Ángel Furlotti: A Wine for the King of the Vineyard
I explain why I made a wine named after my great-grandfather and where the drawing on its label comes from.
I have no memories of my family’s winery. It had been sold in the late 1970s, when I was very young. I never saw its wines on a shop shelf. But I did know its labels.
Some leftover labels had stayed behind. I remember using them to cover a school folder. They were Selección Furlotti labels, with a drawing of vineyards, houses and trees that stayed with me.
Many years later, in a shop, I came across two bottles of Selección Furlotti hanging on a wall, one red and one white. I asked the owner to sell them to me. I still have them.
Who was the King of the Vineyard?
Ángel Furlotti was my great-grandfather. He was born in Fontanellato, Italy, in 1868, exactly one hundred years before me. I never met him. He arrived in Argentina at twenty and started out as a vineyard-planting contractor in Mendoza.
He spent many years planting vines, at a time when Mendoza was filling up with vineyards. His was one of the names behind those plantings. He knew the land and knew where to plant. That is why, when he began buying land for himself, his farms ended up in places like Luján de Cuyo, Maipú, Agrelo and Altamira. Because of that skill, people came to call him “El Rey de la Viña”, the King of the Vineyard.
I like a story told by a friend of his, Eugenio Del Cioppo: Ángel rode around his farms on horseback and could wear out two horses in a single day. That is how I picture him, going from one vineyard to the next, looking at his vines.
Later, with his sons, he built a winery in Maipú that kept growing for decades. But when I think of him, I mostly think of the man who knew how to plant vines. His full story is in From Fontanellato to Mendoza.
A wine in his honor
When I read his story, what strikes me most is not how far he went, but how he started: a man who crossed the ocean and came with his hands to plant vines. This wine honors my great-grandfather and everyone who dared to do the same. I have been making wine for more than twenty years, and with this wine I also close something in my own story.
When I wanted to pay tribute to those men, I went back to my memories and to those bottles of Selección Furlotti. I recovered the drawing, and we adapted it to a more contemporary label. Ángel Furlotti is a red wine from our vineyard in Lunlunta, planted in the early 1900s. This is its first vintage, 2022: an edition of 2,600 numbered bottles.
Today I know that vineyard better and can decide more of what I want. With the winemakers, we chose the part of the vineyard that could best represent it. Then we tasted many barrels and chose only a few. I wanted a classic wine, with the strength of those immigrants, but with today’s fruit and style. I didn’t want a wine that follows a trend.
It is a very balanced red with very good acidity. We bottled it in 2023 and let it rest in the bottle for three years before releasing it. After all these years, that drawing is back on a bottle of Furlotti wine.
Would you like to try our new wine? Buy it here.
