There is a scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian in which the hapless messiah, played by Graham Chapman, hawks ancient Roman snack food in Jerusalem's Colosseum. His tray is filled with ocelot spleens, jaguar earlobes, and wolf-nipple chips, and we think to ourselves that Roman food was probably just as gruesome. But what about Roman wine? They apparently liked to cut it with seawater and honey. How disgusting was it? We will never know, because no one will ever be able to reproduce exactly the combination of varietals, viticulture, and climate that prevailed in Roman Europe 2,000 years ago. As with ocelot spleens, we will have to guess.
Still, we do know that the Romans understood the concept of vintages and appreciated the qualities of older wine. Writing at around A.D. 70, the scholar and administrator Pliny the Elder sang the praises of the 121 B.C. vintage, which implies that, unlike almost anyone alive now, he had perhaps sampled a 200-year-old wine. Pliny wrote extensively about viticulture in his Historia Naturalis, and he is also the reputed source of the immortal aphorism "In vino veritas." (He's said to have coined "In vino sanitas," too, but that doesn't have quite the same ring.)
It's curious to recall that Pliny died during the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius on August 24, A.D. 79, in a resort town near Pompeii. After all, it is inside the ruins of Pompeii that the Campanian winery Mastroberardino — known for a splendid Aglianico, Radici Taurasi Riserva — has been trying to re-create a Roman wine on the sites of actual Pompeii vineyards with varietals it believes correspond to those used by the Pompeians. Mastroberardino calls this experiment in archaeological wine-making Villa dei Misteri, after a frescoed Pompeii villa. The wine has become something of a cult item, with certain vintages selling for more than $200 a bottle (grapeswine.com), and it is identified as Pompeiano Red, recalling the names of ancient local grapes and wines — Pompeiana, Holconia, Aminea, or my favorite, Vesuvinum, which cleverly combined Vesuvius and vinum, Latin for wine.
It's fitting, In some sense. During its heyday, Pompeii had more than 200 wine bars. Thanks to Vesuvius, many are still standing, and they prove that Pompeians loved their tipple. On almost every street there is a bar, with its seats, countertops, and graffiti charmingly intact. One piece of famous wine graffiti I saw on a recent visit reads, "During the wine harvest festival, Veneria sucked off Maximus." There are many in a similar vein, and one wonders who Maximus was and whether he too was buried in volcanic ash.
Mastroberardino is a family business based in the Irpinia region, about 45 minutes from Vesuvius. It maintains five vineyards inside Pompeii, each one protected by locked gates and high walls, much as they were in Pliny's time. The winery is run by Professore Piero Mastroberardino, but it was his father, Antonio, who conceived the idea of re-creating a "Roman wine" by determining how ancient growers spaced their vines and then adapting obscure local varietals — some of them still growing wild and forgotten on the slopes of Vesuvius — to mimic what a Roman wine might have been.
