IN VINO VERY STAR – In cinema, she has built her career portraying women desired but never reached. Yet, on a volcanic island lost between Sicily and Tunisia, she has been producing the most sensual and sunny wine in the Mediterranean for twenty years. Here is a portrait of a winemaker no one expected, especially herself.
She could have easily, like many movie and music stars, ventured into producing a Provence rosé, safe and marketable. But Carole Bouquet decided to take a slightly more complex path: a volcanic island unknown to many, nestled between Sicily and Tunisia, a grape variety no one can pronounce, and a style of wine often pushed to the back of wine lists. Passito di Pantelleria is not exactly a trendy drink.
Rich, opulent, sweet – everything the wine world has been avoiding for twenty years in favor of natural, mineral, dry wines. While new generations were raving about natural sparkling wines and oxidative whites, Carole Bouquet continued to dry her grapes on black stones, cluster by cluster, turning them by hand every two days, under a forty-degree sun for a month.
This delicate process, known as “passerillage,” requires a level of patience rare in this era. Pantelleria, suggested by Isabella Rossellini, is a wind-swept island where Carole Bouquet bought a house in the late 1990s, discovered abandoned vines, and patiently acquired the parcels that would form her future estate with over seventy farmers, culminating in twenty-five reconstructed hectares, including eight of vineyards, and some centennial vines still producing.
She built her own winery and released her first vintage in 2005. The wine is called Sangue d’Oro, meaning “golden blood,” in tribute to the colors of the Sicilian flag. The grape, Zibibbo – local Muscat of Alexandria, whose name literally means “dried grape” – produces an intense wine with flavors of candied apricot, dried fig, orange blossom, saffron, and a surprising salinity for the unaccustomed palate.
Personality of the Year Award
There’s a paradox in Carole Bouquet’s journey that few have taken the time to articulate. In cinema, she spent thirty years embodying coldness: the desired but unattainable woman in Buñuel’s films, the angel of death with a petrified face in Cold Cuts, the wife too beautiful and distant in Blier’s films, the face of a perfume that Ridley Scott filmed like an apparition. A filmography built on resisting others’ desires and the distance directors imposed on her. Some may have criticized her for not being a full-fledged winemaker, delegating vineyard management and winemaking to Nunzio Gorgone, whom she praises in interviews. She limits herself to having a vision and embodying the image of a domain where bottles fly off the shelves, despite going against the current trend.
In January 2023, Revue du Vin de France awarded her the Personality of the Year. Carole Bouquet, sixty-five, César award-winning actress, Chanel No. 5 ambassador, James Bond girl in For Your Eyes Only, shared a memorable quote: “It’s the first thing you’ll see when you open the door to my house in Paris. And, I shouldn’t say this, but I no longer know where the Césars are.” Editor-in-chief, Denis Saverot, admitted that she had “commanded admiration” from the staff, acknowledging that her unexpected winery venture had surprised everyone. What remains clear is that this seemingly aloof beauty chose to create the most fiery wine.
