It is James Ivory, director of “A Room with a View”, who signs Nittardi’s art label this year

It is Oscar-winning director James Ivory, internationally famous for such hugely successful films as “The Remains of the Day”, starring Anthony Hopkins, “A Room with a View”, set in Florence, and “Howards End”, who this year signed the artistic label for the wine-symbol of Nittardi, a well-known Chianti estate owned by the Canali-Femfert family. A project combining wine and art, now in its 41st edition, Nittardi has involved an internationally renowned artist every year since 1981 to have him or her create a work for the label and one for the silk paper that wraps each bottle. In the past, the labels have boasted other distinguished authors- painters, musicians and writers - including Yoko Ono, Günter Grass, Igor Mitoraj, Dario Fo, Mimmo Paladino and Fabrizio Plessi.

A passion for Italy, and for Venice in particular, is the common thread that leads back to the family’s Venetian origins. And it is with this origin in mind that James Ivory titled the label “I due Frari”, or “The Two Brothers”. A lover of visual art from a very young age, to best dress Nittardi 2021’s Chianti Classico Casanova Ivory made sophisticated use of the art of collage, which was also used with chromatic profluence for the silk paper “Homage to Matisse”.

“The process that transforms grapes is craftsmanship and binds human ingenuity to nature”, explains Léon Femfert, at the helm of the Nittardi Estate. “The artist works with a blank sheet of paper and uses colors to represent reality, while the winemaker works with what nature makes available to him and which he cannot modify, but only accompany and interpret in the best way possible through knowledge and creativity in the vineyard and cellar. Art, at Nittardi, tells about the wine and the label stops in time the emotions it generates”. This is the philosophy on which the history of Nittardi’s winemakers has been founded and which has given rise to a wine-art collection of great depth and consistency. The Canali-Femfert family, who are also gallery owners in Germany, set out again to enhance the character of this wine through art: for each vintage, an artist is in fact invited to experience the reality of Nittardi and from there to create two works, one for the silk paper that embellishes each bottle and one for the label, which expresses each year with different facets, with the same intensity, the value of the wine interpreted by the artist.

The label designed by James Ivory, who won an Oscar in 2018 for the screenplay of Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name”, depicts the two brothers Léon and Damiano Femfert in profile, two faces of the same soul, framed in the hottest colors of the Chianti land, gold, blue and vermilion. “For the first time”, says Léon Femfert, “the artist focuses on the family. Man becomes the protagonist of the label. The colors chosen, red and yellow, describe precisely the powerful, impactful and sunny vintage”.

Casanova di Nittardi “Vigna Doghessa” 2021 turns out to be a pleasantly complex, dynamic wine that is as well telling of the winemaker’s dedication and ideas as a work of art can be. “Casanova di Nittardi”, Léon concludes, “is an emblem of the way we see wine for us at Nittardi: a highly professional process that unfolds like life, with creative and meditative spurts”.

Nittardi can count on 40 hectares of vineyards, under organic farming since 2014, divided between Chianti and Maremma. In the 16th century, the Castellina estate was owned̀ by Michelangelo Buonarroti, who had wine sent from there to Rome to offer to Pope Paul III. The artistic vocation is in the winery’s DNA, as evidenced by the extraordinary contemporary sculpture park and the exceptional artists who create dedicated labels each year.