Uncorked (10 page)

If you think organic means hippy-dippy, you’ve never met Laura (Avogadro dei Conti di Valdengo e) Collobiano, the vineyard’s proprietor, along with her husband Moreno. Laura, winner of the prestigious journal
Gambero Rosso
’s “Organic Winemaker of the Year” in 2008, favors an androgynous uniform of man’s jacket over jeans and sturdy boots. She operates her vineyard with a demanding intensity. I certainly didn’t have to worry about her prancing naked through the fields.

As we walked down the rejuvenated main street that runs along the service part of the estate, Laura spoke of her mission to revitalize the whole forty-acre farm. Unlike the wealthy English who’ve long taken refuge in Lucca’s estates, Laura’s focus was not just on cosmetic restoration but also on rejuvenation of the entire system on which these estates originally operated: a self-sustaining farm with livestock and vegetables. This was the fattoria reborn.

We’d arrived in the middle of bottling, and the vineyard was abuzz. In an open graveled area, a specially outfitted truck filled, corked, capped, and labeled the wines in one shot. As the truck spewed diesel exhaust, the clatter was deafening, and to my relief, as far as I could see, no one was chanting or strewing crystals. Far from the churning assembly line, lunch was a familiar exercise in studied informality. We sat in the kitchen, but the kitchen
was monumental: sixteen-foot ceilings, massive cast iron cookers topped with bubbling pots attended by uniformed women in aprons. In front of the table were glass doors opening up to a graveled terrace dotted with potted lemon trees, framed by stone railings, and looking out toward olive tree–covered mountains beyond.

The menu was deceptively simple: spaghetti ai frutti di mare, a seafood pasta. Only later did Laura (whose equally fastidious uncle was Giovanni Agnelli, the legendary scion of the Fiat family) reveal that the fish had been bought directly from a fisherman in Viareggio and that the pasta had been brought from a favored supplier in Naples. No wonder she finds the rigors of biodynamism so appealing. With its prescription-size preparations and demanding schedule, biodynamic farming seems tailor-made for obsessives; no Type A wants just to sit and watch grapes grow.

As Laura uncorked the first bottle of her basic Tenuta di Valgiano red, I was wondering whether I’d be able to taste the benefits of all this attention to detail. As I swirled the glass, the first sniff was promising. The wine smelled like a bowl of ripe fruit, without any obvious defects. No sawdusty wood odors, no sinus-clearing alcoholic bite, no whiff of decay. Just a big bunch of plump grapes. The taste was also full, velvety, and brimming with fruit essence.

In truth, it was hard to tell if some of this clarity was due to the cow’s horn or just to good organic farming. Or was that purity a result of some other aspect of Laura’s demanding regimen? At Valgiano, for example, the grapes are crushed within three hours of picking. Could the wine’s pure taste actually be the result of the quick processing of the picked bunches?

Over lunch, Laura espoused passions similar to those of Monsieur
Tissot, but she emphasized the natural over the mystical. It was as if they had entirely different readings of the same religious text. Her focus was more on responsible agriculture than on supernatural viscera: crop rotations to build the soil and butterflies to eat pesky aphids. I was familiar with stinging nettles, having stepped on my share as a kid. If you brush up against
ortica
, as it’s known in Tuscan dialect, you won’t want to touch it again. I could see why a bug wouldn’t either. Despite the exotic recipes, a lot of these preparations come down to the use of rotting organic matter. And even I know that compost seems to be good for almost everything you’d want to grow. Much of the other practices (e.g., no pesticides, no hormones) fall into the mainstream of sensible organic agriculture.

Laura was considerably more dogmatic on one common winemaking technique that has nothing to do with biodynamism: mixing grapes. Europeans traditionally have blended varietals, whereas we Americans tend to be grape-fixated. We want pure Chardonnays and pure Pinot Noirs; they combine varietals to improve wines. Purity, Laura reminded me, doesn’t mean sticking to one grape. In Valgiano’s case, Sangiovese, the foundation of the most revered Tuscan wine, Brunello di Montalcino, can be tannic (as in mouth-puckering) when young. To offset its bite, Laura adds round and mellow Merlot as well as rich Syrah. The result is a wine that will age well (those tannins soften over the years) and has a deep lingering taste without the harshness of pure Sangiovese.

Harder to swallow was her contention, one that she shares with many of her biodynamic colleagues, that her wines have more
terroir
, or “sense of place,” than those farmed by conventional
methods. The idea sounds so good: Who wouldn’t want to have more local character in an increasingly global and homogenized world? The trouble is that whereas Laura grows the types of grapes that are on her plot of land (Sangiovese, Merlot, Syrah, and, for her white wines, Malvasia, Trebbiano, and Vermentino), no one else nearby makes the same blend. It’s not like going to Saint-Émilion in France, where winemakers traditionally have adhered to a specific ratio of grapes (70 percent Merlot, 15 percent Cabernet Franc, and 15 percent Cabernet Sauvignon). Crack open a Premier Cru, right-bank Bordeaux and even a slightly tutored neophyte can identify it. This is not the case in Lucca’s foothills. Laura’s wine may taste like her patch of earth or not, but there isn’t much basis for comparison or a tradition of making that particular blend. Indeed, red wines of similar richness and depth are now found throughout the world. Her fresh and full wines, the products of cutting-edge techniques, arguably tell you more about when they were made than where. After our meal, we emerged from an ancient tunnel under the villa to continue our discussion. I got the feeling that Laura, like many biodynamic winemakers, treats the astrological part of Steiner’s theories the way we treat horoscopes. It’s not that I fear Mercury in retrograde, but just in case, I’m not going to push it either.

Other winemakers are harder to read. Certainly, most acknowledge that biodynamics has become shorthand for “I care more about my vineyard” and therefore a powerful marketing tool. Tyler Colman, an acquaintance and the writer of the popular
Dr. Vino
blog, described a conversation he had with a well-known Napa vintner. Even though the winemaker wasn’t a true believer, he switched his vineyard to biodynamic farming because, he said, “at his price point, everything is extremely competitive, and he didn’t want to allow his competitors who were practicing biodynamics to have any sort of an advantage.”

What is clear is that biodynamic farmers tend to be skilled and successful, able to trade lower yields for higher prices. And although there’s no direct correlation between biodynamism and wine quality, biodynamic wines do tend to taste better than their more conventionally made counterparts. They also include some of the most experienced and esteemed names in the business: Nicolas Joly, Leroy, Zind-Humbrecht, Weinbach, Deiss, Chapoutier, Gravner, Domaine Leflaive, Alvaro Palacios, and some Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (the scarcest, most expensive, and, frequently, best wine in the world). No one can accuse these guys of being loopy. Savvy? Yes. Cynical? Maybe. Nutty? Not a chance. One thing was for sure: biodynamic wine would definitely have a place in our store.

It’s hard not to be seduced by the romance of winemaking, which is fine for someone splurging on something to sip with his risotto but dangerous for a wineshop owner. You can do a lot of crazy things for love, and getting stuck with fifty cases of expensive and incredibly well-made wine that won’t be drinkable for another five years is one of them. My livelihood depends on keeping enchantment in check.

Despite the temptations, our shop was making money as we ended our first year. The problem was that the building renovation demanded more cash than the store—and our savings—could supply. After a year of celebration, I suspected a hangover was coming at the end of 2006. But I was determined to end the year as festively as we had begun it.

For our first Christmas party, we created a live nativity scene.
The store was strewn with hay, and we set up a tented manger in the enoteca that featured a Nebuchadnezzar (equivalent to twenty regular-size bottles) of Bellenda (“Bethlehem” Prosecco) in the cradle. We dressed in diaphanous white robes. With his curly blond locks, Luca would have looked better in the cradle, but try getting an eighteen-month-old toddler to sit still. We even borrowed a real camel from the holiday show at Radio City Music Hall.

Our place was packed. The camel was stationed in front of the store. Outside, I could read the lips of passing drivers as they mouthed, “Oh, my God.” Soon, a small crowd blocked the entrance and cameras were flashing just like at a movie premiere. The year-end bash felt like a bookend to our opening party as once again the store was filled with smiling neighbors, customers, and friends.

That is, until I saw who Janet was kissing in the back corner of the enoteca. “This,” I thought, “could change everything.”

chapter 4