Iris Duplantier Rideau is a legend and, at 85 years old, is finally getting the attention she deserves. She is Creole, born in New Orleans of mixed cultures and race; became a prominent businesswoman and social activist in Los Angeles; and then opened Rideau Vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley of Santa Barbara, becoming the first Black woman to own a commercial winery in the U.S.
Ottin Elio, based in Aosta, is a small family winery and farm that works organically mostly focused around native varietals. In addition to wine they also farm apples and breed cattle. Grape Collective talks to Nicolas Ottin about the family farm and the evolution of the Valle d'Aosta.
As Leonardo Beconcini tells it, the story of his winery begins in the early 1950s in the Colline Pisane appellation of Chianti. That’s when his grandfather Giuseppe, a sharecropper at the Marchesi Ridolfi estate, purchased the land he had been renting to start his own company of growing and selling agricultural products—everything from fruits and cereals to livestock. It wasn’t until Leonardo’s father, Pietro, took over the business that the focus turned solely to the making of simple Chianti red wine, typical of that time period, sold in straw-covered bottles called fiascos.
Like many of the next generation who take the reins from their elders, Leonardo wanted to improve the quality of what his father had given him. It was the 1990s and wine consumers were becoming more discerning about what they were drinking. He needed to have a better understanding of his vineyards if he wanted to improve the wines, so he began extensive research studies of the local environment. This undertaking led him to two local Sangiovese clones that he believed would make more exciting wines and which are now planted in his vineyards.
Beconcini's research also led to a fascinating discovery of what was then an unknown variety growing amongst the Sangiovese vines, and which he simply labeled 'X.' He was so impressed by the quality of the wine that these mysterious vines produced that he continued to cultivate them. It took more than eleven years and DNA analysis to identify the grapes as Tempranillo.
Most likely the variety had arrived in Chianti centuries ago, brought by religious pilgrims traveling along the ancient Via Francigena which runs through his wine estate. Today the winery produces the only commercially-produced Tuscan Tempranillo wines, two red and one rosé. The winery's portfolio also includes red and white wines from classic Italian varieties of Sangiovese, Malvasia and Trebbiano.
I caught up with Eva Beconcini, co-owner of the winery with her husband, to learn more about this innovative winery and what it’s like to be a small, organic wine producer making artisanal wine in a region with many big industrial producers.
Lisa Denning: Can you tell me a little bit about your winery?
Eva Beconcini: We are between Pisa and Florence, in San Miniato. It’s a wonderful city; a fantastic place and the town of the white truffle in Tuscany. We are an appellation of Chianti Colline Pisane but we only write Chianti on the label and we are in the new DOC Terra di Pisa. For the entire life of my father-in-law he was producing Chianti in fiasco, the straw bottle, so that is our roots, our tradition that we respect and we love and is a part of our blood. This is the winery of my husband, and we work together, but Leonardo is really the man behind everything because he knows the vineyards and all the vines and everything in the cellar as the winemaker. For three years we have also been working with an enologist who has entered the winery with respect for the work that my husband has been doing for years. He helps us to not have such heavy weight on our shoulders because we produce many wines and we have a lot of things to do and so it’s a good marriage.
We have been certified organic for 6 years and in the vineyards we do everything to maintain the fertility of the soil, like with manure, with planting cover crops, but in the cellar we really do nothing. During the past two years we have done some restyling of the cellar but we don’t really use high-technology; we do everything with our hands. We are creating at this moment a new cellar so we have bought a lot of vineyards, as well as land without vineyards where we have planted vineyards, in order to define our project for our winery. And we are very excited to start this project.
We use only our grapes from our own vineyards and we use only the yeast from the skins. We have started to do some white wines, but red winemaking is at our core. All the studies we do in our vineyards are used to make more types of wines. For example, we have found that Malvasia Nera, an ancient grape variety, can make wonderful wines and so we said, let’s do something interesting with it.
Can you tell me a little more about your location in Chianti; the terroir and how it influences your wines?
Our land used to be on the bottom of the sea 20 million years ago, so the soil is full of fossil shells; it’s white and gray. You walk on shells in the vineyards. We have a lot of white clay too and the shells are crushed and mixed into the clay. We have a lot of water under the soil. Our vines are not in stress, never, even in the summer when it is very warm because the roots are really deep. We really work the soil a lot during the autumn and winter as the clay is very compact and you have to crush it for the roots to go down and down.
As for the climate, we are between three rivers, the River Arno, the main river of Tuscany, the River Elsa, and the River Egola. It’s very important to speak about the rivers because the climate is mild—we are under the Apennines and all the cold winds are stopped by these two mountain chain...
We toured Texas Wine Country for a few days and here are some brief impressions from first-time visitors.
--Texas’s signature red will be Tempranillo and white will be Viognier – or not. We’re starting with this because it’s marvelously controversial. Texas is so large that many in the industry don’t think it needs or can have a signature. We’d argue that wine regions require one or two to cut through the noise: New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, Malbec from Argentina, and even New Mexico sparkling wine, for instance. “You do want to be known for something,” said Patrick Connelly, general manager of highly respected Becker Vineyard...
Turning on to the drive leading up to the Riofavara Vineyards in Val di Noto, the first thing you notice is all the plant and animal life thriving around you. The biodiversity on the vineyard is evident from the gate, butterflies abundant and flora in full bloom. Massimo Padova and his family have been growing vines for generations but only began bottling their own juice in 1993.
We almost didn’t write this column. We were approaching a special wedding anniversary -- which ones aren’t special? -- and we thought we’d return to Napa and Sonoma Wine Country to celebrate. We’d simply drive around to see the places that had sowed some of the seeds of who we’ve become, personally and professionally, since our first visit in 1975.
The challenge for the gin lover is to find the true craftspeople of the gin world, to separate them from the herd. In that light, Greenhook and Steven DeAngelo almost belong in their own category, that of gin made not out of necessity but by design.
Sometimes you just fall in love with a wine, right? If it’s a magnum and it’s a Burgundy, that helps, but we’d guess most wine lovers remember a bottle – or two, or three – that they simply fell for, regardless of price or pedigree. That happened to us recently and here’s the story, which, like any good love story, has some angst in the middle but ultimately a happy ending.
Pinot Noir is known as the heartbreak grape. A thin-skinned variety that easily succumbs to disease, it requires just the right climatic conditions to thrive: a cool climate with plenty of fruit-ripening sunshine. In places like California, where the weather can get extremely hot, the grape does well in cooler areas close to the Pacific Ocean. One place the grape has been able to shine is Sonoma County, a vast area whose topography includes more than 55 miles of breathtaking Pacific coastline.
A couple questions intrigued us in 2000 about the lack of progress in figuring out why some people suffered headaches after drinking wine. We were told then that there are dedicated opponents to alcohol consumption, no matter how moderate the consumption, inside and outside government. Modern prohibitionists are mounting efforts right now to further flag wine and other beverage alcohol as injurious to your health.
