We first met Mattia Carfagna in 2011, when a small group of us were marooned on the island of Giglio. At the time, Mattia was working at the Altura winery with his father Francesco and cooking at their seasonal family restaurant Arcobaleno. To this day, I vividly remember the fresh anchovies he served us with the 2010, 2009 and 2008 Altura Ansonaco. We’d see him again in 2015 at our New York City October trade show, then a few years later in Paris, where he’d decamped to go cook professionally. By then, he'd left the kitchen to start importing specialty Italian foods.
Over constant, lengthy road trips from Paris to Italy to re-up on goods, Mattia began making a habit of visiting his vignerons friends in the Auvergne. Quickly falling in love with the region, he originally envisioned having a second home there. Then, in 2019, a chance opportunity came from his friends Catherine Dumora and Manuel Duveau of L’Egrapille: having recently separated, the couple were no longer using their communal cellar and asked Mattia if he wanted to rent it along with some adjacent land for 250 euros a month. That same year, Mattia made a tiny amount of wine in the Auvergne. His sister Irene poured it for us at Altura’s table during the 2020 Dive Bouteille. Our interest was piqued.
We’d meant to get in touch but got somewhat distracted by the pandemic and resulting lockdowns of March 2020: a time that upended and changed everyone’s life one way or the other. For Mattia, with no restaurants to sell to, his food business was done. Strapped for cash and needing to leave Paris, he and his girlfriend Chiara decamped to the Auvergne, where for over a year they lived in Catherine and Manu’s cellar with no electricity, using gas burners to cook and showering without hot water. During that time, Mattia started tending the tiny plots of land he was renting as well as asking local owners if he could rent their abandoned parcels. Some said no, others yes. That year, Carfagna managed to start working nine tiny parcels owned by seven separate owners, all very old vines and previously abandoned.
Totaling little more than a single hectare combined, most of these micro-plots are within a cru of the Auvergne AOP called Châteaugay. There is no basalt here, though volcanic chunks of peperite mark the clay heavy terroir. One plot within Châteaugay happens to be purely limestone, and a final parcel in a nearby village grows on basalt soils (it's also completly surrounded by the suburban housing of Clermont-Ferrand, with the city visible from the vineyard).
An inestimable amount of work was and continues to be needed to get the land back into shape; during a January 2023 visit, we saw one plot so completely overrun by thorns and shrubbery you had to squint to see the vines. For Mattia, this is a labor of love, passion and patience honestly, it has to be seen to be believed. From these plots, a Gamay d’Auvergne called “Le Serail" is produced. With vines averaging 80 to 100 years old and yields at a measly 10-14hl/ha, production is unsurprisingly very low.
Knowing he could not survive producing just one wine, in 2020 Mattia reached out to vigneron friends across France for grapes to make supplemental cuvées. This landed him in the Hérault, where Jeff Coutelou helped him buy fruit. In 2022, chance struck again: through Coutelou, Mattia was able to rent 3.5 hectares in the Languedoc on the hills of Faugères. A 3+ hour drive from Châteaugay, Coutelou’s team tends the vines year-round, with Mattia present for crucial moments like pruning and harvest. From the Languedoc, he mostly farms Viognier and a smaller amount of Grenache Noir and Muscat Petits Grains. The grapes are trucked back and vinified in the Auvergne, with an “Italian style” macerated white wine and a Grenache/Viognier blend produced at the time of this writing.
Mattia’s means in the cellar are limited to fiberglass and an an old concrete tank for the time being, though he hopes to grow and evolve the types of vessels and vinification techniques over time. Each year the wines are made by instinct over formula, with the names and the labels often changing to reflect the unique aspect of the vintage.
