Wine As An Art Form

Peter Femfert knew nothing about wine making when he took over Nittardi in Tuscany more than 30 years ago. Since then, the passionate gallerist has turned the estate into one of Chianti’s top producers

- Lin Weiwen

Peter Femfert smiles when I ask him how he got started in winemaking. “A woman,” he says. He appears to ponder his next words but breaks into a chuckle. “It always begins with a woman.” Love. The answer to life’s mysteries.

But the 72-year-old German tells me that he was once a sceptic of romance. As a youth, he embraced his bachelorhood, and was convinced that marriage and kids were not for him. In the 1970s, he had a high-paying job as general manager of Avis, an American car rental company, in Frankfurt, but he did not enjoy it. The company’s nasty internal politics troubled him. “I was fed up,” he recalls. “I spent a third of my time there defending myself, making sure no one sawed off a leg of my chair. People were after my position. It was a shark pool.”

Disenchanted, he left the job in 1977 and spent a year travelling around Southeast Asia and island-hopping in the Pacific. In 1979, to feed his love for art, he set up Die Galerie, a modern art gallery in Frankfurt. Then he met Stefania Canali, an Italian, at a convention in Berlin, fell deeply in love, and “threw out all my previous convictions about bachelorhood”. After their marriage, Canali mooted the idea of owning a dream house in Tuscany. Femfert scanned the lands of Chianti. In 1982, he bought Nittardi, an ancient estate, which once belonged to painter and poet Michelangelo Buonarotti in the 16th century.