South of Somewhere by Robert V. Camuto

Author:Robert V. Camuto [Camuto, Robert V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, TRV009110 Travel / Europe / Italy, CKB088000 Cooking / Beverages / Wine & Spirits
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

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That morning, outside Randazzo, Andrea Franchetti stood erect in front of Castello Romeo, a pink turreted and frescoed eighteenth-century confection of a marquis’s palazzo that looked like it could have once hosted balls out of Sicily’s literary bible: di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. A great lawn ended in a pair of tall palms and the villa’s double staircase; arrayed on the grass were open, white shade tents under which more than a hundred Etna producers poured their wines for a few thousand people who arrived in waves.

At nearly sixty-nine, Franchetti’s features had softened. He still looked like a faded movie star with dark tortoiseshell sunglasses balanced on his Roman nose, his thick wave of slightly-askew brown hair combed over his brow, and a seersucker jacket covering his broad frame. Franchetti was one of the first stranieri to have stumbled upon Etna in the 2000s, after first stumbling into winemaking in Tuscany. He was the maestro who created this event, and he and his boyish grin were in their element. “Etna was nowhere ten, eleven years ago,” he said. “Now, producers come from Northern Italy to see what’s going on, and some of them start making wine here. I ask myself why.”

We continued the conversation one morning later that week in his more-or-less-renovated Passopisciaro winery. “Etna is pristine,” Franchetti began. “It lends itself to emotion.” Wearing a moth-eaten sport jacket, he sat slouched on an old leather sofa. He growled his words carefully, like chords in a jazz composition. “And people are not stuck up. You see, the new, young sommeliers who really sell the wine in Italy, they don’t want to be involved in the academy. They want to come to a place that’s fun. They have tattoos and a lot of power.”

Franchetti has a knack for obliquely riffing on subjects, trying out words and seemingly unassociated memories and ideas until he arrives at a linguistic pearl charged with greater meaning than what he set out to say.

“Wine used to be serious for the knowledgeable and erudite,” he mused. “James Bond ordered Chateau Lafite, so you showed off you knew stuff.”

Franchetti has led the life of a novelistic character, beginning with his happenstance birth in New York, where his mother, the expat heiress to the South Carolina Milliken textile fortune, traveled so as to have her child in an American hospital. His father was an Italian baron from one of the rare Jewish families admitted to the Italian aristocracy in the nineteenth century. Franchetti grew up among parties and the art world of 1960s Rome. One uncle was a leading modern gallerist; another, by marriage, was the American expat artist Cy Twombly. Franchetti quit high school, bicycled and hitchhiked his way to Afghanistan, wrote some magazine articles, and played bit parts in Italian low-budget noir films. But, for the most part, he led a prolonged, drug-fueled adolescence until the age of thirty-two, when he decided to put on a tie and travel to New York to import Italian wine.

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