After a year of stories, curiosities and recipes on the products of our land in the company of the “Strada della Romagna”, a journey to discover local wines begins today. The history of wine in Romagna has ancient roots, even if the vocation for producing high quality wine emerged in this area only recently. The reason why for a long time Romagna did not have any great crus and its vine growing area was characterised mainly by the production of quantity rather than quality is of a historical and environmental nature. Firstly, the vines originating in the Middle East were brought by the Greeks to the colonies of southern Italy; the main production areas for excellent wines in Roman times were to be found in this distribution area. The crus of Romagna in those times were limited to the wines of Faenza and Rimini and the Latin farmers said wonderful things about viticulture in Romagna regarding the productivity of the vines.
In Faenza in the first century BC the Roman scholar and agronomist Marcus Terentius Varro wrote that wine production was 15 skins/juger, equivalent to 312 hectolitres per hectare, that is about double what is considered a good yield. Such a high yield of the vineyards at that time was not seen negatively then as it is today by those seeking quality production because wine was needed in large quantity to sanitise the unhealthy water that was found in the Po Delta region, then still largely marshy. The ground work of viticulture done by the Etruscans and Villanovans was enriched considerably by the varieties and techniques brought by the Romans. The particularly cold damp environment favoured the survival of some varieties of wild vines, biotypes of Vitis vinifera sativa (common grape vine) which overcame the impact with the Po Valley environment and hybrids of these two types of vines. After the demise of the Roman Empire, viticulture suffered a setback and then resumed two centuries later as confirmed by the sixteenth century treatises of Marco Bussato (1578) and Bernardino Carroli (1581) in which a description is given of an agriculture oriented firstly to the production of bread and wine.
After the very serious economic crisis of the Po Valley between the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, the first detailed picture of viticulture in Romagna comes from the volume “Pratica Agraria” (1778) by the abbot Giovanni Battarra. The small size of the estates and large families of country folk imposed multi-crop subsistence farming that made the most use of the spaces available; the “piantata” training system was the ideal solution. Long rectangular fields were divided into strips of land on which the rows of vines were arranged and supported by tall trees such as elms, mulberries, poplars or fruit trees under which some vegetables were also grown. It was only in the early nineteen hundreds that production started to exceed the needs of the family. The growth of the cities required wine even at a distance from the production areas and thus the first associations of grape producers came into being in order to produce wine for sale on the market. More rational and specialised planting systems were introduced in the nineteen seventies for the sale of bulk wine while the nineties saw the beginning of genuine progress in the quality of viticulture in Romagna.
A new chapter of a story that is still long is yet to be written and populated by important protagonists which we will see in the upcoming episodes.
This post is also available in: Italiano (Italian)