Adulteration vs Social Progress

Last night I was re-reading the book Falanghina and was struck by a passage from the chapter "History of a Grapevine" by Antonella Monaco, a pioneering genetic researcher in the field of southern Italian grape varieties. She quotes Giuseppe Frojo (pronounced froyo), whose 1876 research sparked a modern system of classification of the varieties. He took a critical view of viticultural and commercial wine practices in that now antique period.

  

And of many interesting passages, this was the one that seemed most relevant to today's situation, even despite all of the vast improvements in viticulture and winemaking since those days under the shadow of phylloxera and the end of the Little Ice Age.  

"Ask me about Falanghina"

...Frojo...deplores the excessive influence on the "...peasants' taste...of the small wine retailers" who not only imposed some characters to the wine [I think this means to say 'particular qualities or characteristics'] that were incompatible with those required by international trade (wines too tannic, loved because "strong" or too acidic, called "razzenti", or too spirituous), but that also lowered their quality, urging to make farmers to make wines "that are easier to adulterate...they prefer to buy the most tannic, spirituous and colored wine." (Page 41)

(Underscore mine.)

Let's take this passage apart, just a bit.

In the 1870s the culprits, according to Frojo, were the small merchants -- both retailers and wholesalers -- who catered to a largely local market. (At that time Naples was by far the biggest city in Italy, the center of a very densely populated urban region.) The peasants -- a key word denoting the almost serflike state of the wine producers -- were led by these supposed tastemakers. As perhaps they needed to be, since, as Monaco recounts, the farmers were guilty of planting too wide a variety of vines, often yielding very inferior fruit and bearing differing traits as to color, taste and ripening times. 

This problem was attested by Columella in the 1st Century AD. But surely the deteriorating quality of the vines that Frojo documented was in part a result of an oidium attack around 1850, during which several excellent varieties were reportedly wiped out. 

All interesting in an academic sort of way. What stood out was the portion that I underlined. The end of the passage suggests a couple of significant things regarding today's wine and its evaluations:

1. The identification of dark, tannic, "strong" wines with "superior" wines seems to have been a constant since the 1870s at least. Unlike oidium and phylloxera, this plaguey preference was not a ruinous American import. It was part of a broader wine culture in Italy and, probably, in much of Europe. Given the much chillier climatic conditions of the era, one can see how higher alcohol, darker, "richer" wines would be sought after. So much wine had to be thin plonk indeed. 

2. The urge to "correct" wine by various means -- adding sugar being the least of the "adulterations" -- was no less widespread than it is today. Technology hadn't yet provided a way to prevent wines from being ruined by bad musts and various fungal contaminations. Today wines are frequently "hypercorrected" in the sense that they aren't usually off or bad, but they are manipulated to acquire a set of desirable marketing characteristics. In 1876 they would doubtless have done it if they'd been able.

3. The big change in the power equation is the increased autonomy of the grape-farmer/winemaker. One hears the same story again and again in Italy and especially in Campania: "We grew grapes for bulk wines for 40 years, but we realized our fruit was too good to sell off like that and we decided to make much better wine with it." To attribute all of this to technology and improved agricultural education is to look at only part of the story. It is evidence of the impressive social, political and economic progress made by the "peasants". And also because in so many families it's the younger generation of women who are taking over the management of the azienda and the making of the wine.

You see, everything in Italy isn't as dysfunctional as the Italians like to believe.  

 

 

Comments

[Gianni Lovato]

Somehow I feel compelled to compare what has happened (and is still happening) in the world of wine connoisseurs, to what has been happening to music, in the last century. The mood and taste swings have been just as erratic and, at times, as unpredictable.
In both fields the trends have often been driven by technological progress (or held back by the lack of it).
It is probably only a coincidence, but I find it ironic that there is a renaissance (or is it a naissance?) of wines from Campania, a land where song and dance have a long, albeit often overly melodramatic, tradition.
Also an area of Italy where beauty, contradictions, street smarts and sleigh-of-hand reign supreme.
Just think Sophia, camorra, Capri, pizza, sciusà....and, yes, at long last, the rise of smart women to positions where they can show the "cafoni" males how to get things done.
Forza belle!

[gianpaolo]

good post strappo! The only thing that comes to my mind is that food and wine always seem to attract some sort of adulteration.

[Strappo]

that's true. but, thank god, enough GOOD producers avoid the easy way.