2025 1769 Blanc, Clos Venturi

• Style: Dry, light and crispy Corsican white; 100% Vermentinu, 13%
• Taste: Ripe peach and orange blossom, a herbal snap of rosemary, saline brightness
• Food: Grilled fish, fresh oysters, fried calamari
• Occasion: A fish supper or a long summer lunch; the bottle for cooks who buy fish on the day
• Serve: Well chilled, no decanting; drink young

In the Glass — Tasting Notes

The 2025 1769 Blanc, Clos Venturi is pure Vermentinu from Manu Venturi's sheltered hillside in the northeast of Corsica, and it is the bottle we hand to anyone who thinks island whites are simple holiday wines. Bright sunshine and salty air compressed into a glass—that's what this bottle delivers. Pale straw with green glints, it opens on ripe peach and orange blossom, then shows its austere side: bright acidity, mineral grip. Look for a thread of rosemary behind the fruit, and a salty length that outlasts it. At 13%, it's light enough to drink all afternoon, serious enough to deserve the best ingredients. One of the finest examples of Light & Crispy White Wine we've found from Corsica. If that shelf is where you usually shop, or you already follow the grape on our Vermentino & Rolle shelf, start here.

The Winery — Clos Venturi

How the 2025 vintage and the site come together is remarkable. Early-summer rainfall balanced Corsica's heat and kept acidity bright. The vineyard sits 400 metres up, on ancient sandstone with granite and slate underneath—soils that demand mineral precision. This Vermentinu grows from 45-year-old vines planted south and south-east facing; a wide diurnal temperature range ensures slow ripening and concentrated fruit. The result: a wine from France's Mediterranean edge that tastes alive, with density and length that belie its light frame.

Emmanuel Venturi and his father Jean-Marc created Clos Venturi to showcase this site's potential. The plot is 28 hectares inside the larger Domaine Vico, and Manu, as everyone calls him, farms it like a smallholding: sheep and chickens among the vines for manure and weed control, beehives for biodiversity. Hand-harvested fruit undergoes gentle destemming and skin contact to extract flavour. Native yeasts ferment in temperature-controlled tanks; long lees contact adds texture and body. Organic and biodynamic certified, the vineyard runs at deliberately low yields, working the soil by horsepower to minimise compaction. The wine is bottled unfined and only lightly filtered—as little as possible between you and the vineyard's character. If that kind of farming is what you look for on a label, the other wines Manu makes on this hillside are lined up on our Clos Venturi shelf, and that is the obvious next stop after this one.

At Your Table — Food Pairing & Serving

Buy it for grilled fish, fresh oysters, and fried calamari, where its mineral acidity and saline edge cut through richness with precision. Pesto, anchovies and a fritto misto work just as well; anything with olive oil and a squeeze of lemon is on safe ground. Serve it properly cold from the fridge, no decanting, and drink it young while the blossom is still on the nose. Worth buying? Yes, if you shop at the fishmonger and want a white that tastes of its own coastline rather than of oak; it is organic and vegetarian too, so it suits a mixed table. Put a bottle in the basket for the next fish supper, then follow whichever thread hooked you: the Clos Venturi shelf for the rest of Manu's hillside, our Vermentino & Rolle shelf for the grape's other wines in the cellar, the Corsica shelf for the rest of the island, or Light & Crispy White Wine for the same style from further afield.

Explore the cellar: Corsica · France · Light & Crispy White Wine · Clos Venturi · Vermentino & Rolle