Bibi Graetz was an accidental winemaker. Twenty-three years ago, the former art student with no formal winemaking training inherited his family’s old-vine vineyards in Fiesole, just outside of Florence, and began making Sangiovese-based wines. They were a sensation. Graetz quickly became a critical darling for his big, highly extracted Tuscan wines, then to the wine world’s amazement, turned to making lighter, more restrained wines that were equally successful and revered. 

Few winemakers in any region have Graetz’s range and touch, and even fewer have his irreverent charisma. Nowhere does this charm shine through more than in the infectious joy he exudes when describing his childhood summer stomping grounds on Giglio Island. After many years visiting the island, Graetz decided to open one of Giglio's first commercial wineries. The project required purchasing old vines and renovating the ancient terraces on which they grew, ultimately resulting in an utterly unique white wine. 

The colorful winemaker recently spoke to The New Wine Review about his love of Giglio, and the great joy he derives from making wine in a place so deeply embedded in his own memories.

• On Giglio Island, blue is everywhere, from the water to the horizon. Giglio is small but powerful, like a pearl. It has everything. It has enough dimension to be a world by itself. There’s nothing missing here.

• When I was a kid, we'd pack up the car for old-style vacations on Giglio. You know, where you stay the whole summer in one place. My parents packed every inch of the car and flopped the mattresses on the roof. My brother and I sat on top of them!

• Giglio Island has a very different feel because it’s not touristic. There’s no airport. It's all Italians. It’s cute and low key; not like Capri or Elba or Positano. Those places, you go in the summer, and there are traffic jams. Every time you go into a village, it takes an hour. Giglio has no traffic jams. There are a limited number of houses. Our house was a hut without electricity!

• Everyone knows everyone else here. When I was seven years old, I would hitchhike to get around. The island is tiny. But it‘s also 500 meters high—a granite fortress with a small pocket of volcanic soils. You only bike on Giglio if you’re training for the Giro! 

• The most typical dish is wild rabbit. The place is still full of wild rabbits, but lately you can't find wild rabbit [being eaten]. No more hunting—it's not kosher according to the animal protection associations. It's a pity because the rabbits are here, but people just buy farmed rabbit now to make ragù.

• I stopped coming after I turned 18. Then I started coming back again about 14 years later. It was Easter 2000, and I was already making wine. I couldn't sleep for four nights. I knew I had to do something here. 

• I made my first white wines from Giglio Island fruit in 2002, but our first Testamatta Bianco [Graetz’s signature white wine from Giglio] wasn’t released until 2016. In the interim, about eight years ago, we bought a house overlooking the town.

• What's interesting about wine here is that there’s lots of it made on the island. But it's only for the locals. They hardly even sell it to tourists. Still, there’s great local pride in wine. 

• When I was a kid, home winemakers would try to lure my mom, a beautiful, tall Norwegian, into tasting their wine. And with her genes, she could drink! But she would have to try to avoid making eye contact so she wouldn't have to stop at everyone's cellars all the time!

• When I started my new project here, there was one guy who started a year before me. He had a restaurant, so he made some wine--a few hundred bottles. Since I started my white wines here, another two young guys started developing a winery. I'm an outsider somehow. So, I haven't sold my wines on the island. I don't want to interfere with the island guys' lives. They sell 90% of their wine on the island. I sell my wine in 50 countries. Besides, we're making different styles of wine.

• Under the medieval town and under every house here, there is a network of cellars. Most of them connect. We say cantine di fusa—communal cellars. We’re building a big winery on the island in the old medieval town connecting these thousand-year-old cellars under the castle. I hope it’s ready for harvest this year. It’s going to be amazing.

• On June 1st, we’re opening a tasting room on Giglio. It’s incredibly cool because we got a hold of the most popular bar in the center of the medieval village. We've turned it into a showroom, but it's still a bar—an Italian bar. You can have a cappuccino then taste wines from 11 am. It's the first time we've had a project outside of the wine business, and [smiling broadly] [...] my daughters are involved. 

• We've been planting a lot of vineyards and developing the vineyard terraces. I originally bought six hectares, but I'd like 30. It might take me 30 years to do that because we’re rehabilitating the 300-year-old terraces. Maybe I'll buy 50 hectares. Maybe even 100? The vines are all in granite soil and at good elevation, 200-500 meters. They look at the Mediterranean. Most are 80 to 120 years old!

• Our white grape, Ansonica, it's really an island grape. It's an ancient grape. I want to go see it in Sicily, too. It is called Inzolia there. All of my vines in the Pietrabona and Serrone vineyards are Ansonica now. But I'd like to plant some red vines, too. You can do whatever you want here. The soil is fantastic and there are lots of exposures. Giglio is an open book. 

• Everything is done by hand, and the work is backbreaking. But I like to do hands-on work, and there is no point taking shortcuts on anything. It’s already crazy to make those wines. These cost ten times more than mainland wines, so if it costs 12 or 13 times, it doesn't matter that much.

• We don't have enough vineyards now, but maybe in four or five years we can start talking to the Italian government about an Isola del Giglio DOC. You need at least 50 hectares for a DOC, I think. For now, everything is Toscana IGT.

• We try to emphasize freshness, which is tough to retain because of heat. No one wants to do anything here during the day in the summer because it’s too hot. Same for the vines. They stop trying to stay fresh.
  
• The key to drinking these Ansonicas lies in when you drink them—the stage when you open them. Ansonica is not an aromatic grape, so its aromas are delicate. There is no punch of perfumes. I was opening a 2018 Colore last week in Giglio and it was interesting because peach and apricot were coming out. It also depends on the wine. Our Colore Bianco is a bit more oaky, which is very noticeable. Testamatta Bianco is on the fresher side of things. Whichever of the two you drink, you feel the saltiness of the sea. 

• Sometimes, when the wines are very young, Ansonica smells like wild myrtle berries. One year I tasted the whites and I couldn't believe it. I asked the winemaker if he had put mint in the barrel—it was crazy! But he explained that you get extreme maturation of these berries around harvest, and myrtle bushes are very oily. So when the wind whips up, the oil from the bushes carries onto the grapes. Not long after that, I was getting tickets for the ferry and suddenly, everything smelled like the wines—that's it! Myrto! Shit! 

• I want to make wines of pleasure for ladies in Rome. Before I made wines for geeks. But, there is no contradiction between pleasure and complexity. The same is true of a piece of beautiful music performed by a virtuoso. 

• I don't make a lot of these Isola del Giglio white wines, 10,000 bottles total for both wines. But that’s changing. This is special wine. We must make more.