Andrea Franchetti is worrying about a door.
It's two days before the Contrada dell'Etna, the main seasonal tasting of Etna wines, and Franchetti is hosting the event at his winery, in the new salon behind his main winery building. A cre...
Andrea Franchetti is worrying about a door.
It's two days before the Contrada dell'Etna, the main seasonal tasting of Etna wines, and Franchetti is hosting the event at his winery, in the new salon behind his main winery building. A crew of workers is busy pressure testing the fountain that has also recently been installed in the courtyard in the fading light of the afternoon.
My Italian is poor, so I can't quite tell just how annoyed the soft-spoken Franchetti is, but it's clear he's not happy that the doors to his tasting salon are hanging a good inch above the marble floors.
He's asking some stern and perhaps slightly exasperated questions of one of his workman while wearing a blue sport coat, a pink shirt, thick-rimmed black eyeglasses that are half nerdy, half chic, and if the massive white bandage on his nose is any indication, having just completed some sort of minor surgical procedure on his face.
The scene balances right on the edge of comedy, but doesn't topple over the line into farce, if only because Franchetti seems at once both entirely earnest, and not the least self conscious about the whole thing. He's clearly really excited about the upcoming event and wants things to go right.
Franchetti follows me into the modest tasting room at Passopisciaro Winery that sits at the back of his ancient stone winery, and after a bit of what is clearly antsyness, asks if perhaps I'd like to taste the wines with one of his marketing folks, and then after have a conversation. He is clearly worried about his door, and I am more than happy to focus on the wines first. With a relieved smile, he heads back out into the courtyard, and I sit down to his remarkable lineup of wines.
Andrea Franchetti is acknowledged as one of the early pioneers in the current renaissance of Etna wines. Which, given the youth of the industry, means that he's been making wine on Etna since 2001, which was the year after he came to Sicily on vacation and couldn't manage to cool down.
"I went to Syracuse on vacation and it was too hot," he says. "I kept driving around looking for someplace that was less hot. I turned the corner and it got much colder, and there were vineyards everywhere. Right away, you could see how extraordinary it was for wine."
Franchetti had already proven to the world the quality of his intuition about terroir.
"I had a ruin of a house, and I mean a ruin, in Tuscany that I bought in 1981" he says. "I went to work distributing wine in New York for 12 years, and when I came back to that ruin, I always felt like I never wanted to go back to a city. So I basically came up with a way to stay there. I went to Bordeaux and learned a bit about making wine. I'll give you a hint -- the most interesting thing you can do in Bordeaux is pruning and doing the vines -- that was my most important learning."
In 1992, Franchetti planted a vineyard in an unremarkable sheep pasture in the Val d'Orcia region of Tuscany, east of Montalcino near the border with Umbria. From the Bordeaux varieties he planted there, with an emphasis on Cabernet Franc, Franchetti created the critically acclaimed Tenuta di Trinoro, a wine which played a role in the rise of the Super Tuscan movement in the region. Called "the Tuscan Cheval Blanc" by some admirers, Tenuta di Trinoro brought Franchetti to international prominence as a singleminded, if somewhat eccentric winemaker to watch.
On Etna, you might say he found his second calling. But it took him a little while to understand what the place was telling him.
"To be honest, I wasn't really interested in the local varieties," says Franchetti, "I just thought Etna would be a good place for winemaking. Everything here on Etna was for sale -- completely abandoned. This property was all decrepit. The person who sold it to me named a figure and I offered him 25% of the price, and he said OK. The problem with Etna is that it is so difficult to work here."
Franchetti started rehabilitating the old viney