Roman wine being brought back to life in Pompeii. Photo: Piero Mastrobeardino
Posted on 02/27/2016 12:39:22 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Made from ancient grape varieties grown in Pompeii, 'Villa dei Misteri' has to be one of the world's most exclusive wines.
The grapes are planted in exactly the same position, grown using identical techniques and grow from the same soil the city's wine-makers exploited until Vesuvius buried the city and its inhabitants in AD 79.
In the late 1800s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli first excavated some of the city's vineyards from beneath three metres of solid ash.
The digs turned up an almost perfect snapshot of ancient wine-growing - and thirteen petrified corpses, huddled against a wall.
Casts were made of the bodies, as well as the vines and the surviving segments of trellises on which they were growing.
But archaeologists didn't think to restore the vineyards of ancient Pompeii until the late 1980s.
When they did, they realized they didn't have a clue about wine-making, so they called in local winemaker Piero Mastrobeardino.
Together they set out to discover how the ancient Romans made wine, and which grapes and farming methods they used.
"The team looked at casts of vine roots made two centuries ago and consulted the surviving fragments of ancient farming texts," Mastrobeardino told The Local. "We even looked at ancient frescoes to try to identify which grapes grew from Pompeii's soil."
(Excerpt) Read more at thelocal.it ...
Roman wine being brought back to life in Pompeii. Photo: Piero Mastrobeardino
Don’t know much about wine-making but very interesting.
Any chillable red box wine?
Looks like Pompeii was divinely adjudicated
“...grown using identical techniques and grow from the same soil the city’s wine-makers exploited until Vesuvius buried the city and its inhabitants in AD 79.”
Aren’t the ancient wine-makers now part of the soil?
This will not end well for pompeii... The gods are not amused
wine ping
Pompeii was so raunchy then it would make Vegas look like an Amish village.
One might say they were destined for premature eradication.
Yes, that's what give the wine its unique terroir.
Interesting!
Oh common. These days Vegas isn’t “raunchy.” It’s just tasteless, sort of like the boardwalk at Ocean City. For the most part it is overpriced boring schlock. The only reason it isn’t truly family friendly is that it is so dull that you are driven to do drugs as an escape from it all.
From the article: “Pliny the Elder, a Roman author, wrote that it was common to find drowned mice which had fallen into wine-filled dolia. Should this happen, he suggested the best course of action was to extract the marinated mouse and roast it straight away.”
“Superintendent Parrot *ate* one of those...”
Let's add the Digest ping, make this the weekly topic.
So, one day, Yellowstone will be the new wine country!
The pumice in the soil was inhabitable to the phloxera louse that destroyed Europe’s vines... Pompeii has vines 500 years old.
From the site of the other great Mediterranian volcanic eruption:
http://zesterdaily.com/drinking/santorini-greek-wine-industry/
“The soil is volcanic ash, with some pumice and other stones, but there is no organic matter, and it is astonishing that anything grows at all. There is no irrigation — the vines depend on sea mist for moisture and can also tap some water retained by the pumice stones after occasional rains.....The island is immune to the destructive insect phylloxera, for if there is no clay, there can be no phylloxera.”
Looks like ‘79 (AD) wasn’t a very good year for Pompeiian wine.
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