Renaissance and Roman Vineyards Part II: The Final Moments of Pompeii
Keen to go further back even further in time, Mastroberadino’s agronomist Antonio Dente agrees to take me to see exactly how vineyards in Campania looked 2000 years ago. The site is Pompeii, the Roman trading town on the south side of the Vesuvius that was buried along with Herculaneum and Stabiae during the massive eruption of the volcanio in 79AD. It’s an event that remains etched in western psyche and has made Vesuvius the most famous volcano of all, in large part because of how the town it destroyed became frozen in time under a thick, funeral veil of ash. Life as it was in the first century, as well as the final moments before death of the citizens of Pompeii, is preserved in frightening detail.
The voice of Pliny the Younger, nephew of the famous historian, naturalist, and naval commander Pliny the Elder, reaches out to us through the centuries to recount the unfurling of events over the fateful 24-hour period of August 24th (some say October 24th), of the year 79. Pliny, who was staying at his uncle’s villa in Misenum on the far northwest edge of the Bay of Naples, a safe 30-odd kilometers from Vesuvius, was asked a quarter century later by his friend Cornelius Tacitus to describe the events of the eruption that killed his uncle, along with an estimated 2000 Roman citizens. Pliny the Elder was in active command of the navy stationed in the Bay of Naples that day and had set out by boat to rescue stranded people. It was a journey from which he would not return.
The eruption began just after midday. By mid-afternoon, nearly half a meter of ash, cinders and pumice stones the size of golf balls had already fallen on the town. Pliny’s letters to Tacitus tell of a cloud of rising smoke from the mountain that resembled “an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches… In places it looked white, elsewhere blotched and dirty, according to the amount of soil and ashes it carried with it.” By observing the spread of ash and tephra, geologists have calculated that the eruptive column reached 30 kilometers into the stratosphere. Pompeii, to its misfortune, was located right in the path of the winds that day, blowing to the south.
By evening, roofs began collapsing under the growing weight of debris, now over two meters thick, claiming the first victims. But the worst was yet to come. Those who had chosen to flee rather than hunker down inside their villas made the right choice.
There comes a moment during such violent volcanic eruptions, now termed “Plinian”, thanks to Pliny’s detailed description - the first in recorded history - when the sheer mass of ejected debris super saturates the air and the plume begins to collapse upon itself, causing what volcanologists call a pyroclastic surge. A surge is a fluidized, highly turbulent mass of hot gas and rock that travels at up to one hundred meters per second. Unlike a heavier lava flow, surges are able to move up and over obstacles, like city walls.
The first ultra-dense cloud of ash and scorching gas thundered like an avalanche of fire down the mountain in the early hours of the morning on August 25th, pushing ahead of it an envelope of air and gas and finer dust particles like a leading-edge shockwave. This burning cloud spared Pompeii, but the citizens of Herculaneum on the southwest side of Vesuvius were not so fortunate.
The eruptive column soon reached the tipping point again, sending a second surge of burning air towards Herculaneum, and then a third that skirted around the north rampart of Pompeii. The coup de gras came in the hours just after sunrise on August 25th, when a fourth pyroclastic surge enveloped the city of Pompeii head-on, rushing over stone walls like an unstoppable catastrophic flood. All citizens who had foolishly remained were instantly suffocated in the fiery cloud. Macabre plaster casts of cadavers made during the archeological digs show bodies curled up in the fetal position, hands in front of their faces in a futile attempt to protect themselves from the burning gases.
Two more heavily ash-laden surges in the hours that followed buried Pompeii in a seven-meter-thick layer of debris. The last of these travelled another ten kilometers further south to Stabiae, where Pliny the Elder met his fate in a final gasp of poisonous air.
By then, even though it was daytime, the entire region was plunged into a darkness deeper than night, the sun all but invisible behind a floating wall of ash and dust. As Pliny wrote: “not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.”
The damage was so extensive and the layers of ash and scoria so deep that Pompeii would stay buried until 1748, when excavations of the lost city began. Still to this day, a third of the city remains hidden under a blanket of volcanic debris, untouched since the morning of August 25th of the year 79.
The Vineyards and Wines of Pompeii: Pompeii Lives!
But back to Antonio Dente and our tour. He’s the perfect guide for Pompeii, since he’s responsible for the fifteen vineyards that Mastroberardino farms within the walls of the city. Quite how the venerable Mastroberardino company came to grow grapes in Pompeii is a story in itself.
In the mid-eighties, the archeological superintendence of Pompeii embarked on an ambitious plan to bring the first century AD back to life. The project, called Pompeii Viva (Pompeii Lives) included proposals to recreate the gardens as well as the agricultural traditions of Roman times, including of course vineyards and wine production. Wine, it’s clear, was a big part of life in the resort and trading town. Some two hundred establishments called thermopolia, the wine bars of the time (in a city of only 20,000 people), have been uncovered, some of which, like that of Lucius Vetutius Placidus, are richly decorated with colourful frescos and mosaic marble counters.
Large terra cotta amphora called dolia are built right into the countertops to ease the dispensing of food and wine, the prices for which were posted on the walls. In 79AD, for example, a tumbler of ordinary wine would have run you one small copper piece, while a chalice of the grand cru of the day, falernum, made in the north of Campania in what is today the Falerno del Massico appellation, ran four times as much, about a quarter of the average daily wage for workers. All things considered, that’s still cheap by today’s standards.
But wine was not only consumed in great quantities in Pompeii, it was also produced. Most of the villas within the walls, especially in the eastern quarter around the amphitheatre, had their own gardens, olive groves and vineyards, where the well-to-do citizens would often dine al fresco on U-shaped sofa beds. The vineyards were large enough to supply the household in wine for the year, and in some cases, produce enough to sell as well.
So, when the superintendence sought a partner in the winemaking sector to head up the project to resurrect these vineyards, Mastroberardino was the clear choice. There were few other serious commercial wine producers in the 1980s in Campania, and in any case Antonio Mastroberardino, as mentioned earlier, had very obviously shown his dedication to the native grape varieties of Campania and traditional winemaking. The match was perfect.
The ancient texts of Columella, Pliny the Elder and others describing the grape varieties and winegrowing methods in use at the time were studied in detail in order to recreate a proper Roman-style vineyard. But some of the most valuable clues came straight from the ruins of Pompeii itself. Archeologists were able to visualize vineyard spacing and architecture through the painstaking process of injecting plaster into the hollows uncovered in the ash, the same technique used to make plaster casts of bodies. Compacted volcanic ash is extremely durable, whereas the organic matter of vines (and bodies) disintegrates over time, leaving cavities encased within the resilient ash. As the fluid plaster fills these cavities and then hardens, the surrounding ash can be scrapped away to reveal the shape of whatever organic matter had been encased at the very moment of the eruption.
Thus the planting density of vineyards and the trellising methods could clearly be seen. Other clues were found in the dolia (amphorae) used for winemaking, including grape seeds and other wine residues. Frescos found in Pompeii also provided more hints, like Bacco e Il Vesuvio, depicting Bacchus, God of wine, dressed in a cloak of grapes, with Vesuvius behind him clearly covered in vines trellised on high pergolas.
With all of this information, Mastroberardino finally set about re-planting the ancient vineyards in 1996. Dente leads us to the enclosure where these first trials were made. Eight varieties in all were planted: the white grapes falanghina, coda di volpe, caprettone, fiano and greco, and the red grapes aglianico, piedirosso and sciascinoso, all on a tall pergola nearly two meters high. These are still the leading varieties planted in Campania today, a story running two thousand years long.
Micro quantities of wine were produced from each and evaluated. The white varieties, it turned out, didn’t perform particularly well in the heat and relative dryness of the southern side of the mountain, so in the second phase of planting only sciascinoso and piedirosso were planted again, and later, in the last phase in 2009, aglianico was also added. Seven different trellising methods in all were used, covering the known spectrum of techniques of the day including those derived from the Greeks and Etruscans. Fifteen small vineyards are now planted throughout the town, a total of just 1.5 hectares.
The reds are clearly happy here. The trunks of the young, six-year-old Aglianico vines Dente shows me look more like 15 or 20 years old they’re so thick, while the vines planted in 2001 look like most 30-year-old vines planted elsewhere in less vigorous and fertile soil. Presumably the soils in 79AD were also highly fertile, having derived from earlier volcanic events, but the addition of fresh ash in the big eruption has turned these into super soils. The low rainfall, however, naturally limits vegetative vigor and grape production.
Mastroberardino produces a single red wine from the Pompeii vineyards, about 1700 bottles a year, called Villa dei Misteri. It disappears quickly into the cellars of collectors and select restaurants, even if the company has never made a big commercial splash about it, nor taken advantage of the rather remarkable story behind it to charge a senator’s ransom for it. And while the overall house style of Mastroberardino leans towards what I would call traditional, with long macerations and ageing in large, old casks, the red wine from Pompeii is paradoxically the most “modern” in the portfolio, aged in brand new barriques, soft and woody. When I ask Dente when they’ll try making the wine in in clay dolia, he just laughs.
Text and Photos by John Szabo, MS