Today's newspaper article

Today’s article is from “The Telegraph” (UK) and talks about the plans to replicate the Roman method of wine making:

Do as the Romans do: ancient winemaking techniques revived

The techniques that the ancient Romans employed to make their beloved wine are being revived in a sun-baked corner of Italy.

The techniques that the ancient Romans used to make their beloved wine are being revived in a sun-baked corner of Italy Photo: ALAMY

By Nick Squires, Rome

6:52PM BST 22 Aug 2013

Italian historians are drawing on 2,000-year-old Roman texts in an attempt to replicate the type of wine that would have been guzzled by the emperors, legionaries and plebeians of the empire.

They are using tools once used by the Romans, such as a wooden cross with a lead weight on a piece of string, known colloquially as "the stork", which was used to check that the holes dug for new vines were the correct depth.

Instead of using modern twine to bind young vines to poles, they are using strips of cane and twists of wood from broom bushes, as Roman farmers once did.

Without mechanisation, pesticides or fertilisers, the ancient Roman wine will be similar to the organic wines that have become so popular in the last decade.

They are using eight varieties of wine that are thought to have been cultivated by the Romans and will store it in terracotta pots rather than the wooden barrels that vintners use today.

The varieties, seven red and one white, include little known grapes such as Nerello Mascalese, Visparola, Racinedda and Muscatedda.

The scientists have established a vineyard at Mascali, near Catania in Sicily, using technical know-how gleaned from the writings of the poet Virgil, whose lengthy work, the Georgics, describes Roman viticulture methods including advice on grafting, when to plant vines and the dangers of goats munching through vineyards.

The researchers have also drawn on the works of Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, the Roman Empire's best known writer on agriculture.

A former soldier who served as a tribune in Syria in the first century AD, he took up farming after leaving the army and wrote a twelve-volume study of agriculture called De Re Rustica.

He recommended planting vines two paces apart and said they should be tied to wooden stakes about the height of a man.

"The Roman sources are very precise and we want to see what happens when we carry out their instructions to the letter," Mario Indelicato, a researcher from the University of Catania, told The Daily Telegraph.

"Many of these tools and techniques were still in use in Sicily and other parts of Italy until the end of the Second World War, so there was a great deal of continuity with the Roman era. "Then came mechanisation and modern chemicals, and everything changed. We think we can recover the old techniques and that they could applied to modern winemaking."

Daniele Malfitana, the director of the Institute for Archeological Heritage and Monuments, who is overseeing the project, said: "Step by step, by reading and interpreting the Latin sources, we are learning how the Romans managed their vineyards.

"The scope of the project is twofold – on the one hand to check the feasibility of the Roman techniques, and on the other to understand if this knowledge can be used in modern viticulture."

The first vines were planted in March and the first harvest is expected in four years.

The wine has yet to be given a name and the researchers have not yet decided whether to sell it commercially.

The Romans are thought to have picked up winemaking from the Etruscans and ancient Greeks and it became one of the Empire's most important trade commodities, shipped around the Mediterranean in clay amphorae.

Roman merchants sold their wine to the farthest-flung corners of the Empire, from Carthage and Spain to the lands inhabited by Germanic tribes.

The principal source of wine for Rome was the area around Pompeii, where vast vineyards were cultivated.