Without calling on the biblical tradition and the story of Noah’s drunkenness (Genesis 9:20-27), in some ways the first winegrower in history, or on the Neolithic women who, some twelve thousand years ago, gathered the fruit of the vine and discovered its intoxicating potential, we can begin by saying that large-scale wine production started shortly after 3000 BC. The ancient Egyptians were masters of vine-growing techniques, but it was the Greek and Phoenician colonists who spread wine and new grape varieties through what would later become its lands of choice: Italy, France and Spain. A further boost to the consumption and culture of Bacchus’s drink certainly came in Roman times, when new viticultural techniques reached northern Europe, the age in which wooden barrels and glass bottles also made their appearance.
Turning our attention to Umbria, it was the Etruscans who preceded the Romans in growing vines and making wine. Traces of their passage, of their agronomic techniques and of their style are still visible in the region’s countryside today, and they certainly were even more so until the mid-1970s. Only the rise of so-called specialised viticulture gradually transformed an agricultural landscape that was essentially mixed, able to make different crops coexist (an approach embraced, in its underlying philosophy, by sharecropping contracts). Among those crops, of course, was the vine, which nevertheless had to share the land and often “marry” the elms. A very different situation from the specialised system of the Greeks, fathers of the bush-trained vines still visible today in many areas of Puglia and Sicily.

On the ampelographic level, meanwhile, the regional varieties of those days are the ones we now call “traditional” and, in some cases, native. Pliny the Elder records that the tudernis grape (from Todi) was widely planted, while Martial recounts the vices and virtues of the wines of Spoleto. Perhaps he was referring to that Trebbiano Spoletino which is enjoying a second youth today and which, in the fields and not only in memory, still grows married to trees and climbing, often even on its own roots, across the Spoleto plain. Sadly, though, the dominion it once held over certain areas of the Valnerina, at Sellano for example, up to and beyond a thousand metres of altitude, is now no more than a memory! In the Middle Ages it was Sante Lancerio, bottler to Pope Paul III and a sommelier ante litteram, who declared the Sucano (in the Orvieto area) excellent, while Bacci writes of the wines of Gubbio, as well as of those of Nocera, Assisi, Amelia, Norcia, Spello and Città di Castello. Among the whites, Grechetto stands out (Todi is its adopted homeland, but it thrives in every corner of the region); together with Trebbiano and Malvasia it forms a kind of regional triad (also for the production of Vin Santo). Among the local curiosities, moreover, there is certainly the Vernaccia di Cannara. This sweet wine of a dark ruby colour takes its name from Vernum (winter), since the pressing and the ensuing vinification take place in that season rather than in autumn, after the necessary drying period; or perhaps from Vernaculum (of the place), a theory supported by the many other Vernaccia wines existing in Italy that have nothing to do with the one from Cannara (the Vernaccia of San Gimignano, of Oristano and so on). Today it is made from the Cornetta grape, but many varieties were once used, as this passage by Giulio Baldaccini shows (Relazione sulle Condizioni agricole ed economiche del territorio di Cannara, Foligno, 1882):

Excellent is the so-called vernaccia of Cannara, a wine customarily made with dried grapes, to which is added a certain quantity of Sacrantino or Tintarolo that imparts a ruby red colour. Vernaccia is a wine ordinarily sweet or semi-sweet, because it is made with the grape berries alone, which, after being crushed, are placed in vats where they are left to ferment for a longer or shorter time, according to the thermal conditions of the atmosphere, to the greater or lesser degree of sweetness one wishes to give it, or until the moment it has acquired its transparent ruby colour.

A delicacy, in short, traditionally made at home and savoured around Easter, paired with a rich breakfast that featured the classic torta al formaggio with capocollo and hard-boiled eggs.
It should be said that the wine of the more distant past was a very different drink from the one we know today, truly hard to compare with the many bottlings that modern wineries turn out every year, displayed proudly on the shelves of wine shops and on the lists of the world’s best restaurants. Very often they were sweet wines, for example. By taste, and above all for lack of knowledge about the causes and mechanisms of alcoholic fermentation. A style that leads us straight to Orvieto. The tuff formation of the city on the cliff, riddled with tunnels, hollows and underground cellars, proved ideal for winemaking. The temperature of the caves, however, made the fermentation of the must extremely slow, so much so that stuck fermentations were the order of the day. Unable to complete the full conversion of sugars into alcohol, those wines therefore tended to be sweet, or at any rate off-dry. A fact that certainly contributed to their fame. The local exploits of the Etruscans and the Romans are well known, as is the appreciation of many Popes (Paul III Farnese was particularly “greedy” for it), while the frescoes in the Cathedral by Signorelli, who asked as payment a life annuity in local wine (Item che la fabrica sia obligata a darli, per lo tempo che lui lavora continuo, dui quartenghe di grano al mese e dodice some di mosto per ciascun anno alla vendebia incomensando alla vendebia proxima che verrà), offer endless evocations of the vine and the grape. And what of D’Annunzio’s famous phrase describing Orvieto as the Sun of Italy? In more recent times, it is worth recalling the meticulous descriptions of Professor Giorgio Garavini, inspector general of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests, who in 1931 delimited the production zone of the typical wine of Orvieto, stressing that the off-dry style was still the most appreciated and widespread. A wine often drunk in the caves, «pale golden yellow in colour, limpid, with a graceful scent closely resembling that of fresh grapes, with an abundance of esters, a gently sweet flavour, a slightly bitterish aftertaste as of almond, lightly sparkling from the carbon dioxide produced by slow fermentation». Precise characteristics, so much so that more than a few wine writers of the early twentieth century compared Orvieto to the French Sauternes, at times even judging it better, «there being absent in it that sulphur taste which is almost always found in those wines».
A resounding success which, as often happens, opened the door to commercial speculation and to uneven, often uncontrolled swings in quality. Orvieto attracted the appetites of the big industrialists of Italian wine and of as many bottlers, with serious consequences, still at the centre of the stage, for the identity and perceived quality of the product. That said, a timid renaissance sun seems to be shining on Orvieto’s golden clusters, and more than one winery has picked up the threads of its nobler history. The wines of Palazzone, of Decugnano dei Barbi, of Barberani (which makes a divine Muffa Nobile called “Calcaia”), or of even smaller estates such as Custodi (and there are others growing fast) are a hope for the future of Orvieto. Not forgetting the achievements of the Umbrian outpost of the Marchesi Antinori, that Castello della Sala which around the mid-1980s gave birth to Cervaro, over time one of Italy’s benchmark whites, conceived with an eye to the great Burgundies and the finest whites of France.
Picking up the thread of wine history, it is worth asking when wine began to take on, both in technical and productive terms and commercially, the characteristics we know today. On the production side, between 1650 and 1850 new techniques were refined in the vineyard and in the cellar, new wines began to be “created” with “quality” as the compass, and viticulture was introduced into new areas of the world. On the commercial side, a broader, mainly urban market developed, and a trade aimed at the wealthier classes began to take shape, such as the French nobility or the rising English bourgeoisie of the time. Society was evolving and, as Lachiver points out: «When wine became an element of everyday consumption, it was impossible for the rich to drink ordinary wine» (Lachiver, Vini, viti e vignerons: storia della vigna francese,1988). In Italy things moved a little more slowly, and the wineries of modern conception, able to play the quality game and hold their place on the market, were little more than a handful at the start of the twentieth century. Until the 1960s and 1970s the wine sector went through a sluggish phase, but the changes under way from the second postwar period onwards laid the groundwork for major developments. In Umbria the birth of modern winemaking coincides with the enterprise of Giorgio Lungarotti and his family. For the celebrated wine writer Hugh Johnson, he is the one who «drew Umbria onto the world wine map», while Daniele Cernilli, the most influential of Italian critics, recalls how it was this authentic character who built at Torgiano «a true cathedral in the desert, inventing a denomination and a wine, Rubesco, which debuted with the 1964 vintage and which, for at least a decade, carried the image of Umbria’s quality wines around the world almost single-handedly». From there everything set off again, because it became clear that splendid wines could be made in Umbria, just as in neighbouring Tuscany, and in some cases even better.
The turning point of 1986, the year of the methanol scandal, was nonetheless decisive for Italian wine and consequently for Umbrian wine too. A true watershed that changed things forever, triggering an unstoppable process towards quality and a growing number of wineries, which began to spring up like mushrooms. Isolated episodes aside, the wines of Montefalco are without doubt a case history of extraordinary importance. But here a step back is needed, because the origins, the myth and the popular spread of Sagrantino deserve to be told.
The first document officially mentioning the grape dates from the sixteenth century and is kept in the notarial archive of Assisi. Before that, it is once again Pliny the Elder who describes the wines of the area, in particular the itriola grape, though it is not certain that this was Sagrantino. More reliable, although alternatives abound, is the theory that Sagrantino vine cuttings arrived directly from Asia Minor in the fourteenth century, brought in by monks who followed Saint Francis. And from here, perhaps, the name, traceable to the sacraments. What is certain is that in Montefalco it became the base for an excellent passito wine, destined first for religious rites and later for more secular, popular ones. Today as yesterday, in family homes as in bottling estates, the grapes are picked and laid on racks to dry until the concentration of sugars is enough to make a sweet wine, marked by the tannic streak typical of the variety. A delicacy which in the past even found its way onto the Easter table, keeping company with the classic roast lamb. But the popular bond between the grape of Montefalco, the town and its inhabitants is even stronger in the remarkable pattern of domestic vineyards, enclosed by the high walls of kitchen gardens, testimony to a great continuity over time and to how much these were symbols of identity, wealth and pride. In more recent times, there is ample evidence of the area’s importance for quality wine. It is no accident that the “Mostra regionale di vini ed oli” of 1925 was held right here, an occasion on which it was reaffirmed that this was indeed “the most important winemaking centre of Umbria”.
Despite everything, however, the change of perspective is a recent fact, and the reinvention of Sagrantino in a contemporary key, begun sporadically by the estates of longest tradition, such as Terre dei Trinci, Adanti and Antonelli, was shaken up by the arrival on the scene of Marco Caprai. Son of the textile entrepreneur Arnaldo, who had bought the Val di Maggio estate in 1971, the young Caprai accomplished one of the most extraordinary feats in recent Italian wine history. Recovering pieces of tradition and arranging them in an innovative, inspired way, he managed to reassemble, and give meaning to, a mosaic that would otherwise be unintelligible. He set in motion a phenomenon that intrigued many, as shown by the numerous investments that followed over the years, drawing a picture that is extremely rich, complex, but often confused too, in search of its precise key. Sagrantino is one of Italy’s great age-worthy reds, with unique, original and therefore radical traits. Taking them into account, perhaps turning its difficulties into distinctive features, is the challenge of today and tomorrow.
And what if we wanted to identify the trend of the moment, trying to read the near future of Umbrian wine? There is no doubt that a certain modernist wave, the same one that renewed Italian wine growing and making, not without some mistakes and a few shortcuts, has now subsided. With the consequent return to the tradition of native grape varieties, to a more considered viticulture, to less invasive cellar practices. And with the classic denominations ever more attractive than those untethered from a strict historical and territorial logic.
As for grape varieties, as we were saying, those of the oldest tradition are once again making themselves heard, shining with new light. From Grechetto to Ciliegiolo, from Gamay del Trasimeno to Trebbiano Spoletino (besides Sangiovese and Sagrantino, of course), old varieties that seemed destined for oblivion are flourishing everywhere, proving instead a precious ally for Umbria’s winegrowers. Hand in hand comes a substantial stylistic refinement of the wines. The hangover of “demonstrative”, “muscle-bound” or “competition” wines now behind it, Umbria too seems to have rediscovered a taste for more original and authentic products, legitimate children of the territory, of the grapes grown and of the palate of their maker. With an eye turned to the past, certainly, but with the desire to make those paths current and contemporary.

Antonio Boco was born and lives in Perugia. He works with some of Italy’s leading food and wine publishers, including Gambero Rosso. In February 2007 he received an award from the Città del Vino «for having helped transform the way food, wine and typical products are communicated, turning it into a tool for understanding and promoting Italy’s many diversities». In April 2010 the Associazione Grandi Cru d’Italia conferred on him the title of “Best Young Italian Wine Journalist”.