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For a student of wine, Italy presents arguably the most dizzying abundance of native grape varieties, appellations, and wine styles of any nation. While the country’s unmatched diversity might induce confusion, the study of its wines is among the most rewarding of subjects. The world’s highest volume of wine is produced in Italy, and vineyards are cultivated in each of its 20 regions. The country is perhaps best known for its red wines, with collectors regularly gravitating toward Super Tuscans and the three B’s: Barolo, Barbaresco, and Brunello di Montalcino. Yet, importantly, its palette also includes the best-selling sparkling wine worldwide by volume, Prosecco; the most established regions for sparkling reds; a series of overlooked, ageworthy whites; fortified wines that, like Madeira, once also endured long sea voyages; and the most extensive tradition of dried-grape wines found anywhere.
The boot’s contributions to the wine industry are not new. Ancient Rome vinified some of the most prized delicacies of the classical world, its soldiers helped spread the vine across the Mediterranean basin and beyond, and its scholars provided the most significant primary accounts of early wine. Italy’s influence continues today, as its winegrowers harness the potential of the country’s indigenous grapes with renewed energy and continue to balance their dignified traditions with a spirit of innovation captured in their finest bottles.
Much of the discussion about ancient winegrowing on the Italian Peninsula centers on the Romans, but viticulture is known to have begun long before Rome’s founding, traditionally, though tenuously, dated to 753 BCE. The precise origins of Italian viticulture remain unclear, especially in light of the discovery in 2017 of wine residue on ceramic storage vessels found in a cave at Monte Kronio, in southwestern Sicily. Analysis places these prehistoric wines in the Copper Age, roughly 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, far earlier than the date that had long been proposed for Italy’s first wines, and included with the most ancient evidence of winemaking, following that of Georgia and potentially China.
This sector of the Sicilian coastline as well as parts of southern Italy would later fall under the control of what the Romans called Magna Graecia (Great Greece). The Greeks also gave their Italian territories the epithet Oenotria (Land of Wine). Although viticulture existed prior, most recently by the Phoenicians (traders whose territory corresponded approximately to modern Lebanon), the Greeks were widely responsible for this initial boom in Italian wine culture in the first millennium BCE. Under their rule, the vine was firmly established throughout Sicily, notably near Mount Etna, and crossed the Tyrrhenian Sea to the mainland. The Murgentina grape, which thrived in Sicily’s volcanic soils, was rooted in similar terroir near Pompeii, on Mount Vesuvius.
Further north, the Etruscans, focused generally in what is today Tuscany, also came into contact with the Phoenicians. Under Phoenician influence, the Etruscans likely transitioned from mixed alcoholic beverages, fermented from a variety of fruits and grains, similar to Celtic grog, toward wine while also modeling their amphorae on Phoenician examples. Beyond local consumption, the Etruscans traded their wines with the Celts in southern France and planted vineyards there. Although the Celts were a predominately beer-drinking society, their interaction with Etruscan wine was substantial. The discovery of a shipwreck south of Provence revealed piles of Etruscan amphorae that would have contained around 40,000 liters of wine.