LESS IS MORE
Italian grape guru talks fine wine
Italian Alberto Antonini is out to change the way the world makes wines. Actually, he’s not that arrogant, nor would he dream of making such an outrageous statement. What he might say is that it is better to express the land and the grapes in your wine instead of the barrels and the winemaking, something he tries to do wherever the job takes him.
Antonini grew up in Tuscany and runs the family estate, Poggiotondo, in Cerreto Guidi (near Florence in Tuscany).
He started his career as an assistant winemaker at the Frescobaldi Winery before becoming the technical director at the Col D’Orcia Winery in Montalcino. From Montalcino he became the head winemaker at the Antinori winery before starting his own consulting business in 1997. Today he is widely considered among the top five wine consultants anywhere in the world, and he works in a lot of places.
Antonini was in Vancouver last week to launch his latest wine venture Bodega Garzón. The Uruguayan, Leeds-certified winery was swamped during the Vancouver International Wine Festival last month, stunning locals with its two principal wines: a red made from Tannat and a white made from Albariño. Antonini poured more than a dozen Garzón labels last week, taking the time to point out why they are truly different than most wines.
Antonini talks a lot about terroir and he uses words like purity and energy to describe his wines and the importance of “understanding first the place where you are growing the grapes and making the wines, and then, to sell wines that are delivering the essence of the place where the grapes are grown.”
It may explain why none of them is listed in government wine stores where it appears tried and true commercial wines, with plenty of oak and sugar, remain the key listing requirements.
He hates over-extraction and all the unnecessary additives that end up in modern wine. He likens it to adding three layers of barbecue sauce to a perfect piece of beef or 10 different pizza toppings versus the simplicity of a Margherita pizza.
Less is more is his philosophy.
“If you want to get more you have to do less, because Mother Nature has provided us with all we need for making something great,” he says. “You only have to use your experience, your knowledge and all your mistakes to be able to do much less, which means that doing less means to know a lot more.”
The problem, as Antonini sees it, is that some people don’t understand the concept very well because “they believe doing less is easier, but in fact, it’s far more difficult. That’s what we are trying to do. If you want to get a lot you can’t do too much to distract the wine from its own life and avenue to expressing the essence of the place it’s from.”
What worries him at the start of any venture is having the right parts. At Garzón, “all the ingredients are all on the table; it’s just a question of understanding of how to put them together. There is great commitment at Garzón and Uruguay in general to make Uruguay a more interesting and well-known wine culture and I think we will get there. They are just missing a little bit of confidence in believing that they can be a lot more important than what they are now, but that will come.”
Antonini left the tasting, heading for Okanagan Crush Pad and Summerland’s Garnett Valley, where his first wines made with winemaker Matt Dumayne are ready to be tasted. The Garnett project will be a classic, less is more, adventure.
“All the actors of this movie are very experienced people, each in his own field, so we are comfortable to let the place play the main role in the film,” he said. “You can only do that when you have enough confidence in yourself, when you have gone through enough mistakes in your career, and you know your experience can support such a natural project in the way of letting the place and grapes express the beauty and the uniqueness of that terroir.”
Antonini hopes the ultimate story of Garnett will be simple in the sense of letting people enjoy the greatness of its unique terroir. In the end, great wines are born from very special places, and “they are made by people who understand the importance of the place and where they forget about showing themselves.”