Breaking up the Family for better Wines

Breaking up the Family for Better Wines

Roberto Anselmi and daughter Lisa have revolutionized the family's winemaking ethos. Roberto Anselmi forced his own father to quit the family business in order to improve the wines.

By W. Blake Gray | Posted Tuesday, 26-May-2015

In the late 1970s, Roberto Anselmi fought with his father, who wanted to keep making bulk wine in Soave, as his own father had. The business was successful and had made the family rich. But Roberto wanted to do more.

One day Roberto forced his father Marino out, and we do mean "forced". He did it purely by force of will; he didn't have the shares of stock or management position to do it, but he could act crazy – if it was even an act. Roberto smashed up some desks; enologist Giuseppe Inama quit, and ended up starting his own successful winery. Then Roberto fired five other employees. His father quit in disgust at his behavior.

"Revolution must be a little bit violent," Roberto says.

He was just 25 years old, but he succeeded in chasing his father away from his life's work. His father still lived on the Anselmi winery compound, and passed his son nearly every day, but didn't speak to him for 10 years.

"My father is crazy," says Roberto's daughter Lisa, who now works for him at Anselmi winery. "He's a great man but he's also crazy. I have been around my father a long time and I know the great part is maybe twice as much as the crazy part."

The conflict, like most of Roberto Anselmi's subsequent conflicts, was over wine quality. In a sense it was his father's fault, because Marino indulgently gave Roberto money to travel the world after he graduated from university.

"I go to Alsace, Australia, California," Roberto recalls. "I go to wonderful restaurants in Sydney and I taste the wines. And I see that my wine is shit. I want to come home and change."

Roberto Anselmi is best known in Italy for his flamboyance. He flies his own helicopter, poses for wine magazines in black leather duds beside his motorcycle, and had a Porsche made to his specifications. But professionally, he's deadly serious. He wants to make world-class white wines, which he thinks is possible in Soave Classico, and is willing to take whatever extreme steps he deems necessary.

After driving his father out, his first basic step was moving to smaller yields picked at close to uniform ripeness; not groundbreaking in most regions, but in the 1980s in Soave, when almost every grower sold all the grapes he could produce to co-ops, this was unusual.

Anselmi has often been an early adopter of wine technology.

"The most important is the use of nitrogen," he says. The winery blasts every vessel the grapes will go into – from the press to the bottling line – with neutral nitrogen gas, to prevent contact with oxygen. The idea is to preserve the crisp, fresh taste.

In the early part of the '90s, Anselmi became a standard-bearer for quality Soave Classico wines, at a time when the region needed it. The world opinion of Soave was formed by Bolla, a co-op wine that had practically no character whatsoever. Anselmi, along with Soave Classico pioneer Pieropan, was proving that wines from the hills in the region could be more interesting than that. But he never forgot his Australian epiphany, and he wanted to do more.

Soave wines have long been based on Garganega, a variety that develops big bunches of beautiful, picturesque grapes, but which not everyone thinks is truly a noble, world-class variety. In particular, Garganega is not aromatic. The best Soave Classicos are crisp and minerally and food-friendly, but they don't wow you before you put them in your mouth. Anselmi wanted more aromatic excitement than Garganega could deliver. However, the Consorzio requires 70 percent Garganega in all wines labeled Soave Classico and currently allows only two other grapes, Chardonnay and Trebbiano di Soave.

"We are in competition with the best aromatic white wines in the world," Anselmi says. So he planted Sauvignon Blanc and Traminer and now uses them in his flagship wine, San Vincenzo.

Anselmi San Vincenzo is one of the most delicious wines made in Soave Classico; its aroma has the pungent gooseberry note of Sauvignon Blanc, and it's complex on the palate, with apricot and tropical fruit and a pinch of salt on the finish. It's juicy and refreshing and delightful – and it's not Soave Classico, because it breaks the labeling laws. The solution was simple: Anselmi left the Soave Classico Consorzio.

"I broke with my father. I broke with the Consorzio. I am a broken man," he says, laughing. Anselmi also makes two single-vineyard wines that could be called Soave Classico, but aren't: Capitel Foscarino, which has a nice touch of richness from 10 percent Chardonnay, and Capitel Croce, a juicy 100-percent Garganega wine that is fermented in used oak. They're good wines, but Anselmi won't call them Soave Classico because he thinks the reputation of Soave Classico is still not as high as it should be.

"Chianti Classico has become one word for the consumer," Anselmi says. "For Soave Classico, we still talk about Soave. It's not one word. The problem with Soave is we still find in the market cheap-priced wines of medium quality. The consumer associates the reputation for the price. This doesn't help the small grower." Not having Soave Classico on the label makes Anselmi's wines a hand sell in restaurants, but he does have plenty of fans.

"I like the San Vincenzo," says Umberto Gibin, proprietor of Perbacco restaurant in San Francisco. "It has a little more depth than most Soave Classicos with the Chardonnay, and a little more crispness with the Sauvignon.

Anselmi has built the business of his dreams. He makes 750,000 bottles a year – just 5 percent of the volume his father made, but of much higher quality. He tore up a parking lot across from the family compound to build an experimental vineyard, currently planted with Cabernet Sauvignon and with Garganega in a new system, where twice as many plants grow, but only half as high. "Sometimes these (Garganega) grapes are the best grapes in San Vincenzo," he says, although "I just wanted to have a vineyard across from my house".

And finally, in the last years of Marino's life, he came to appreciate what Roberto had done for the family name. "My grandfather didn't ever come to the winery," Lisa Anselmi said. "But finally when my father had success, my grandfather would tap him on the shoulder and say: 'Not bad, not bad'."