THREE VERY OLD VINES
In our garden there are three very old vines, standing side by side. They are all that remains of a pergola which, as the iron supports still embedded in the wall show, once ran around the perimeter of the courtyard.
I have always known them there, and they have quite literally survived everything: more than twenty years of abandonment, fire, chemicals, chainsaws, excavators, building works, wildfires, disease, pests, drought and the great freeze of 1985. Never pruned, never tended, never fertilised. Before the war, a brick buttress was even built right up against one of them — but somehow the vine found its way through.
They even produced a little fruit: two bore red grapes and one white. The white one was a table grape. A good one, too.
Over the years, I often wondered why I myself had never sacrificed them during all the work carried out in that part of the garden.
1896. THE WAR IN AFRICA, A LITTLE MONKEY AND THE PERGOLA
Then something suddenly came back to me: an old family story told by an elderly aunt about my rather heavy-handed great-grandfather.
“When he came back from the war in Africa,” she used to say, “he brought a little monkey home with him for company. He kept it on a chain. One day, though, the monkey escaped, climbed onto the pergola and, before they could catch it, broke all the vine shoots. So Great-Grandfather took off his belt and gave it a good thrashing.”
I had always dismissed it as an insignificant little story, probably embellished over the years. But the reference to the vines could hardly have been accidental. And suddenly it all became clear: if the pergola was already there in 1896, could I actually have ungrafted vines growing in my garden?
PAOLO STORCHI OF CREA AREZZO
None of the old people of Monte Sante Marie could remember anything, except that the pergola had always been there and that, in the old days, its grapes were harvested together with those from the family estate vineyards.
So I decided to ask Paolo Storchi, Director of CREA’s Research Centre for Viticulture and Enology in Arezzo, to come and take a look.
Obviously, I had very little solid evidence to offer him apart from my aunt’s story and the far more interesting history of this thousand-year-old fortified village in the Crete Senesi, which I had been studying for years and trying to rescue from oblivion. An oblivion that had swallowed up an important part of its ancient rural heritage too.
He came, took a few samples and said: “We’ll see.” I didn’t find that particularly reassuring.
LUGLIENGA, CITRONELLE AND PANFINONE
The results arrived a few weeks later and were astonishing. At least to me.
They were three different varieties, all rare and unusual.
The least unusual was Luglienga, an early-ripening white table grape also used in wine-grape crosses. The most unusual was Citronelle, an extremely rare red wine grape of French origin. The third was Panfinone, a rare red wine grape of which only a handful of specimens were known in Italy, possibly of Hungarian-Ukrainian origin.
HEROIC VINES: THE EXTRAORDINARILY LONG SHOOTS OF PANFINONE AND ZUCCACCIO
At this point, instead of satisfying my curiosity, the discovery only increased it, and the questions multiplied. Why were such unusual grape varieties growing side by side in the courtyard of a manor house? Could they be the remains of a collection? Who had planted them, and when? As far as I knew, none of my ancestors from the previous two generations had shown any particular interest in ampelography. And the neglect of the pergola over the previous seventy years certainly seemed to confirm it. So?
Strict orders followed: the surviving vines were to be protected at all costs. Then came a painstaking search of the village, the surrounding countryside and the edges of estate land where vineyards had stood until 1965. From the scrub, the undergrowth and the field margins emerged more heroic vines, their shoots extraordinarily long. Samples were taken immediately.
Then began the systematic search: old estate records, historical cultivation maps, early aerial photographs and the memories of local farmers in their nineties, all combed for clues as to where another surviving Panfinone vine — or something else — might still be found.
The search paid off. Along a hedge tangled with brambles we found Panfinone vines that no one had ever paid any attention to. And from a wooded ravine emerged Zuccaccio vines, still entwined around the olive trees that had fallen with them: an old Valdarno grape variety whose traces had been lost sometime between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
AND SO, A TINY VINEYARD
In the meantime, Paolo Storchi had managed to propagate a few young vines from the samples. He brought them to me. And I planted them — with due ceremony — to recreate the lost pergola and establish a tiny family vineyard.
Not all of them took; the roe deer did their bit too. But Panfinone’s journey has begun again.
Stefano e Daniela Tesi e il Panfinone in 100 CUSTODI PER 100 VITIGNI
La biodiversità viticola in italia
G.R.A.S.P.O.
FORGOTTEN FRUIT
In the abandoned, overgrown orchards of the estate’s old farmsteads, we rediscovered apple trees bearing small, rounded fruit, pomegranate-red to pink and streaked with yellow. They may belong to the old Abbondanza variety, traditionally planted in orchards to encourage pollination.
Personal memories and information gathered locally suggest that, until the 1960s, several apple varieties were still grown in kitchen gardens in the area, some renowned for their flavour and small size.
Alongside the apples, we have also rediscovered and rescued old winter pear trees, whose flesh is very firm but delicately flavoured. We use them to make a delicious purée with nothing more than lemon and vanilla.
