Introduction to Italy

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.

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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.

[ITALY HISTORY TIMELINE TK]

While it is difficult to separate legend from history in Rome’s early centuries, Roman antiquity is divided into three phases: the regal period, beginning in 753 BCE with Rome’s likely mythic founder and first king, Romulus; the Roman Republic, starting in 509 BCE, under which Rome was ruled by two annually elected consuls; and the Roman Empire, which lasted from the ascension of Emperor Augustus in 27 BCE, just 17 years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, in 476 CE. For the first several hundred years, Rome’s boundaries were largely confined to the city itself and small neighboring areas with which it fought or made agreements. Rome’s great era of expansion did not commence until midway through the Roman Republic, in the third century BCE. By the end of the Second Punic War, with the defeat of Hannibal and the Carthaginians, Rome included almost all of the Italian Peninsula and much of the French and Spanish coastline. At the height of its territorial reach, in 117 CE, Rome incorporated the entire Mediterranean basin as well as such disparate lands as today’s England, southern Germany, the whole of Iberia, and much of the Black and Red Seas.

The Romans’ documentation of viticulture is some of the most robust and illuminating that remains from the classical world. Cato devotes considerable prose to winegrowing in his agricultural treatise De agri cultura or Concerning the Cultivation of the Land, as did Columella, who followed in the first century BCE with De re rustica (On Agriculture). Palladius and Varro notably penned volumes of the same name and of similar import. Collectively, these works demonstrate Rome’s many improvements in the vineyard, including some understanding of such advanced topics as yield restrictions and grafting. Perhaps the most cited Roman authority on wine, however, is Pliny the Elder. Natural History, his surviving work from the first century CE, is written in 37 books, with Books 14 and 17 dedicated to wine and viticulture. In addition to sharing technical observations, Pliny ranks the best wines of the Roman Empire and describes the relationship between soil and wine quality. He writes that, although winegrowing was widespread earlier, superior Roman wines were not vinified until the second century BCE, noting Opimius’s consulship in 121 BCE as a particularly heralded vintage.

The Romans understood the critical role of place in determining winegrowing potential. The most celebrated wines of Rome were concentrated around what is today Lazio and Campania, with the wines from the Colli Albani immediately outside Rome earning praise unseen today. The most prized ancient wine was Falernian (Falernum in Latin), believed to come from the south-facing slopes of Monte Massico, north of Naples. Falernian was further classified into three quality levels; the best wines, Faustianum, came from the midslope, followed by Caucinum, grown on the hilltops, and lastly general Falernum, harvested near the base. Altogether, the system was not unlike what is still used to separate grand cru, premier cru, and villageBurgundy. Beyond Falernian, a number of additional Roman wines were also esteemed, including Caecuban, a white grown near southern Lazio’s Lago di Fondi; Surrentine, or Surrentinum, an acidic white from the Sorrento Peninsula; Vesbius, or Vesuvinum, from the volcanic soils of Mount Vesuvius; Mamertinum, a Sicilian delicacy favored by Julius Caesar; and Pucinum, an early success for northern Italy in today’s Friuli. Growers of these wines practiced diverse viticultural techniques. In some vineyards, for example, the vines were trellised, while in others they were trained to climb up tree trunks.

Generally, the finest wines of ancient Rome were sweet, fermented from grapes that were dried—a practice learned from the Greeks—on mats outdoors, on the vine through delayed harvest, or by twisting the stems to accelerate desiccation. Dry examples of Falernian and other top wines, however, are also noted. Still, in many essential ways, these ancient wines differed from contemporary passito wines. Additives such as tree resins (not unlike with Greek Retsina), gypsum, pitch, ashes, herbs, and honey were commonplace, as was seawater, all of which Cato suggests for hiding flaws in and helping preserve more ordinary wines. The best wines were those demonstrating some capacity to age. They were often matured in amphorae with considerable headspace to encourage oxidative, rancio-like character, an amber hue, and, ultimately,longevity. Such wines were generally reserved for Rome’s elite. Soldiers, plebeians, and slaves also enjoyed wine, though the wines they typically consumed were more dilute and sour. Some would come from the second or third pressings, or pomace mixed with water, referred to today as piquette. 

Rome’s influence on the development of wine reached far beyond the confines of the Italian Peninsula. As the Romans conquered more territory, they increased the range of viticulture, tending to vineyards from the British Isles to Belgium to Northern Africa, with some areas, of course, showing greater potential than others. Efforts were made to curtail the production of wine outside Italy, such as Emperor Domitian’s 92 CE edict ordering the destruction of certain vineyards elsewhere in the Roman Empire (primarily to encourage the planting of cereal grains during a time of famine), but the law was difficult to enforce. In places that already held winegrowing traditions, the Romans brought various improvements through their exacting practices. Rome also introduced vinifera to such classic regions as Germany’s Mosel Valley and, most significantly, proliferated the vine throughout Gaul in the early part of the first millennium. Accordingly, many of France’s wine regions, including Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, and the Rhône Valley, either originate with the Romans or were transformed by their contributions. While wine was widely traded by ship in amphorae across the Mediterranean, Rome’s inland reaches prompted a transition toward barrels. This new wooden vessel proved easier to maneuver, especially for transporting wines traded by land, and could carry more liquid. Barrels were considered a poorer choice for maturation—their porousness accelerated oxidation—but this was of little concern if the wines were destined to satiate the masses or to be used as military rations.

In addition to its use as a source of pleasure and calories, wine in ancient Rome was also a religious rite, tied to the worship of Bacchus, the Roman equivalent of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, fertility, theater, and music. Festivals honoring Bacchus, namely Bacchanalia, were among Rome’s rowdiest, combining sexual activity and animal sacrifice with copious wine drinking—so much so that Bacchanalia was banned by the Roman Senate in 186 BCE. The role of wine in religion took on new meaning in the common era, as it came to signify the blood of Christ. Emperor Constantine converted from paganism and transitioned Christianity to become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, moving the capital from Rome to Constantinople. Though wholly different from its role during the Roman Republic, wine’s new religious prominence as part of the Eucharist would reinstate the vitality of viticulture across the Roman Empire, through its fall and for centuries thereafter, even as the church distinguished sacramental wine from widespread, ordinary wine.

Late Antiquity, Middle Ages, and the Renaissance 

By the fifth century CE, the expanse of the Roman Empire grew difficult to manage and increasingly susceptible to invaders. Upon his death, in 395 CE, Emperor Theodosius I divided his territory in half and bequeathed the realms to his sons. Honorius came to rule the Western Roman Empire, while Arcadius took the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, centered at Constantinople. The Western Roman Empire, however, soon reached its demise, first with the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 and ultimately with the coronation of the Ostrogoth Odoacer as the first king of Italy in 476, overthrowing the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus. What followed over the centuries were frequent shifts in territorial leadership across Italy, resulting in a fragmented series of duchies, kingdoms, and city-states across the landscape. For much of the late first millennium, northern Italy was held by the Lombards, before the Frankish Charlemagne captured Rome and the north for the Carolingian Empire and became the first Holy Roman Emperor. Soon after, Sicily and the south sustained attacks from the east during the early Muslim conquests. Similar to much of Spain, the Arab influence can still be felt in these southern Italy and its cultures.

Less is understood about the wines of the early Middle Ages. Though winegrowing across Italy did not cease with Rome’s fall, the great wines of the ancient world vanished, as did the important trade routes critical to the fine-wine industry. As production dwindled, wine became a more local commodity for several centuries, especially as the mountainous terrain rendered inter-Italian trade challenging and impractical. What was made is thought to have been weak, dry, and intended for immediate consumption. Some insight is provided by Petrus de Crescentiis in his 14th-century work Liber ruralium commodorum (Book of Rural Benefits), in which he discusses the differences between wines of his time and those described by Pliny and Columella. He notes the necessity of topping off in barrel to avoid acetification and explains how to rack.

The Crusades, beginning in the late 11th century, held two primary objectives: to protect Byzantium from Islamic invaders and to reunite western Europe with the Eastern Roman Empire. What Crusaders found in the eastern Mediterranean was a surviving practice of dried-grape winemaking, akin to those of ancient Rome. Such sweet wines were plentiful in Crete, which fell to the control of the Republic of Venice in 1212, and could also be found in Cyprus (Commandaria) and elsewhere in the Levant. The rival port cities of Venice and Genoa imported these wines into Italy and encouraged imitations to be produced domestically. During the 13th and 14th centuries, dried-grape winemaking was renewed throughout the Italian Peninsula, and the wines once again earned a place among the most sought after in the world. Referred to as romneys, they were particularly cherished as a rare window into the great wines of ancient Rome and the traditions thought to have been lost. Their production further solidified Italian dominance in the re-emerging wine routes, as it was not viable to ferment similar wines in the rainy, cold autumn climates of northern Europe. Various Italian Vernaccias and Malvasias crossed the Alps to wealthy consumers in the north, creating a network that served as a forerunner to the modern wine trade. The Catholic Reconquista of Spain from Moorish rule, however, ended this period for Italian wine, as Spanish sack, essentially a diluted dried-grape wine, offered a cheaper alternative for England and the northern markets.

The decline of the romneys, however, coincided with the rise of a region that would later define the image of Italian wine worldwide: Chianti. As a wine, Chianti is first mentioned in text in 1398, and various documents from the following century note the region’s quality. In his analysis of Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, Cristoforo Landino claims that Chianti “has always been a most fertile source of excellent wine.” The Chianti and Chianti Classico wines of today provide little understanding of their early relatives. The wine mentioned in 1398 was white, and even the subsequent reds of the region were not built on Sangiovese until much later. But the ascent of Chianti marks a shift of economic opportunity toward Tuscany and the Republic of Florence, regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Following the Black Death (a breakout of bubonic plague), in the late 1340s, the Florentine population was cut in half. Despite the devastation, Florence experienced an exciting agricultural restructuring in the following decades. Because of the decreased demand for grains, other crops, such as grapevines and olive trees, earned greater prominence across Tuscany, with vineyards covering over 30% of the farmland in some areas. Vineyards of the noble Florentine estates were tended by sharecroppers under the mezzadria system, which endured through the late 20th century. The name derives from the word mezzo (half), referencing how profits were split between tenant farmers and their landlords (minus the upfront loans of equipment, livestock, and other resources). The mezzadria system initially promoted a modernization of vineyards, training vines on stakes in more densely planted rows. Later, however, a form of mixed agriculture became more widespread. 

Florence’s economic growth also fueled a rise of powerful merchants in Tuscany. These men regularly attended the Champagne fairs, where they traded luxury goods and learned about French winemaking practices. The new wines of Chianti gained a reputation in Florence as well as the Republic of Siena to the south, and they increased in value despite the challenges of transportation into these urban spaces. At the same time, the Medicis, a wealthy banking family, rose to power in Florence. Under their prolific reign and patronage, Florence ushered in the Renaissance through dynamic achievements in art, architecture, literature, music, philosophy, and science that would ignite similar rebirths throughout Italy and across Europe. 

Early Modern Era to Today