Italy’s Late Harvest and Air-Dried Sweet Red Wines
BY IAN D'AGATA |
While modern society’s wine tastes run dry, with dry white and red wines attracting the most attention and recording the biggest sales, it was sweet wines that were important throughout much of history. In fact, the first wine ever made by human beings was sweet, not dry. Clearly, the haphazard vinification techniques commonplace in antiquity and the lack of knowledge about the fermentation process meant that much wine, if not all, was inevitably the product of stuck fermentations. In other words, not all the sugar was fermented into alcohol, and so the resulting wines were heavily characterized by varying doses of residual sugar. Back then, sweet wines were also a social and cultural reality. In fact, sweet wines were considered luxury goods already in antiquity, worthy of the nobility and the wealthy, and fetched the highest prices. Not by accident, their production was especially strong near ports (by the seasides, harbors and major internal waterways), as these wines were the object of much trade.
Italy's great sweet red wines are often born from very old vines
Sweet Wines – A Historical Perspective
A look at the history of sweet wines reveals an extraordinary legacy that stretches back into antiquity. The Hittites, one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, lived from roughly the 17th century BC to the 11th century BC. Their empire was one of the largest and most powerful in ancient times. Wine was so important they passed laws with stiff penalties on those who damaged vineyards. Offering sweet wines to anyone was a privilege of the priest-king (the origin of the word ‘vine’ in Hittite stems from ‘stick of the Bacchants’, underscoring the sacred nature of the beverage and its use). Wine was also important for the Sumerians, who inhabited southernmost part of Mesopotamia, an area roughly equivalent to parts of modern-day Iraq and Kuwait, from approximately 4500-1900 BC. Sumerian pictograms show grapes ripened by the sun and raisins associated with what was most likely sweet wine stored in pointy amphoras. Research shows that in 1500 BC a vineyard (kaenkeme) in the Nile delta was used to produce a wine ‘sweeter than honey’. Sweet wine played a big role in ancient Greek culture too. For example, community leaders believed the best way to foster a relationship with strangers or foreigners (philoxenia, or ‘the love of hospitality’ or the ‘art of hospitality’) was through the use of sweet wine. In the Odyssey, Homer writes that Ulysses got Polyphemus drunk by offering him a black, sweet wine.
Production Methods & Techniques
During Ancient Egypt’s New Empire (16th century BC-11th century BC), it was common to concentrate wine via the use of heat, making it even sweeter. The Egyptians concentrated wine not just because of possible taste preferences but because such wines were able to travel better and sustain longer periods of storage. Not surprisingly, it was in ancient Rome that sweet wines reached their production and marketing zenith. Wines such as Passum (probably first made by the Phoenicians) and Acinaticum (developed later than Passum), both involving air-dried grapes and/or concentration of the must, were some of the most sought after potables of those times. Columella, whose De Re Rustica is the most complete treatise on agriculture to have reached us from Roman times, left detailed instructions on how to make Passum (from sun-dried grapes) and even a lesser lower quality second Passum wine, partly made with the dregs left over after the first pressing. Other famous Roman men of letters such as Horatio, Virgil, Cato the Elder (or the Censor: it’s important to use descriptors to identify Cato to differentiate him from his similarly named great-grandson), and Pliny the Elder all wrote about the production of sweet wines and had some very specific and altogether different ways on how to go about doing so. Techniques included late harvesting grapes by leaving them on the vine after the stalks leading to the berries had been twisted (as described by Palladius) or cut (as preferred by Pliny the Elder). Clearly, all such techniques were meant to interrupt sap flow and let the grapes concentrate their must contents mainly by way of evaporation.
