In the first of a summer series of highlights from The World of Fine Wine’s extensive archive of travel writing from the world’s wine regions, Bruce Schoenfeld recounts the highlights of a memorable, if belated, first visit to Corsica from WFW60 in 2018.
Napoleon stands on a high granite ramp against a background of olive trees and maquis-covered hills. Planted on his native rock, he stares somberly out to sea, symbol of that determination of the Corsicans, illustrated all throughout their history, to overcome obscurity and isolation, to impose themselves on circumstances, men, the world.
—Dorothy Carrington, Granite Island
Corsica, someone once said, is shaped like a rat on its head. That stayed with me. I found reasons not to visit. The island seemed dense and unknowable. It looked at the world through narrowed eyes. But eventually circumstances led me there, and I despaired when I had to leave.
It’s beautiful, for one thing. Steep hills are capped with dense forest, like a hairstyle. Beaches are vast and often empty. Days dawn with a fierce clarity. And the water that separates the Corsicans from the mainland has created a singular people who are nothing if not authentic. Nobody put on a show for me.
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Pisa colonized Corsica’s bottom half and adorned it with Romanesque architecture. The Republic of Genoa, which overran the north, defeated the Pisans in 1284 but couldn’t consolidate its rule until nearly 1500. At about that time, the Sangiovese grape—the ancestor of today’s mutated Niellucciu—was introduced on the island. Corsican wines gained a reputation for excellence, but exports were banned to any port except Genoa.
By 1993, the year I started writing about wine, that prohibition had long faded into obscurity. But you wouldn’t have known it. When was the first time you had a Corsican wine? Was it after the century turned? Was it within the past decade?
Over the past few years, I became aware of several producers. It happened, as Hemingway wrote of bankruptcy, in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. I read about Arena somewhere. A restaurant here in Colorado did a tasting of Abbatucci. I drank a glass of amphora-aged Canarelli. Soon I was noticing them everywhere.
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These wines are Corsican in the same way that Beaucastel, Cheval Blanc, and Schlumberger are French. Only when I arrived did I realize how little they have to do with each other. Much of that involves transportation. Corsica isn’t a huge island, only about one third the size of Sicily, but travel is difficult unless you’re breezing down T-10 along the east coast. Villages can be an hour apart by car even if they’re 10 miles (16km) away as the crow flies, and that’s assuming the crow doesn’t get lost. Local affiliation dominates. If you live in Bastia, you’re Bastiais by inclination, spiritually Haute-Corsican, only officially Corsican, and nominally French.
Domaine Comte Abbatucci sits in the AOC Ajaccio, which consists of seven distinct subzones that surround the capital on the west coast like sand traps around a green. Domaine Antoine Arena is in the far opposite corner, the U-shaped AOC of Patrimonio. That hugs a bay on the north coast, not far from Corsica’s second city of Bastia. And Clos Canarelli is part of Corse Figari, heralded as the southernmost appellation of France.
There’s another winery of renown, Domaine d’Alzipratu, on the northwestern coast. But I spent my time on Corsica in yet another appellation, AOC Corse, which stretches along the eastern shoreline from about half an hour south of Bastia down nearly to Porto-Vecchio. It also juts an hour inland to a small patch in the interior, an area that surprised even Carrington with “the magnitude of its desolation.”
That’s where I was headed on a late summer afternoon, being driven in a small car by a Corsican who seemed to know the way. Nevertheless, the journey seemed interminable. Halfway there, we came across a roadside restaurant that he hadn’t seen. We ate wild boar and drank the local rosé. Then we set out again, winding between the hillsides covered with the maquis. “Just half an hour more,” he told me. And then, 15 minutes later, he said it again. It is the mantra of Corsica.
Vico, Venturi, and Canerecchia
I have visited wineries as remote as Domaine Vico, but not many. The surrounding landscape is the kind of setting that soldiers get sent to for survival training. It looks like somewhere that Mr Kurtz would turn up dead.
The vast regional appellation of AOC Corse contains 20 wineries. Nineteen are in some measure coastal. Vico, which also includes the wines of Clos Venturi, sits outside the village of Ponte Lecchia. Corsica is an island, yet I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Ponte Lecchia’s inhabitants had never seen the water. Carrington again: “I felt dwarfed, engulfed, as though penetrating a continent as yet barely explored… I never quite overcame this sensation of being swallowed by the landscape.” Though her book was published in 1971, she would recognize the Corsican interior today. She might not even realize that time had passed.
Corsica has homogenous soil, mostly granite throughout. But there in the province of Morosaglia, two upheavals have created a complex geoscape. The winery’s holdings consist of two parcels, set 3.7 miles (6km) apart. Domaine Vico’s vines are planted on young dirt, studded with schist and basalt. Clos Venturi’s setting is Miocene and almost entirely sandstone. The expression of the grape varieties that results is formidably different.
And those grape varieties! Between the two sites, the Venturis have planted Syrah and Grenache, and Aglianico and Niellucciu and Sciaciarello. There’s Biancu Gentile, of course, and Genovese, and the inevitable Vermentinu, as well as Riminse and Carcaghjolu and also Minostro and Nero Bueno and Cualtaccio. And did I mention the Vintaghjolu, the only example of it on Corsica?
This fecundity seems perverse, until you remember that Vico has no similarities with any other producer, on or off the island. It stands alone, literally and figuratively. What grows best in those distinctive terroirs outside Ponte Lecchia? There’s no way to know beyond experimentation.
Domaine Vico dates from 1901. It had deteriorated almost to disuse by the mid-1980s, when enologist Jean-Marc Venturi bought it. The holdings included a second planting, 3.7 miles (6km) away. In 2005, Venturi separated them and created Clos Venturi.
His son Emmanuel, now 42, grew up in wineries. As a result, he vowed to dedicate his life to anything but wine! “Like a lot of children, I think, I wanted to kill my father,” he says. He studied law in Nice. He earned a doctorate in environmental engineering. After that, as tends to happen, he returned to Corsica to work with his father, carrying with him ambition from the outside world. “I want to make grand vin,” he says now. “And to get this designation, we have to make wines that can survive and thrive over time.”
Clos Venturi bottles 12 different wines, 10,000 cases in all. Domaine Vico, which has three times the volume, bottles eight. Nearly all are at least interesting. Some 3,000 bottles of the Vermentinu Clos Venturi Bianco, which is about one quarter of the production, are held back each vintage then released five or six years later.
I tasted the gold-colored 2009, which had an astonishing richness, like a mature Grüner Veltliner from the Danube. The current release, the 2016, was fresh, with a strong strain of minerality and muscle that helped me understand why the wines can age so well. The Chiesa Nera white, a blend of Vermentinu, Biancu Gentile, and Genovese, was a step above. It’s a field blend, fermented in a concrete egg, then aged on its lees for two years. It tasted of bitter lemon and had a firmness that appealed to me, though the alcohol made my mouth tingle.
White wines have lately gained a position of status in Corsica. Only a few years ago, the island’s production was 70 percent red. But ambitious whites such as this one, made primarily from local varieties, have gained followings. Whatever attention has come to Clos Venturi, in competitions or tastings or from critics around the world, has come from the Chiesa Nera White. Yet my favorite of its wines was the 2014 Chiesa Nera Red. That consists of seven or eight red varieties, nobody is exactly sure. They’re grown biodynamically in a vineyard so steep that part of it is farmed using a horse-drawn tractor. I believe native yeasts are involved. Then the whole thing is aged in amphorae.
I know what you’re thinking: This sounds like the ultimate hipster wine, right? Every one of the latest trends is in evidence, including the obscure, impossible-to-reach location. So why, when I took my first sip, did classified-growth Bordeaux immediately come to mind? “I like precision in wine,” Emmanuel said. “I like crystalline wines. I try to make my wines like that. And this wine is very strange. It’s a thinking wine. You just drink it and think about it.”
I had plenty of time to think as we drove to Clos Canerecchia, which is tucked back toward the east coast in the south of the appellation. We were headed to see Christian Esteve, who left the cooperative where his father worked in 2010 to satisfy his passion for amphorae. His winery produces just 1,800 cases, spread across ten wines and nine grape varieties. The best of them are aged in clay vessels of various sizes. Stained a uniform orange-brown, those vessels occupy more space in his tiny winery than anything else.
Esteve produces reds, but under duress. Several years ago, his right arm became stuck in a sorting machine. It took six operations to make it even somewhat functional. Along the way, he lost his taste for red wine. “I used to love it,” he says. “But after one operation, I came out of unconsciousness and my taste buds had changed. I no longer enjoyed red wines. In fact, I’m barely able to drink them. Only whites.” His best wine, you won’t be shocked to learn, is an amphora-aged white—except that he makes it like a red, with a 25-day maceration. Then it lingers in the clay for as long as eight months. Twice a day, Esteve plunges in his good arm and churns. Once the wine is bottled, he serves it almost at room temperature. “It’s a wine of eating,” he says.
It is precisely to make wines like this one, Esteve tells me, that he started his own winery. Now 42, his beard flecked with gray, he is hoping for many vintages to come. The arm, the difficulties of succeeding economically as almost a one-man operation—none of it matters. He smiles. “The story of my wines,” he says, “is the history of a happy man.”
Terra Vecchia and Clos Poggiale
Robert Skalli was the most important producer on Corsica, right up until the time that Corsican wines actually started to become important. The family had come from Algeria, where it grew Rhône varieties that probably ended up in someone’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape. In 1961, the Skallis purchased Terra Vecchia, on Corsica’s Costa Serena, and planted vines. They made wine there for half a century, until 2011. Then, with exquisitely bad timing, the family sold.
To be fair, Skalli understood what was coming. But he had other holdings by then, in Languedoc and in the Rhône, and mass-production brands that dwarfed the scale of what he was doing in Corsica. A nectarine farmer named Jean-François Renucci owned adjacent vineyard land and was serving as president of the Union des Vignerons de l’Ile de Beauté, the local growers’ syndicate. He had the interest and the wherewithal to buy the entire Skalli package. His purchase created Corsica’s largest independent winery.
Terra Vecchia sits by the sea, on sandy soil. When the wind is right, you can smell olives. Clos Poggiale, the other part of the property, is further inland on the Plateau du Pianiccia, the island’s typical granite and red clay. Summer days are hot. I lingered beside the vines early one morning and felt the air around me heating up as the sun moved higher in the sky. French fighter jets roared ominously. For a moment I imagined that our story was back in Algeria.
After taking control, Renucci renovated everything. He replanted vines to a higher density. He brought in sheep to nibble on cover crop. He began harvesting at night to keep grapes fresh. He hired Denis Dubourdieu, the renowned Bordelais enologist and university professor, to consult. After Dubourdieu died in 2016, he turned to Stéphane Derenoncourt, a self-taught winemaker who has the same pedigree without the fancy papers.
The consultants have raised the level of the basic wines, but—mercifully—they haven’t homogenized them. There are 11,000 cases of Clos Poggiale, divided among just three wines: a white, a red, and a rosé. I tasted all three at dinner with various local dishes in the restaurant of a small hotel in the nearby town. The hotel’s owner was a white-haired man with an impossible accent; I labored to understand his French until I realized he was speaking English. He stepped up with a bottle whenever a glass was empty or was even headed in that direction. It was like being at dinner with a peasant family somewhere deep in southern Italy or Greece. It almost didn’t matter what we were drinking.
But then I had the wines again, alongside the Terra Vecchia line, in the twilight of the next evening. I was on the veranda of Veni e Posa, the estate’s accomplished restaurant, with the water just down the hill. The wines seem dressed for the occasion. One after another, they announced themselves. I could taste the hand of Dubourdieu, who never made a slipshod wine in his life, in almost every bottle.
The better wines, if you happened to be reviewing them, were Clos Poggiale’s. But I kept turning my attention back to the Terra Vecchias, singular expressions of varieties such as Sciccarellu and Muscat and Vermintinu and Biancu Gentile; a Niellucciu/Merlot blend; and others. I grabbed five or six bottles, carried them to a table, and ordered dinner.
The best of the wines, and the most memorable I had in Corsica, was a Niellucciu rosé called Cuvée Albaria. I had sampled it during a tour of the winery and been impressed, but that had been like catching a glimpse of a pretty girl in the street. Really, I knew nothing about it. “It was very experimental,” Lionel Mauchand, the winemaker, told me later. “We were just trying something.” The juice spent four hours on its skins, he reported, and some of it was then aged for a year in new oak while the rest was aged in steel. “We blended it for a good balance,” Mauchand said. He sighed. “Less than 200 cases for the world.”
Waiting for my seafood platter on the terrace, I was able to appreciate the Albaria in its element. I am only exaggerating slightly when I say that this wine alone seemed worth my journey. The weather had cooled considerably, and someone had given me a shawl to put over my legs. Every so often, I sipped the Albaria. Oysters arrived. When I tell people I write about wine, it’s likely that this is the kind of scene they envision.
Wines inexorably intertwined with the place
Doug Margerum, the Santa Barbara wine retailer and restaurateur who became a producer, tells a story about the women who would come into his shop enthusiastically requesting Est! Est!! Est!!!, that drinkable but hardly noteworthy wine from central Italy. He’d smile at them. Then he’d ask, “Have you recently returned from Italy?”
“Why, yes,” was the inevitable response. How did he know? “And was there a terrace, maybe a moonlit night?”
There usually was.
“And am I wrong in guessing,” he’d say, “that there might have been a man involved?”
Blushing. Giggles. And the purchase of a bottle or two of the wine—of which, it was already clear, too much was being asked.
Back home, I was able to obtain a bottle of the Albaria. Now I was that wine romantic, seeking to recreate an experience I’d had in a strikingly beautiful place with the only aspect of it that could be transported. Nervous, I pulled the cork. I fussed about what to serve it with, and even where to drink it. Out on my porch, even though the day was brisk? At the table over dinner? Or by myself, in an easy chair, with a bit of cheese and a moment to contemplate?
I won’t string out the story. The wine was very good. But Corsica, in the end, was better. The wines are inexorably intertwined with the place, which is maybe the best thing you can say about a wine. Drinking them elsewhere can be compelling, but it is only half the experience.
“When I went aboard ship that night under the bright stars, I felt confident and serene,” Carrington reports about an early visit. “[F]or I already knew, by one of those decisions taken below consciousness, so as to seem like a judgement passed, an order received, that Corsica would be my lot.”
I’m too old for that, alas. I already have my lot, and it isn’t Corsica. But I will be back.
