Salvo Foti’s Vinajancu

Yesterday I tasted a wine that thrilled me to my shallow core. It was Salvo Foti’s Vinujancu from ashen-faced Mount Etna.

A Man with a Plan
A native of the city of Catania, Salvo studied enology and began his career in 1981 as a technical and agrarian advisor to some noted estates in eastern Sicily. He continues that work today for estates such as Gulfi, Benanti and ViniBiondi, all of whose wines are universally recognized as among the best in Sicily. But it is still working with and for someone else. Salvo wanted his own project to really make a wine that sings.

He bought the tiny 2-hectare estate between 1998 and 2005 which he called ’I Vigneri’ after the association of top Etnan winemakers called ’La Maestranza dei Vigneri’ that was formed in 1435 in order to align the small vineyards in Sicily around the cultivation of the Alberello bush vine. (hence the date that is stated on the labels as ‘from 1435’.

He is the leader of the natural wine movement in this volcanic, south-eastern corner of Sicily. While extreme in some respects (racking and bottling under a lunar cycle), he is a pure spirit of natural viniculture and if you want to understand Sicilian winemaking in the Etna DOC, start with Salvo Foti.

I Vigneri is an agricultural collective dedicated to indigenous grapes, natural cultivation and an obsessive attachment to the terroir of Etna. Today it provides the economic incentive for local wine experts and trades people to continue to work in the trade, keeping the skills intact. We of course are the beneficiaries of this.

It also aims to “ avoid the nonsensical ideas that have grown up in modern times, inspired by greed and egoism and by the desire to subjugate and dominate nature”. it promotes the work ethic ‘of the pleasure in ‘ doing and working well while avoiding fanaticism’.  Salvo Foti describes the work methods of this association as “ using a viticulture of excellence ’in harmony with mankind and the environment’, “ I Vigneri is ‘an organic system”. 

Foti believes that wine has its own composition that is created by the grape, the vine, the vineyard, the climatic conditions and the individual (vineyard worker and winemaker). In his own words “It’s important that there is harmony and respect for each variable to make a wine that truly sings”.

The Vinujancu is 50% Riesling Renano, 20% Grecanico with the remaining a mixture of Minella Bianca and Carricante from a recently replanted vineyard at 1,200 metres above sea level.  Salvo comments that the ‘I Vigneri’ vines are not well ordered and that the vines mirror a human population in that all stages and social categories of human life are represented in the vineyards:  youth as well as old age.  Old vines(sometimes centenarian ones) cohabit with young vines. ( Salvo has over recent years taken to replanting some vineyards in order to rejuvenate the stock of vines that was beginning to verge on the ancient.  Similarly, the different types of grape varieties are not separated out clearly into parcels, meaning that pinpointing the exact percentages of the different grape varieties is not always a precise exercise.

Extreme Viticulture
The I Vigneri vines are planted in northern and eastern Etna.  Both zones are composed of disintegrating volcanic lava outcrops, and sand (phylloxera cannot survive in this very active volcanic ash soil). Northern Etna is distinguished by the extreme difference in the temperature throughout the seasons with very cold winters and very hot summers, during which there can be dramatic diurnal temperature fluctuations. The harvest takes place end of October into November when the weather is cool, allowing the grapes to continue ripening slowly and consistently, and to temper their acidity slowly. 

Wild Ferment
Vinification is au natural in 500-litre oak barrels. Salvo Foti remarks that this natural ambient cool temperature avoids the need for thermo-control during vinification. There is no malolactic fermentation.

The wine is racked and bottled according to lunar cycles for it to achieve optimal maturity and bottled without filtration, fining and sulphur.

This is a breathtaking estate with a mission to make great wines. Furthermore, it is an association that is pulling from the experience and energy of local grape growing talent and giving them a vested interest to create great wines in an region that is economically challenging for many of its inhabitants, especially farmers.

Salvo says that a living wine has its own composition that arises from its own variables: the grape, the vine, the vineyard, the climatic conditions and the individual (vineyard worker and vinifier). It’s important that there is harmony and respect for each variable to make a wine that truly sings.

Lemon-yellow with glints of gold, Vinujancu’s initial impression is of incredible saltiness followed by vivid slanting Riesling lemon rind and lime zest notes surging into liquefied minerals. As it warms up in the glass, however, the wine opens up and mutates, unveiling powerful balsamic notes, fermented apples, baked bread and smoke - all held together by reverberating acidity. That the wine embraces these contradictory flavours and textures, and moves back and forth between them, signifies that it is a living wine and that drinking it is like being at the volcano’s edge where the snow at the summit of the mountain meets the heat from within. It is a wine with the hard brilliance and permanence of a diamond and the brittle transience of a piece of coal.