Renaissance and Roman Vineyards Part I: La Vecchia di Lapio
Even the luggage carousel at Capodichino Airport in Naples moves faster than the average. Travelers must jostle and scramble to retrieve their bags from the spinning belt. Perhaps it is sped up on purpose to set the pace and prepare unwitting tourists for the frenetic beat of life in Naples. The streets and highways are famously chaotic, and one quickly gets the sense that they’re unwittingly part of a rally race with real danger at every corner. Traffic in Naples is governed by no obvious code. It’s every driver for him or herself. Lanes are non-existent, and traffic lights are more suggestive rather than imperative. It’s a continual dance of stop and start, dash and dodge, and hair-thin misses timed to a symphony of honking horns conducted by a multitude of upturned palms with fingers squeezed together and pointing to the sky in the universal Italian gesture, accompanied by shouts of “Ohhhh-ehhh”.
Yet astonishingly, the instinct of self-preservation is so finely tuned, and hand-eye coordination so lightning fast, that accident rates are improbably low. Or perhaps it’s the overwhelming dread of the hassle and loss of time that accompanies a fender-bender that drives Neapolitans to access an inner sense of accident avoidance. The result, in any case, is the most remarkable example of organized chaos I have ever witnessed. It’s even rumored, in a richly ironic twist, that the German government considered removing street markings and traffic lights to recreate the chaos of Naples, thus forcing drivers to pay more attention and ultimately reduce traffic accidents.
To be fair, the municipal government has been building a metro system to relieve traffic pressure on the tangled streets of Naples. But the project has been dragging on for about three decades. The trouble is, anywhere you peel back a layer in this part of the world you uncover antiquity. And each time a new potentially important site is discovered, subway works are halted until the archeological superintendence can assess its value. It’s a painstakingly slow process. So many ancient sites from remote history have been found during construction that one well-known Neapolitan comic was prompted to quip: “we’re not sure if they’re actually building the metro, or just looking for it.”
Inland in the mountainous countryside, time moves at a more languid pace. But here as well there’s no shortage of museum-worthy artifacts, albeit living artifacts housed in open-air museums. Campania surely vies with Santorini for the honour of harboring the world’s oldest living grapevines. The significance of these ancient vineyards, a glimpse at renaissance e-era winegrowing, has only recently been fully grasped. Such a complete databank of genetic material is a priceless resource.
I’m introduced to Pierpaolo Sirch, the managing director of Feudi di San Gregorio, one of largest wine producers in Campania headquartered in Sorbo Serpico above Atripalda in the province of Avellino where some of the region’s finest wines are made. He’s a tall, imposing man with shaved head and a northerner’s accent – Sirch is from Friuli. I declare my interest in the historical aspects of winegrowing and the native grapes of Campania in the hopes to gain a better understanding of both where the region has come from, and, importantly, where it’s going. He smiles. “Let’s go”, he says. Sirch is a specialist in vine pruning and trellising, after all, and much happier in the field than in the boardroom. We set out to visit some of the company’s oldest vineyards in the province of Avellino, the vines they call “the patriarchs”.
In most parts of the world, “old vines”, conjure an image of short, gnarled trunks, aged about the same as the average human lifespan, exceptionally over a hundred years old. In Campania I witness something altogether different and utterly original, and much older. Sirch takes me first to the Vigneto Dal Rè in the Taurasi appellation to see the vines used to produce their top end aglianico called Serpico.
What I see is not really a vineyard in any traditional sense, in fact it’s something I’ve never seen before, more like a sparse forest of vine-trees. Some of these aglianico vines actually climb up scattered trees, a mix of beech, chestnut, flowering ash and oak, while others lean on thick wooden chestnut posts at least three meters high. Multiple thick and rugged old trunks, two or three or more, grow up from the same spot in the ground to high wires stretched between the posts. The arms of the vines run along these wires over six feet above the ground with other armlets dropping and looping at irregular intervals from them like imperfect seahorse tails. Some of the vine arms stretch horizontally for four or five meters. The oldest vines among these, Sirch assures me, surpass their second century, and quite why they never succumbed to phylloxera remains a mystery.
The whole scene is extraordinary. It’s like an antique shop filled with giant, elaborate candelabras by Antonio Gaudì.
“Watch your head”, warns Sirch as we wander around this living museum, avoiding the vine-tails just beginning to burst in the springtime warmth. A pitiable three tons of grapes are harvested from each of the five hectares of these ancient relics, the equivalent of about 2500 bottles per hectare, or half of a normally low-yielding vineyard. But the effort required to maintain them is minimal at least. “The less you do the better”, says Sirch. “They look after themselves.” Is the quality better? I ask leadingly. “It’s not better or worse”, he replies, “just different. Even the grapes from neighboring vines taste different”, he continues contemplatively. These vineyards of a by-gone era are a rich treasure trove of genetics that the current generation is fortunately turning to more and more for vine material when planting new vineyards.
We hop back in Sirch’s car, but the wonderland tour isn’t over yet.
Next, he takes me on a hunt for what he reckons is the oldest living fiano vine, one of southern Italy’s most celebrated white varieties. Fiano was known to the Romans as Vitis Apiana, literally the “vine of the bees” thanks to the particularly attractive sweet nectar of its flowers and sugar-rich fruit. It’s believed to originate around the hilltop town of Lapio, which is now within the Fiano di Avellino appellation. Sirch came across the vine he simply calls “La Vecchia di Lapio” (“the old mother of Lapio”), over a decade ago while quite literally roaming through the forest.
“When I had some spare time I would wander through the countryside looking for old vineyards”, he tells me. “I knew they must exist, and I wanted to find them.” Sirch discovered La Vecchia in a small clearing on a property belonging to an old widower on the heavily forested hills below the town. He was immediately struck by the ancient plant and knew he had found something special.
The trouble is, after leaving that day, he couldn’t quite remember how to get back there. It’s a story I found odd from a man who spends a great deal of his time in the vineyards of the region – Feudi di San Gregorio draws grapes from some 780 different vineyard sites, so you’d think he would know every inch of the territory like the back of his hand. But when we retrace his steps back to the clearing, I begin to comprehend how, even in the 21stC with GPS and Google Earth, vineyards in Irpinia can remain lost in time and space.
“It took me years to find the place again”, he confesses as we park the car below the north side of town off of a dirt track. The area is thickly forested and the spring countryside is exploding with life. Although there are no volcanoes in the immediate vicinity, tons of volcanic ash from the eruptions of the Campi Flegrei, Roccamonfina and of course Vesuvius have fallen and accumulated in the region over eons, making the soil in most of the Campanian hinterland extremely fertile and vigorous. Plants and trees love it here. Everything grows to out-measured size, like the giant tree-vines I’ve just seen. Wildflowers and grasses are three feet tall even under a thick canopy of leaves and climbing ivy wraps around tree trunks in a bushy embrace, making the entire forest look like a solid wall of deep green punctuated by the bright yellow of buttercups and vibrant red of poppies. Acacia trees are in full blossom, the sweet scent of their flowers hanging heavily in the late afternoon air.
We walk through the maze of green down a path and make a turn onto an even narrower dirt path, entering finally into a semi-clearing where the path ends in a tall field of grass beneath an abandoned stone house, with a few candelabra-like vines growing overhead. We trample the grass on a gentle slope under the vines; in the distance I catch a glimpse of the town of Taurasi through the branches crowning a distant hill with its Palazzo Marchionale and bell tower. I snap photos but Sirch carries on, for La Vecchia is further down.
At last he stops next to the largest vine in the clearing. Its rugged, 200 year-old trunk, which looks more like a hardened piece of rope with multiple strands braided together, must be three feet in circumference. It leans heavily on a post nearly as thick as a telephone pole to support the weight, with an ornate crown of twisted arms radiating out in all directions, no longer paying heed to the guide wires that run overhead. “This is La Vecchia”, he pronounces without unnecessary flourish. I have found my Grail.
We stand in reverential silence for several minutes, staring at the gorgeous old lady. There’s little to say. A Zen-like calm permeates the clearing as the sun makes its way towards the horizon, only the buzzing of insects and bird song break the hush. “You should see the beautiful grapes from this vine”, Sirch finally offers. “So perfect, translucent, bright green. There’s something special about this place. We can learn a lot from this ancient wisdom”.
By wisdom, Sirch is referring to the way these vines are pruned, an old method that inflicts minimal damage and thus avoids various vine diseases like Esca, a fungus that attacks vines through open cuts. Esca has plagued vineyards around the world in the last couple of decades, and in some severe cases has been responsible for killing up to ten percent of vineyards in a single year. Proper pruning, Sirch believes, along with the biodiversity in such forest-vineyards, are part of the secret of the longevity of these vines.
Sirch has adapted the old pruning method for vines trained on more manageable trellising systems. As beautiful as the candelabra-vines look, they’re impractical for modern commercial viticulture. They take many years to fully establish and require significant manual labour to maintain. And ultimately, they were designed to maximize quantity, an approach rarely linked to top quality as we understand it today. Sirch and others who have taken on this approach are convinced they’ve got the best of the ancient and modern worlds.
But it’s still tragic to consider the number of these old vines that have been ripped out in recent times by farmers unaware of their priceless genetic material. These days the plundering has stopped, “but alas, much of the damage has already been done, and the patrimony lost”, Sirch laments. “But at least we have these.”
Fortunately, forward thinking companies like Feudi di San Gregorio and Mastroberardino have initiated programs to retrieve and propagate the genetic material from Campania’s ancient vines. Sirch has taken cuttings from La Vecchia and other old vines and has been replanting vineyards, though so far no special bottlings have been made.
Antonio Dente, chief agronomist for Mastroberardino, has likewise taken cuttings and propagated vines from old aglianico and greco plants. I take a similar journey through the deep corners of the Campanian countryside with Dente to see the field of primeval aglianico that was used as a genetic database for the original studies.
Out of thirty different biotypes found, two proved most promising, and were planted on Mastroberardino’s Mirabella Eclano estate in 2004. The result is the “Redimore” Aglianico Irpinia IGT, and the company is in the process of officially registering the clones under the name “Aglianico Antonio Mastroberardino”. Interestingly, according to Dente, the wine produced from the new clonal selections is as good or better than the wines produced from the centenary vines. “It’s the DNA that makes greatest difference, not the age of the vines”, says Dente, a happy revelation for those of us without a century to spare to see results. Even from these young vines Redimore has memorable depth, with tender structure that belies the variety’s old reputation as a tannic brute. “We were selecting for fresher fruit character and softer tannins”, Dente confirms.
The Mastroberardino estate has a long history of preserving and championing Campania’s indigenous varieties. The estate, officially registered with the chamber of commerce in 1878 (though wine has been produced by the family since at least the 1760s), has always focused on local grapes. Antonio Mastroberardino, grandfather of current generation Piero, made the conscientious decision after WWII to remain focused on aglianico, fiano and greco, in a period when the rest of Italy was industrializing fast and more fashionable French varieties started to infiltrate the country. Mastroberardino remained steadfast and is largely credited with preserving Campania’s millennial viticultural heritage.
In the 1970s and ‘80s it must have been quite lonely in Campania for Mastroberardino and others who shared a similar vision of reviving the region’s viticultural history. At times it must have seemed as though there were only the glorious past, but no future. Now, finally, decades later, history is repaying that stubborn determination with a very bright future illuminated by a riot of national and international attention.
Text and Photos by John Szabo, MS