An
Italian Prince and His Magic Cellar
To say you have sampled the wines of the Fiorano estate would put
you in the elite few. The rare and highly regarded wines come from
the international varietals of Cabernet
Sauvignon and Merlot for the Rosso and Malvasia di Candia for
the Bianco, and lastly a white wine made from the Semillon grape.
Fiorano is the wine estate of Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, the prince
of Verosa. The estate is located in the region of Lazio. The wines
are the product of a dedicated and passionate prince whose avant garde
approach was way ahead of its time. His whites took on a phenomenon
for their ability to age, but became a true rarity as the prince was
elusive and did not care to put the wines in the wrong hands. The
story of the prince and his forgotten bottles is truly a gift to be
shared and was captured by The New York Times chief wine critic, Eric
Asimov in the December 22, 2004 edition of The New York Times. Read
the actual article below...
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, tracing 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."
by Eric Asimov
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