Italy, Leonardo, and Natural Wine
I’ve drunk Sicilia’s crimson wine!
The blazing vintage pressed
From grapes on Etna’s breast,
What time the mellowing autumn sun did shine:
I‘ve drunk the wine!
—Bayard Taylor, “Sicilian Wine,” 1854
Winemaking first came to Italy about 3,500 years ago, moving west after being established in Greece. Sicily was probably one of the first regions with major production, so I made an appointment to visit Arianna Occhipinti. In an industry filled with seemingly endless profiles of crusty male winemakers, it’s easy to see why many people welcomed a twenty-something woman with a gift for making bright red Sicilian wines with depth, freshness, and a sense of place. Wine magazines sometimes photograph Occhipinti looking like a model, her long, wavy, black hair cascading around a gaze that varies from intense to seductive. For one shoot she perched on a wine barrel with an old limestone wall in the background; in another she bent joyously down in the vineyard dirt, smiling at the camera with youthful exuberance.
I first tried her wines at a Raleigh, North Carolina, tasting—evidence that her fame has spread beyond the major cities on both US coasts. Critics around the world have praised Occhipinti’s wines, which are made with traditional Sicilian grapes such as Nero d’Avola. Her success is part of a trend, too. Italy has done more to identify, protect, and promote local grapes than any other country in the world. Over four hundred varieties are now used to make wine (compared to about ninety in Spain) and regional chefs and food critics promote once obscure varieties such as Cococciola, Dindarella, Pecorino, and Vespolina. The Wine Grapes authors noted that “there are initiatives all over the country to save from extinction and recuperate historic vine varieties that until recently have been known to perhaps only one or two farmers.”
A visit to southeastern Sicily told another part of the story. Driving around country road SP-68 looking for Occhipinti’s vineyard, I saw some healthy vineyards but also barbed wire fences guarding fields of dead vines. There were more than a few old, ruined, stone farmhouses. A stray dog picked through a pile of trash. The region was struggling, not booming. It was a testament to how much Occhipinti had accomplished, more telling than the glossy wine-centric photo ops.
I found her winery behind a stone entrance with remote-controlled iron gates linked to an intercom. Men on heavy equipment were working on a new white-walled storage structure. A perfectly renovated farmhouse with limestone walls and a terra-cotta roof stood next to a new winery building.
Occhipinti was sixteen when her uncle Giusto took her to the 2000 Vinitaly wine expo. Giusto was a pioneer, too, co-founding COS winery in the 1980s, which emphasizes local grapes and ferments them in clay amphora. It’s one of the largest attempts at recreating ancient winemaking styles in the world. Occhipinti loved the people at Vinitaly and the nonstop wine discussions, and she soon joined the University of Milan’s winemaking program. But many of the courses there stressed laboratory work and industrial wine production, and Occhipinti rebelled. In 2003 she sent a manifesto letter to Luigi “Gino” Veronelli, a pioneering wine journalist and advocate for local agriculture. She wrote to him about listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, reading the French biodynamic winemaker Nicolas Joly, and of feeling alienated from the coursework:
I’m studying Oenology and Viticulture in Milan. Every day, I experience false winemaking, weighed down by the obvious pressure of industrial forces. I don’t like seeing my colleagues learning the wrong methods because they are the winemakers of the future. I don’t know if there will be enough time to change their minds, for them to understand that wine is not “constructed” by impersonal or distant hands. Wine must be accompanied . . . I write these words as a young discoverer, to remember that there is still room for a different path.
Veronelli encouraged her vision, and Occhipinti started making wine. At the age of twenty-five she took out a 150,000 euro loan to buy land, and hired other young idealists to work with her. Critics loved her wines, and the business grew and grew. In 2013, she built a new winery with a system to cool the giant storage tanks on hot summer days. She also sells olive oil produced on the farm.
I had an afternoon appointment but decided to stop by in the morning to take some pictures. Perhaps that was unintentionally rude, but by chance I saw what a day at the winery is really like. A small tractor pulled up, towing a cart stacked high with about seventy-five red plastic cartons filled with purple grapes. Occhipinti and three young workers rapidly unloaded them onto a conveyor belt. She darted from side to side, tasting samples, discarding occasional bunches with rot, and adjusting the belt speed. It was hot, water and dirt stained her cargo pants, and her hair was swept up in a working bun. The grapes tumbled into a mechanical de-stemmer and whooshed down large tubes into the cool winery vats. The crew unloaded all the grapes in about half an hour, and finished up by running each crate through an outdoor rinsing system set up next to an olive tree bursting with small green fruit. Occhipinti rushed off to attend to more business, and I thought of an interview she’d given a few years earlier:
Last August it was my thirtieth birthday, and waking up still wearing my party dress (a very Sicilian Dolce & Gabbana red silk sheath dress with citrus fruits . . .) I felt different, as I finally discovered myself through the wine. The time of the rebel girl fighting against conventions was gone, and I felt more like a young woman, with a precise idea of my wines and my future, maybe with a more feminine touch even if I always say, “I am a farmer, and proud of it.” For me going to the vineyards in the early morning is an amazing sensation of freedom, and I realized that my “allure” as a vintner has nothing to do with the delicate female attitude of gardening, but is more about repairing the tractor or fixing the bottling machine.
I left the winery to have lunch in a nearby tiny, sleepy village with one-way streets, then headed back to talk with Occhipinti. Inside the old farmhouse the high-beamed office space had a Silicon Valley feel—crisp, open, with a long communal table. Drawings and ideas crowded the chalkboards along one wall. One showed an old, bent olive tree growing out of a circle of stones, with two little field mice hiding near the ground. Next to the tree was a bottle labeled “VINO BUONO” and next to that an arrow pointing to the bottle topped by the words “L’olio puro! BUONO!!!” A small blue plastic coffeemaker sat on a wooden table underneath the board, next to an award from Düsseldorf’s ProWein trade fair event, which read “2013 Arianna Occhipinti Newcomer of the Year.”
Occhipinti strode into the office, friendly but intense, dressed in a black T-shirt and tan cargo pants, and sprawled in a chair. I mentioned the abandoned vineyards nearby and then asked, “Did people encourage you in the beginning? Did they say ‘You’re crazy, it’s going down?’ ” She paused for a second. The ruined wineries were ghosts of a boom dating to the early 1900s, she said. “The situation now is many people are [still] abandoning vineyards. And when I started making wine, maybe it was a little bit worse, in the sense that now some wineries are replanting vineyards, something is moving again.”
The old wineries were called palmentos, and they used a system of gravity and containers carved out of limestone to crush grapes and ferment juice. Another part of Occhipinti’s restored farmhouse has an example. “Many of these kinds of farms, the old palmento, were built because they needed to make a lot of wine.” The surge in demand came after phylloxera destroyed many older French and European vineyards. Now there are ruined farmhouses all over the region. Most vineyard production stopped with the Second World War, and many people turned to olives or greenhouse fruits and vegetables. “So many things are different now,” she reflected, gesturing with her hands.
“People sometimes think organic means everything is simple and natural,” I said. “But you spent a lot of money on the cooling system. You are really paying attention to details and quality control. Did you want to mix traditional and modern winemaking?”
“This is a good question,” she said, sitting up in the chair. “Because my life in wine of course did not start with the cellar that you see now. I started in a small place, in another winery. It was not mine, of course, because I had nothing. So I rented. But it was fantastic because I studied [everything] in a very good way. And step by step I became crazy about logistics.”
She spent years making wine with basic, minimal equipment, and the current winery emerged out of all that she learned. It is designed to control production at every point after harvest. “It’s important because two days ago was like 35 degrees Celsius [about 95 degrees Fahrenheit] outside. We are not in the Loire. We are lower than Tunisia in latitude,” she said of southern Sicily. Just a few days of excessive temperatures can lead to wines with burnt flavors.
“You were saying people think organic farming is simple. This kind of farming is not easy. It is really difficult. There were many sacrifices. [But] I’m a person who doesn’t stop if I find some wall. I just try to maybe climb, maybe go around, but I want to go over. Always. Always.” She paused. “Now everything is working really well. People are happy. This is my life, my farm.”
Occhipinti isn’t alone in seeking a business that brings traditional farming and winemaking methods into the twenty-first century. Since 2010 Italy has launched more than a dozen national sustainability programs for winemakers, offering agricultural, academic, and marketing research to regional businesses. Various programs encourage reducing the use of pesticides and fertilizers, making wine without adding chemicals, supporting crop biodiversity, and water conservation.
Now Occhipinti is experimenting with other crops. She planted a local strain of wheat, to grind into flour. She bought some land in mountainous areas, to make a different type of white wine. And she wants to restore more of the nearby abandoned vineyards. “So it’s farm dreams. My dreams are in agriculture. Not other things,” she said.
I asked Occhipinti if she thinks other countries will grow beyond focusing on wine made from just a half-dozen famous grapes. “It’s going to change, I’m sure,” she said, but acknowledged that changing palates is a slow process.
Some critics have turned on so-called natural wine, because they feel too many bottles exhibit sour or spoiled tastes. There’s no question that such wines are sensitive, and perhaps harder to produce. But Occhipinti has succeeded in producing consistently fine wine, and so has Alaverdi. I wondered what scientists had to say about the fierce debate over natural wine, which is complicated by profound questions over exactly what the term means.
While there’s no solid evidence that heavy pesticide or chemical use leads to significant concentrations of harmful chemicals in your wine, they do kill off beneficial microbes, insects, and nearby plants, and may pollute nearby streams with runoff. That alone is worth avoiding. “Wine and table grapes currently receive intense chemical applications to combat severe pathogen pressures,” Sean Myles noted in one of his papers.
Isabelle Legeron is often seen as the leader of the natural movement. The founder of the RAW WINE fair, now held in various countries including the United States, she is a French winemaker and Master of Wine who comes from a family that has produced Cognac for six generations. In a 2011 essay first published in Decanter, she wrote that natural wine isn’t a fad. “Natural wines . . . have existed since time immemorial. When wine was first made 8,000 years ago, it was not made using packets of yeasts, vitamins, enzymes, Mega Purple, reverse osmosis, cryoextraction or powdered tannins—some of the many additives and processes used in winemaking worldwide.”
“Natural growers make a panoply of wines, but all share a similar outlook: nurturing biodiversity while embracing and observing nature, rather than fighting to control it,” Legeron added. In other words, they avoid or strictly limit the use of pesticides, commercial yeasts, and other additives. Some natural winemakers use clay qvevri or amphora, but many don’t.
Cecilia Díaz, a German environmental and food scientist, analyzed twenty different wines from various European countries made in clay vessels, and compared the levels of organic acids and minerals such as calcium and phosphorus to wines made using modern methods. “[The clay wines] contained higher levels of antioxidants and total phenolics, the latter up to 10 times more abundant in the white wine varieties than in conventional wines.” Despite being fermented in mineral-rich clay, the mineral content fell within normal ranges, and phosphorus levels were only slightly higher.
In related research Díaz found that white wines made using traditional methods (skin contact, clay fermentation) “have higher antioxidant properties than commercial white wines . . . Total antioxidant status (TAS), showed average values four times higher in wines produced in amphoras than commercial white wines.” Only white wines produced in traditional clay showed tannin levels similar to red wines. Those wines also had more resveratrol, a compound that may have health benefits.
Roberto Ferrarini, an Italian scientist, found differences in Georgian wines, too. Prolonged contact with grape skins led to wine “enriched with phenolic compounds, such as catechins, proanthocyanidins, [and] cinnamic acids . . . Additionally, the aromatic composition is completely different from that of conventionally produced wines.”
It’s clear that natural or traditional winemaking has intrinsic differences. Some critics claim that natural wines are unstable and prone to spoilage or off-flavors. The critic Simon Woolf took a deeper look at Georgian natural wine. “You might think that this laissez-faire production method would be prone to flaws—how hygienic is a clay amphora, and what about oxidation? Well, that’s the interesting part.” Woolf reviewed his tasting notes for more than fifty qvevri wines, and was surprised to find that the well-made ones do not have a pronounced oxidized taste (an overall dullness of flavor that comes when wine is exposed to air for too long). “Yes, the aromas can be surprising and dense—cooked fruits, honey, jasmine, herbs and floral notes are all common in the whites—but they are quite distinct” from intentionally oxidized wine like sherry, Woolf said, adding that many traditional Georgian red wines use no added sulfur dioxide at all. (That’s an antimicrobial preservative added to most wines around the world, in varying doses.)
I asked Jamie Goode, the British wine critic and scientist, how he views the topic. “You need to be very skilled to make good natural wine. You need much more skill working without the safety net of sulfites and other things than you would if you were just making a conventional wine,” he told me. “The really good people are on the ball. They know what to do. They know about microbes. I think that’s the key for the ones who make good natural wines . . . they’re working meticulously.”
Goode also had an insight about what technology has and hasn’t done for winemaking. “You don’t need any technology to make great wines. You can make great wine very simply, with techniques that would have been available a hundred years ago. I think that’s a good point. There’s no reason why any of the wine today would actually be any better today at the high end because of technology. But technology would certainly help make good wines more consistent.”
The influential American critic Robert Parker isn’t opposed to natural wine principles, he just scoffs at the word. In 2014 Parker addressed a California wine conference and mentioned some of his long-held rules for exceptional wine: that it allows expression of the vineyard terroir, micro-climate, and purity of the grape variety; that the wine isn’t excessively manipulated; and that it “follow[s] an uncompromising, non-interventionistic winemaking philosophy that eschews the food-processing industrial mind-set of high-tech winemaking. In short, give the wine a chance to make itself naturally without—ah, I hate the word naturally!—without the human element attempting to sculpture or alter the wine’s intrinsic character.”
I couldn’t agree more. A “natural” claim is no guarantee of quality, but we need more winemakers who pay obsessive attention to their land, vines, and wines, not more pesticides or machines. I want people and vineyards such as Occhipinti, Alaverdi, and Cremisan to succeed, not be buried by the clever marketing of international wine corporations. To me, that’s the bigger battle: not just natural wine versus the world, but small, dedicated, regional winemakers versus the corporations.
Sicily is a winemaking world unto itself, so I wanted to visit someone on the mainland of Italy. Elisabetta Foradori was on my list for her pioneering work to re-introduce clay amphora wine, with a modern touch. Her winery is near the Swiss border, but she had a last-minute scheduling glitch and our appointment fell through. That left me in Milan with a couple of open days. I scanned local papers and chanced on an unusual opportunity: using archaeological and historical evidence, scientists had re-created a vineyard Leonardo da Vinci once owned, in land right across the street from the Santa Maria delle Grazie church, where he painted The Last Supper mural. The vineyard land was reportedly part payment for the painting.
Serena Imazio, a grape scientist who worked on the vineyard project, met me on a busy street that was once on the outskirts of Milan. We walked through a building to a long, narrow garden that stretched back for a few hundred feet. I could see the spire of the Santa Maria church across the street, just as Leonardo would have.
“It was a crazy idea in the beginning. I thought, OK, they are all crazy,” Imazio told me. “Just because Leonardo da Vinci was here in the sixteenth century, it’s impossible to trace back all that story, even using genetics, to find something related to that vineyard.” She’s a biologist who specializes in grape genetics, particularly how grapes became domesticated as the knowledge of winemaking moved across the Mediterranean, from east to west. Imazio took me back to the beginning of the project, long before “Leonardo’s Vineyard” was opened to the public in 2015.
Leonardo moved to Milan in the 1480s. In 1495 Ludovico Maria Sforza, the Duke of Milan, commissioned The Last Supper. Leonardo finished the painting in 1497, and the Duke gave him a sixteen-perch vineyard that year. “Perch” is an old European land-measuring term that dates back to Roman times. It is a little hard to pinpoint the size because the various kingdoms measured differently. One scholar estimated the vineyard was two or three acres, about 165 by 660 feet. Leonardo kept detailed notes about the value of the vineyard in his notebooks, suggesting that it was worth just over 1,931 gold ducats. At the time a horse cost about forty ducats, and a government employee was paid about three hundred ducats per year.
A sixteenth-century map of Milan shows the vineyard with one tree in the center of the walled garden and additional fields nearby. Leonardo’s property included a small house, either a residence or perhaps a farm building. Imazio said the vineyard gift was important to Leonardo because only landowners could be citizens of Milan at the time. The French invaded the city in the summer of 1499, deposed the Duke, and ultimately confiscated the vineyard, so Leonardo left for Venice. In 1507 the French asked him to return to Milan and formally returned the vineyard property.
Leonardo appears to have lived in Milan for a few years before leaving permanently in 1513. He died in France in 1519. His will left equal shares of the vineyard to his apprentice and alleged lover Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as Salaì, and his servant Giovanbattista Villani. Over the centuries the house fell into ruin. In 1920 a new owner began restorations, and took pictures of the vineyards. A fire, urban sprawl, and Allied bombings during World War II brought new devastation. The vineyard disappeared.
Imazio came to her part in the story as we walked along a gravel path. In 2014 a local historian and wine lover noticed a small plaque outside the home. It said that Leonardo once had a vineyard there. He knocked on the door. The owners confirmed the details, and the historian said, “Really? Nobody knows this story. We have to tell this story.” A project was launched to look for archaeological evidence of the old vineyard, more than seventy years after the last vines had died. Imazio worked with Attilio Scienza of the University of Milan, a renowned scientist who’s published more than two hundred papers on grapes and winemaking. He’s a leading supporter of native grape varieties, and was one of Arianna Occhipinti’s teachers. According to Imazio, Scienza tells everyone, “This is our competitive advantage against the popular international grapes, such as Chardonnay, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon.”
“You were skeptical about finding evidence here?” I said, responding to Imazio’s expression.
“Very skeptical,” she said. “I’m a biologist. Mainly I thought we would never be able to find exactly the places where the roots of these plants were. [But] the people living in this house over the centuries were aware that Leonardo’s vineyard was there. And incredibly this part of Milan wasn’t built until the 1920s. We have lots of pictures showing where exactly the plants were. So we started this work, going down and excavating. And we found some little, very small traces of woods and seeds, that could be useful for our story.”
The scientists continued excavating, finding all sorts of debris and plant remains. These could have come from any species, so they spent months carefully cleaning the material. Imazio explained what happened after that. “First, we tried to understand if we could find some DNA inside. And we found something, but we didn’t know what DNA it was. I thought, OK, we found DNA, but it’s not grapevine.” A process called whole genome amplification was the next step. “That means you can repair some pieces of the DNA you find,” she said. The results showed remains from the Vitis genus—grapes. Imazio thought “OK, [but] the Vitis genus is full of species.” Another round of genome amplification uncovered a few samples of Vitis vinifera, the domesticated grape, and a DNA database search showed a probable match with Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, a widely planted Italian white grape with a long history. The organizers planted seedlings of Malvasia in 2015.
It was an impressive outcome, and I evaluated the details as we walked through the gardens next to the tiny vineyard. A group of tourists chattered nearby and the noise of cars and construction wafted in from surrounding streets. Imazio reminded me that Leonardo grew up in the country village of Vinci, which was full of olive groves and vineyards. She thinks he rested in the Milan vineyard after working on The Last Supper. There are frequent references to “vermillion wine” in Leonardo’s notes and receipts. One country fable he wrote in the 1490s mentions “a spider’s web in a vineyard,” and The Last Supper shows small glasses of red wine on the table in front of each disciple.
In the end, Imazio was surprised by the findings. “It was also a sort of lesson for me about skepticism.” She had underestimated how much could be learned from tiny fragments of plant material, though such potential is part of what attracted her to grape genetics in the first place. “[In DNA] I found this beautiful story about going back to the origin of grapes,” she said. That information could help trace and understand human migrations. “When you study the genetics of grapevines, one of the most interesting things is to see how, in the Mediterranean, you have exactly the same variety of grapes in different harbors. So you have Malvasia, the same variety, the same genotype in Croatia, you have it in Greece, you have it in the south islands of Italy, you have it in Sardinia, and then you have it in Spain.” Imazio said the DNA evidence illuminates and supports the theory that winemaking spread across the Mediterranean by showing the routes that Phoenician ships took as they explored, spreading vines and knowledge of winemaking along the way. “It really gives you an idea about the lives of human beings thousands of years ago.”
Imazio has also worked with Georgian researchers to understand how domesticated grapes moved out of the Caucasus and across the Mediterranean. “What is nice is to see how the germ plasm belonging to the Georgian sylvestris somehow arrived in Europe and gave a sort of print to vineyards across the continent,” she told me. “It has in some way contributed to building the genetic material that we use in our cultivation nowadays.”
Imazio knows and respects José Vouillamoz, but thinks it will be difficult to find a single domestication point in the Caucasus from eight or ten thousand years ago. The pieces of Caucasus grape DNA grow fainter and fainter in vine genomes the farther west researchers look. Perhaps several varieties were domesticated around the same time, in different regions. There could be more than one Holy Grail of wine grapes. Thousands of years of wild and human-induced crossbreeding makes it hard to unravel the truth, especially given the scarcity of funding.
I felt Imazio and her colleagues had uncovered convincing evidence of Leonardo’s vineyard, but found no conclusive proof his grape was Malvasia di Candia Aromatica. Perhaps it was planted long after Leonardo died. It’s still a great project.
That night in Milan I did some more reading about Leonardo. The Last Supper is one of the most famous paintings in the world, a scene that captures love, fear, betrayal, and forgiveness in the various faces at the table with otherworldly skill. There’s just one thing: Whether you believe Jesus was a real person or a character in profound stories from two thousand years ago, those people didn’t sit at tables. They sat on cushions, Middle Eastern–style.
France was my next stop.
Tastings
You could spend a lifetime exploring all the different local wine grape varieties in Italy. One way to start is by picking a region, for example comparing Sicilian wines to those from the north.
Occhipinti, Vittoria, Sicily
SP68 (red, from a blend of Frappato and Nero d’Avola grapes)
SP68 (white, from a blend of Albanello and Zibibbo grapes)
COS, Vittoria, Sicily
Zibibbo in Pithos (white; amphora-aged)
Pithos Rosso (red, from a blend of Nero d’Avola and Frappato grapes; amphora-aged)
Foradori, Mezzolombardo, Italy
Fontanasanta Nosiola (white, from Nosiola grapes; amphora-aged)
Granato (red, from Teroldego grapes; barrel-aged)
The story of how Malvasia white grapes spread across the Mediterranean intrigued me, so here are suggestions for a connect-the-dots Malvasia tasting. The producers go from east to west, just as winemaking did several thousand years ago—with one in California to cap it off.
Domaine Douloufakis, Crete, Greece
Femina (white)
Kozlović Winery, Croatia
Malvazija (white)
Monastero Suore Cistercensi (Monastic Order of Cistercian Nuns), Lazio, Italy
Coenobium Ruscum (“orange,” from a blend of Malvasia and two other grapes)
Blandy’s Madeira, Portugal
Vintage Malmsey (white; if you want to splurge, an old bottle of classic Madeira can cost thousands of dollars)
Los Bermejos, Canary Islands, Spain
Malvasía Naturalmente Dulce NV (“orange”)
Birichino, Santa Cruz, California
Malvasia Bianca (white)