News
News
CHARTER OAK CHOSEN ONE OF SEVEN BEST WINES AT ZAP 2012. PLUS 2009 MONTE ROSSO RATED 93 POINTS!
January 2012
Charter Oak chosen 1 of 7 Best Wines at the State of Zinfandel 2012: ZAP Grand Tasting. 2009 Monte Rosso 93 Points!
CHARTER OAK WINERY ON KRON CHANNEL 4
December 2011
Robert Fanucci on KRON Channel 4
HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
December 2011
Layla Fanucci on KRON Channel 4
Charter Oak Zinfandel chosen TOPS out of 730 wine from around the world! Charter Oak 2007 Monte Rosso Zinfandel Wins top spot in International Competition
For a 22-year-old, David Fanucci spends a lot of his life in the distant past.
How else can one explain Fanucci’s appreciation for the 100-year-old basket press that his great-grandfather brought over from Italy, his devotion to the labor-intensive winemaking techniques from yesteryear?
Fanucci’s respect for his ancestors is palpable; he incorporates it into everything he does at his family’s Charter Oak Winery in St. Helena. In June, the throwback style won him a prestigious honor: The title of “Top Young Winemaker” during the NextGen Wine Competition for Millennial Wine Buyers in Santa Rosa.
In particular, Fanucci was recognized for his Sonoma Valley Monte Rosso Vineyard 2007 Zinfandel. The wine took “Best of Show” at the competition and bested nearly 750 other wines.
“Good wine is all about great fruit,” Fanucci said, noting that the wine is made with grapes from one of the oldest vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties combined. “But I’d like to think the way we go about all of this certainly makes a difference, too.”
Winemaking certainly is in Fanucci’s blood. His great-grandfather, Guido Ragghianti, was the family’s first oenophile, and brought a basket press and wooden grape vats from Lucca, Italy, when he immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s. He set up shop at a home on Charter Oak Avenue in St. Helena.
It wasn’t until 1986 that Fanucci’s father, Robert Fanucci, started Charter Oak.
Since then, the elder Fanucci passed along winemaking knowledge to David, who remembers toiling over his first chores in the cellar when he was 5 or 6 years old. Instead of learning about winemaking at college, where many winemakers do, David Fanucci learned on the job.
“Other high school kids had after-school jobs as teen-agers,” jokes the alum of St. Helena High. “I’d help my dad to the point where football and winemaking was my life.”
Around age 18, Fanucci decided he wanted to be a winemaker. That’s when he started tinkering with his own vintages, when the award-winning 2007 zin ($42 a bottle) came to life. For that vintage, Fanucci carefully selected grapes, put them through great-grandpa’s press and punched them down with a wooden redwood bat from Italy.
He blended the wine, barreled it and bottled it himself.
Jim White, a family friend and partner in the Charter Oak Winery, says the young man’s respect for the past is what makes him different.
“Everybody else has learned with massive pumps and hoses from here to the end of a football field,” White said. “David knows how to use that stuff, but has gone in a completely different direction, and has come out on top.”
Fanucci, who now lives in Rohnert Park, isn’t planning to get complacent. In an attempt to gain experience with other aspects of the winemaking business, he took the year off from Santa Rosa Junior College to work the current harvest at Martinelli Vineyards & Winery in Windsor.
Coupled with a 2009 internship with Abreu Vineyard Management (during which he tended vineyards at Screaming Eagle Winery and Vineyards in Napa), Fanucci says he hopes his current experiences will give him a well-rounded knowledge of everything that goes into wine.
“The more you know, the more it shows in your products,” he quips.
Down the road, Fanucci says his goals are simple. In the short-term, he hopes to put out his own label. In the long term, he wants to notch a high score in Wine Spectator for the family business.
Matt Villano
Napa Valley Register | Posted: Friday, September 10, 2010
