The Fontanabianca agricultural company was founded in 1969 by Franco Pola, my grandfather. It owes its name to an important water source present in the lands, where in the past the whole town went to water their animals.
The first bottling took place in 1970 with Barbaresco Bordini.
My grandfather Franco, exhausted by a long illness, was taken over fully in the 1980s by my father Aldo who continued the work of expanding the company. Today I work alongside him, together with my mother Luisella, and so our company has gone from 7 hectares to 14, with an annual production of around 80,000 bottles.
For all of us, Fontanabianca is a legacy of our ancestors, but also a dream to be cultivated through work, family and sacrifice in order to create and offer not only a simple bottle of wine, but a unique experience in which all the our philosophy and passion .
Matteo
Fontanabianca is a small, large family-run company in the Langa, founded in the Bordini district by Matteo's grandfather in the late sixties. The first bottle produced is Barbaresco Bordini, a true thoroughbred and the house's flagship wine.
In my grandfather's time, grapes and loose wine were sold in demijohns; then, due to his bad illness, the reins passed to the second generation, to Matteo's father, who began to renovate the machinery and structures of the cellar. The great journey of quality began in 1985 with the first sales abroad, in Germany and Switzerland, and subsequently in the United States and northern Europe.
For Matteo, the choice to stay on the company was obvious: his maternal grandfather, from an early age, made his grandchildren taste Dolcetto with water at lunch, and during the harvest period, every afternoon, the children harvested the grapes with their parents.
From there a burning passion for wine was born for him which led him to understand, as he grew up, not only the playful and carefree aspects of youth, but also the difficulties of this job.
"During the harvest, for example, few say it, we work for 16-18 hours a day because the fermentations and pumping over can never stop. The years, then, are not all exceptional; for example in 2002, due to terrible climatic conditions, we bottled nothing. A similar impact, for a small family-run company like ours, is enormous. And then, to promote the wines you make exhausting trips and when you return home the work is tripled."
For a couple of years Matteo has had more and more space in the company, especially in managing the winemaking. From this growth path the project of proposing a classic method came to life a few years ago, also thanks to the insistence of some of his friends at Leva.
Now his younger brother has also undertaken studies in oenology and the hope of the whole family is that he too will stay in the company and contribute to cultivating this great passion and promoting Fontanabianca wines in the world.
We have selected the following wines from the Fontanabianca company, and we asked Matteo to tell us about them:
Langhe Arneis
Langhe Arneis has officially become the only still white wine of our company, as several years ago we decided to focus heavily on native Piedmontese wine and grapes , ceasing the production of Chardonnay, which is produced in every part of the world. We also do this to promote a particularity of our land.
Class of '91
Classe '91 is instead a classic method, based on 95% chardonnay and 5% pinot noir. It started as a whim of mine and my father, who are great admirers of champagne. The name, then, was "imposed" by my military friends during the tasting of the first bottles produced because this is precisely our year of birth .
