Francesco Martinelli: Every Wave You Take

I like how out-of-the-box Francesco's thinking is – but that's no surprise given the long and colourful track record of professions and passions under his belt. I like that he doesn't look for problems, but for solutions. I like the energy he puts into all his projects, for example with the upcoming Bacchanal festival, that is happening on Saturday, April 5, on his Verona hometurf and newly co-organised with the Karakterre crew. (Info & Tickets Here)

Most of all, I enjoy Francesco’s linear Soave wines, born on their 3-hectare property of old vines and forests on volcanic hills of Fittà, near Verona, that came to the family through the ambition of his father, a singular savant figure. People like that don’t come into your life every day, especially in our little town, so I gladly jumped at the opportunity to chat with this renaissance man following in the footsteps of another one.

Words by Milan Nestarec & Lucie Kohoutová, photos courtesy of Cantina Martinelli

I'm interested in your life story – you’re an artist, restaurateur, and creative person. You also spent some time surfing / running a nightclub and DJing, right? What’s the time line on all that? What did you study and what have you done in life, what were the travels, encounters, people and other impulses that let to such a colourful life?

I could give you a long answer, but I’ll try to be quick: I think I was fascinated by art since I was a kid. In high school, my closest friends were studying art, we were performing Arthur Rimbaud’s naked dances, and we were living like Dandys. That was the dream, to make our life a work of art. And I think I took that dream on. I discovered photography when I was 19 and that was my way to start painting reality, because I didn’t go to art school myself. I was born in 1978 and in the 1980's it seemed that Computers were the future and I was good at maths as a kid, so art was not deemed useful.

I travelled until 21, then I studied Cinema at the university and by myself, photography, performing arts, and I started working with music events, as a drummer and a music fan. I worked in restaurants and events for many years. I became kind of famous in Verona thanks to a rave party called Vermouth Underground … since I wanted to do unique things, and it gave me pleasure to generate emotion in people.

After that I opened an electronic music club called Veniceberg, in 2012, but DJing for a dance floor was just too boring for me: I like to get lost in the transcendental state of dance, but I can't play 125 bpm music for 2 to 3 hours…. I love variability in music, the emotional part. So, on the side, I started a bistrot called “Cafè Torbido” in the gas station where Veniceberg project started, with a friend who’s architect and cook, Luca Bono, and a theatre actress Ilaria dalle Donne. We were mixing food, wine, music, emotions, art, every night was different, everything was done with a lot of heart … There I started creating my first selection of wines, asking someone to make the wine that I wanted to drink and serve. Until I re-discovered that, actually, I had a vineyard… That my father had a vineyard.

So that’s when the wine came in.

Wine wasn’t really on my radar until later, like between 2006 and 2012. During my “nightlife years” in Verona, I was often going to Bottega del Vino, one of the 10 biggest enotecas in Europe where my sister was working, and I became what you could call a resident friend. In these years, Joško Gravner was releasing incredible wines. We’d be talking low intervention, spontaneous fermentation, low sulphur etc. while drinking Gravner verticals from 1995 till 2005, Lino Maga’s Barbacarlo (whose bottles where 1:1 incredible to mousy ratio), Soldera’s wines, Emidio Pepe who wasn’t “discovered” yet ….. But also Altura, Francesco Carfagna, Angiolino Maule, Stefano Bellotti, and Nicolas Joly, Julien Labet, Nicolas Reau, Riffault, Pacalet. Bottega was full of these but also conventional wine and also stuff like DRC – my first micro sip of their La Tache stolen from the bottom of a bottle was an eye opening moment – and many others.

At that time I took one of those sommeliers up to my father’s vineyard, to look at it with a professional's eye and understand if it had some potential. That day this guy looked me in the eye and told me: “How much money does your father take from this? What the fuck you are waiting for, this is an incredible vineyard.” So next year, in 2016, I was harvesting my first vintage there.

Are you still running some restaurants or other places?

I am just running Cantina Martinelli now, and it’s enough. But I am always on the lookout: I call places that are selling or renting out at least once a week. I miss a place where I could convey all the network and knowledge that I have gathered in the past 10 years. I grew up serving tables and in the last years before 2020, when my wine skills were growing, helping people open their minds and destroy preconceptions regarding wine was our mission.

I remembered the last restaurant where I was waiting as a sidekick to a sommelier whom I admire a lot, Stefano Cengiarotti at Il Conte. We had fine tuned a method that allowed us to not have a wine list. The solution was to just ask these two questions: 1) Tell us the last 3 bottles that you drank that you remember, and 2) Tell us how much you want to spend – 30, 70, 200 euros or more ? We’d then bring 2 bottles to choose from, and that was what people were drinking. If they were not satisfied, we’d serve it by the glass and go for the second bottle for this table. So you could really help people to discover new wines.

I kind of miss that, I miss tasting and helping people. So I don’t exclude that one day it will happen again. I would have to find the right people that can take care of the place on daily basis, I cannot do everything. I want to work with young guys who are eager and thirsty for experience and amazing wines.

But I am secretly working on the process that would allow Cantina Martinelli to fix our rustic house in Fittà, Soave, next to the vineyards, and build a small cellar downstairs, and a large open space upstairs that can be used 2 days a week as an amazing Osteria, we would have some rooms to rent. And that would be another dream come true.

Tell me more about the role of your father, Dario Martinelli, a philosopher and yoga master, and the story of how you guys purchased your estate in the 1990s?

Actually my father is a person I could define as “Out Of Time”. He could live anytime, anywhere in human history, he studied all his life to be as if he was an ancient Greek philospher or a yogi from the 18th or 1st century. He defines himself as a Stoicist and if you ask him how old he is, he would tell you “surely more than 500 years”.

He was running his non-profit yoga association in Verona from 1970, while working and raising a family of 3 kids, and he was looking for a peaceful place in the hills surrounded by nature where he could also do some yoga retreats. He never shared much with words but he was quite clear in his intentions. I was not even 15 when he just took us one Saturday to see the house, forest and vineyard he bought. He was and still is more proud of the forest than the vineyard, he just admires nature so much. And I understand it, I received that gift too I think. We share the same way of feeling.

So for some years, we used to go and harvest some grapes and just put my younger brother Emiliano in the basket to stomp or press the grapes. It was like a game: the goal was not making a great wine but living the process, playing with nature and biology…wine was just a consequence.

The wines were always and true to that process and sweet – my father used to like the Recioto style wines, ie. late harvests and very high sugars and the result was always sweet. He cared more about the human and family experience than the wine itself – we were making it in the bathtub [laughs], very punk. My mother wanted to throw my father out of the house the second year we did it. So he stopped [laughs].

He was never a man of action, rather of theory and discussions, so the vineyards were given to be used by the “oldest farmer of the village” for some years, until I realised the potential and that that vineyard needed to be set free, to be free to express itself. So I asked and prayed to be given the care of it.

On your website, you speak about “3 crus di Garganega” – what are these and how did they come to your family? And do you work with them in any special way?

Yes , the whole estate is now about 3 hectares, 1.5 hectares of which are forest and shrubbery, surrounded by 3 vineyards. The first plantations are from 1950 to 1970, so the vineyard is old and wild.

They all have some differences, of exposure and incursion with the forest. For the first vintages, I used to use one just for the sur lie Leviatano, the other small one for Pantagruele, and the biggest one for Il Gigante Gargantua. But in 2020, I started to experiment with 4 different picking dates, especially in the bigger vineyards.

We are planning to do some work – I am sad at the idea of replanting a part of the vineyard, but one is too absorbed by the forest now so it’s necessary.

Besides that, you’re working with red wine grapes in Valpolicella, what are the features of that vineyard?

The story of the red varieties is that I define myself as a Whitist, a white winemaker. I probably drank too many strong reds in my teens and twenties, so I got bored.

Anyways, I already had so much to deal with the authorities in our Soave DOC, I didn’t want to go through the same thing in Valpolicella. But the opportunity to get this really nice old vineyard presented itself, nobody wanted to take care of it, because it’s too old to produce enough for conventional production, and too expensive to replant it. So we took it in our charge but only on the condition that they let me do a light red wine, I wanted to work with the grapes and terroir, not with wood barrels and full-bodied reds.

So I first tried the carbonic maceration with the Corvina variety – now someone else took the idea, but I am OK with it. I think Valpolicella it’s too stuck on what they think that “the Market" wants. Everybody talks about the Market, but I always say “I am the Market, and I want to feel the grapes.”

You work with agronomist Antonio Zappoli, what exactly is the form of your collaboration?

When I was thinking of starting the winery, I was conscious that I never was a farmer, that our vineyard is almost heroic viticulture, and that I wasn’t a winemaker. I had people to ask for winemaking advice, but I needed to be able to work the vineyard. I found Antonio, he was working with a lot of estates, but probably looking for a new adventure. He was just starting to study biodynamics and so was I… we started from there.

Was there any particular bottle that influenced you, a producer or something/someone else? What was the trigger?

I spoke about it a bit earlier, I think the trigger was the discovery of the full range of expressions that spontaneous fermentation allows for in natural wines. In addition to that, I realised that the whole process depends on a long series of choices that you have to make throughout the year and creates an incredible insecurity in the result.

I always wanted to be an artist, I admired so much the capacity to set free of the fear of judgment and take the risk to make something ugly or dirty or provoking, or just not perfect… I like the uniqueness of such processes, and wine is just that to me: every year the vineyard is different, the months are different, you as a winemaker are different. For me, it’s like driving a car downhill without brakes, sometimes. You are trying to get somewhere, some things you can control, some you can’t.

So for me wine is really one of the most incredible forms of art. And it’s possible to consume it! You can eat it, you can feed yourself from this piece of art, it becomes you… and it’s finished. This is just too much – sometimes I could cry how extremely poetic it is to me.

Your region – Soave – must have a very long winemaking history. How did the region develop, who did it historically produce wine for?

I think one of the reasons why I started the winery is because I saw a lot of industrial farming around us. I don't like it, I don’t like the exploitation of land, I think it’s unfair. I want to live in a world where people do things and exchange it fairly for something else. I think the industrial methods took too much space – in the economy, in people’s lives. We have just a few years on this beautiful planet. I think it's time to change direction.

The Industry of Soave produces 55 millions of bottles per year of “alcoholic beverage made from grapes”. I honestly don’t know how they can call that thing Wine. For me, wine is what artisans and small producers do. When chemicals and industrial processes get in, then you have products, beverages, sodas, call it whatever you want but it’s not wine.

Sometimes I explain it to people this way: if your grandma makes a cake, it’s amazing, all your friends like it, then grandma makes 3 cakes next week and it’s still great. But if you take Grandma’s recipe and make 2000 cakes… you will not have your Grandma’s cake anymore.

OK, that confirms my suspicion that nowadays in Soave, there’s a lot of large cooperatives that make cheap wines. Do you know why the classic Soave consumer doesn't look for natural, authentic, and vice versa, the classic natural wine lover often doesn't think of looking in Soave? But maybe it's just my biased prejudice and you’ll tell me otherwise!

Currently we are only 3 producers of natural Soave, something like 70.000 bottles against nearly 60 miIlions… so we are really the Don Quixotes here.

Your analysis is correct, we are in 2 blind spots, not seen by the Natural seekers, and not seen by the Soave drinkers. But we are located in the middle of Soave, why should I call it something else? I challenge everybody to take 5 or 10 Soaves and do a blind tasting. The morning after you will be calling me. Time will speak for itself… I'll just keep doing the best I can for that vineyard.

Tell me more about the volcanic hill of Fittà, the Garganega variety, and the pergola – all things that you use, right? Why is that? And what do you think is so special about your place?

The northern part of the Soave area is all volcanic and all at 300 meters of altitude. Garganega is autochthonous at least for 500 years, and the Pergola vine training method is perfect for this variety, because it protects the bunches from the heavy August and September sun, and keeps the grapes also 2 – 3 meters apart from the roots which makes the plant work harder.

The peculiarity of my vineyard is that almost no one else has a 75 years old vineyard. It doesn't make any sense production–wise, we have a yield of 4,000 kg per hectare when everybody wants at least 12,000 kg. I bet that 95% of the vineyards in Soave are not more than 25–30 years old. Plus we use no irrigation, and I have a 1.5 hectare of forest next to the vínes that provides us with a lot of biodiversity, nutrition, but also challenges for the vineyard.

The vineyard faces East, so in the morning a little breeze dries the vineyard, the sun warms it up until 3 – 4 PM and then it rests… The perfect conditions for great grapes.

In a few days, you’re organising Bacannal, a wine fair in Verona. What is the history of this event, and how did it become a new collaboration with Karakterre and Marko Kovač as of this year?

As said before, I have experience in events and sharing, in the sense of contact with the public. So after years of attending wine fairs, it came naturally to me to identify the things that I was starting to miss the most, such as the human part, the time and contact between producers, and the playful part, that is, the “cross-contamination” with other arts and the carnivalesque dimension of the Festival, its most jovial and rowdy part, and also the most light-hearted. And so Baccanal represents exactly that.

I also wanted to bring a bit of international influence during the Verona fairs: Italian fairs often feature 95% of Italian producers, therefore they are too self-referential. Italian producers, winelovers and professionals alike need to know more about what is happening in Europe and around the world.

For me, a fair must also be an experience for the winemaker, there must be a community, it is the place to meet other producers and exchange tastings and opinions, tell stories and receive ideas.

I really admired the selection and valorisation that Karakterre has always brought and it came naturally to me to ask Marko for advice. I would never have expected him to also collaborate, but immediately after I understood – in the end, connecting Italy and the rest of Europe is a very interesting process and I hope it will be useful to many, as it has already been for me.

Why did you choose feather as the symbol/logo of your winery?

The process was very random. It looks like a feather but it is actually a leaf and a stone, but we liked the game of contrast between the feather and the stone. The artwork on the labels was born when I met Tellas, aka Fabio Schirru, a mural artist that made a wall for Veniceberg, the club I had. He only paints natural motifs, nature, forests, plants, leaves and stones and I liked his style, him as a person and the work he did.

Truth be told I think I told him about the wines, he tasted them, their duality between the fruit and the mineral and then I gave him carte blanche. I must have told him “do what you want, I trust you.” It is almost always like this now. I send him the wines, he tastes them, I tell him about the stimuli and then he goes to the drawing board. And “everything is in its right place” as Thom Yorke says.

Obligatory last question – is wine an art, according to you?

Yes, as I said before. But I think it is a very particular art form. Seen from the most romantic and delicate point of view, the best way to enjoy it is in the company of the person who produced it. The possibility, the honour and the beauty of being able to drink a bottle with its creator who tells you about their emotions, their inspirations, the details of that particular harvest... there you go.

I think everything changes when this happens: once you experience a moment like this, then you understand. In the future, it would be nice for winemakers to keep a cuvée that can only be drunk in their cellar, with them in person. A bit like the famous work by Marina Abramovic, The Artist Is Present, performed in 2010 at the MoMA: her work was her, it was you, and her. This would be a revelation.

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