When life gives you grapes, make wine
Chateauneuf-Du-Fargosonini LLC is a small winery in California’s Central Valley focused on sustainable, innovative winemaking.
Founders Alejandro Fargosonini and Andrea Spaziani are committed to tackling the issue of food waste head-on by crafting natural wines from surplus or discarded fruits.
In 2020, Alejandro was working as a cab driver in Los Angeles with plans to start a PhD program in Philosophy when the pandemic hit.
With the decreasing demand for cabs, he relocated to the Santa Cruz Mountains and, by chance, encountered a vineyard owner offering free wine barrels.
Having a passion for cooking and having previously dabbled with making beer, mead, and fermented foods, Alejandro decided to try his hand at winemaking using local grapes that would have otherwise gone to waste.
This sparked a passion that would soon transform into a full-fledged business.
From experiments to building a business
After some research, Alejandro and Andrea found that approximately $218B of food is wasted in the United States every year, and up to 40% happens at the farm level due to uncontrollable factors like when the produce ripens, or demand.
Inspired to make a difference, they began to connect with local farms to take their excess fruit while finding ways to make it mutually beneficial for the farms by agreeing to purchase a minimum amount every year.
After two years of operating in Santa Cruz, they moved to the Central Valley in 2022 and started to build a community of farmers to work with. One introduction would lead to the next–from farmers to distributors – and they were able to start building out their business.
Because they use excess fruits from local farms, the timing and availability of the winery’s stock can be unpredictable, which some might see as a challenge.
However, with both Alejandro and Andrea coming from arts backgrounds, specifically in improvisation, they’ve come to enjoy this way of working and a way to connect their passion for creativity and sustainability.
They now live and operate in a vineyard that they’re converting for organic farming.
Andrea and Alejandro also grow 70 different varieties of their own grapes in addition to the fruits they receive from their partners.
With a strong community of partners, Alejandro and Andrea have been able to keep overhead costs down while distributing their products to larger cities in the area.
Winning the Credibly Small Business Award
In 2024, Chateauneuf-Du-Fargosonini LLC won a contest from the Italian Trade Agency to attend SIMEI, the world’s largest fair for winemaking equipment and technology, in Milan.
Their goal at the fair was to find technology to scale up their operations.
While initially, they had only planned to go to meet people and educate themselves on the equipment available, the Credibly Small Business Award has enabled them to consider actually purchasing the equipment while at the fair.
Here are a couple of the equipment and technology they’re exploring:
- Distilling equipment: As Alejandro and Andrea only make natural wine with no additional chemicals, there’s an increased risk for the wine to go bad. To balance out their risk, they’re considering adding distilled spirits to their product line.
- Wine tracking software: This program helps track each step from harvest to bottling—from where the materials were sourced, the cost, to the quantities of each ingredient in a given bottle. This software would help them learn about and grow the diversity of the combinations of grape varieties and fruits they’re working with.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software: This kind of software would allow Alejandro and Andrea to streamline their marketing, understand the performance of their products after distribution, and allow them to get more specific about how they target different markets.
Sustainability beyond the vine
Alejandro and Andrea hope to continue to build out their vineyard with sustainable methods—from using solar power to finding other ways to repurpose food that might otherwise go to waste.