low, resulting in minute quantities of intense,
concentrated wines, and he did not filter them.
He aged the wine in large numbered barrels,
which he reused year after year. A fine white
mold grew naturally in his cellar, covering
the barrels and the bottles that he stored
in neat stacks. The prince did nothing to remove
it; he believed it was beneficial. Few people
knew of the wines, but their reputation was
excellent.
"The greatness of Fiorano is a secret
shared by a few," wrote Burton Anderson
in "Vino," his 1980 guide to Italian
wine.
The red made the most profound
impression. Italian white wines were thought
to be inconsequential,
and few paid attention to the prince's whites,
though Mr. Anderson called the sémillon "the
most refined wine of its type and a rarity
in Italy."
One who was in on the Fiorano
secret was Luigi Veronelli, a leading Italian
wine writer who
regularly rhapsodized about the wines. He liked
the reds well enough, comparing them to Sassicaia,
the Tuscan Bordeaux blend that became famous
in the 1970's. But he loved the whites. He
was among the first to note their potential
for aging, and he bemoaned their scarcity. "To
obtain his cru is practically impossible," Mr.
Veronelli once wrote. "If I lived in Rome,
I’d beg for them at the prince's door
every morning."
By all reports the prince was strong-willed
and stubborn. He was elusive and rarely spoke
to business associates. Mr. Anderson said he
never met him. Neil Empson, who exported Fiorano
wines to the United States in the 1970's, also
never met him or saw the winery. He dealt only
with a secretary.
"He was a rather strange person to do
business with," Mr. Empson said in a telephone
interview. "You had to pay him when you
made the order, and he would ship whatever
he wanted to ship, not what you ordered."
Mr. Empson said this caused him to stop doing
business with the prince, and eventually he
lost track of the wines. The aging prince continued
to make his wines until 1995, although he had
stopped selling the bottles. After the '95
harvest he pulled out all the vines in his
vineyard, except for a small plot of cabernet
and merlot. He offered no explanation, and
at the time none was asked.
The prince is now 86 years old, in ill health
and living in a hotel in Rome. He had one child,
Francesca, who married Piero Antinori, the
eminent Tuscan winemaker, at the Fiorano estate
in 1966. Mr. Antinori suggests today that the
prince was unable to bear the thought of anybody
else making his wines when he could no longer
do it.
" He is so in love with this estate,
and when you are very much in love, you are
also a bit jealous," Mr. Antinori said
by phone. "When he was not able to do
it himself in the old way, probably he preferred
to give up."
And so the vineyards lie fallow. And 14,000
bottles remained in the prince's cellar, slowly
becoming engulfed by the white mold, until
2000, when Mr. Veronelli, seeking to publicize
some Roman wines in connection with a bicycle
race, sought an audience with the prince. It
was then, Mr. Veronelli said, that he learned
of the destruction of the vines.
Mr. Veronelli requested a sample
of one of the remaining bottles and sent
an emissary,
Filippo Polidori, a restaurateur and television
personality, to pick it up. After being kept
waiting for 90 minutes, Mr. Polidori said at
the tasting in Rome, a secretary told him that
Mr. Veronelli could not have one bottle, but
he could have all 14,000 — 9,500 of the
malvasia and 4,500 of the sémillon — if
he could disperse them properly.
Mr. Polidori said the prince wanted the bottles
to be treated as a legacy, and not consumed
right away. But first the bottles, mostly from
the 1985 to '95 vintages, which had lain untended
in the cellar for years, needed to be cleaned
and cataloged. It took two people almost a
year to complete the task.
Mr. Veronelli and Mr. Polidori then held a
series of tastings, looking for the right people
to disperse the wines. They eventually settled
on three: Andrea Carelli, an Italian wine broker,
who would handle the European and Asian markets;
Paolo Domeneghetti, an importer in New York,
who will handle American restaurant sales;
and Sergio Esposito, managing partner of Italian
Wine Merchants near Union Square, who will
handle American retail sales.
Mr. Esposito, who was invited
to a tasting, said he had never heard of
the wines, and could
only find vague references in old catalogs. "At
the tasting I was completely overtaken by the
wines and fell in love with them," he
said. "To me, they are treasures. They're
wines made from grapes that nobody knew could
make wines like that. They had no history.
It was one person's devotion."
Highlights from the Rome tasting
stand out: a 1982 malvasia with flavors of
apples, minerals
and pears; a 1980 sémillon that tasted
of hazelnuts and wax and seemed impossibly
young. As the wines aged, the youthful acidity
seemed to give way to mineral, earthy flavors.
Yet unaccountably, in contrast to most white
wines, which get darker with age, the golden
colors of the young wines turned pale as they
got older. How to explain this?
Mr. Esposito suggests that
the prince was correct about the white mold. "He was
so in tune with his surroundings that he had
confidence the mold was O.K.," he said. "I
think it was much like how blue cheese was
discovered. It's blue and you're eating it
and it's O.K."
Mr. Esposito said he plans
to sell his allocation slowly over the course
of five years, aiming
for collectors who allow them to age. He is
also planning to hold back bottles from each
vintage for charity tastings. "I want
to participate in these tastings for the next
20 or 30 years and see how they develop," he
said.
As much as these wines are
a legacy of the prince, they are too a legacy
of Mr. Veronelli,
who died in November at 78. Of these wines,
which will never be produced again, he wrote, "They
enchant you with the first taste, burrow in
your memory and make you forever better."
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