An
Italian Prince and His Magic Cellar
December 22, 2004, The New York
Times
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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