The news is three years old, but still worth paying attention too, especially since I am working on a talk on famous persons and their favorite wines. Pity we still have to wait another two years for the first bottles!
The Planeta winery, producer of high quality Sicilian wines, is attempting to recover Mamertino, Julius Caesar’s favorite wine. According to historical sources, it was the flagship wine of Sicily during the Roman period, along with Taormina, which is perhaps the same wine.
The area that will host this adventure of ‘archeo-enology’ is Cape Milazzo (Messina), a promontory on the north side of Sicily. Mamertino – the name probably stems from Mars – was the wine of warriors and is so-called because of its particular characteristics. Strabo and Martial tell us of how Mamertino rivaled the four best Italian wines and Julius Caesar (considered a top authority on vines, because he believed they were the way to keep men working the land as well as an excellent military defense, as the wine farmers bitterly opposed invaders to safeguard their vineyards) chose it to celebrate the feast for his third consulate, along with Falerno.
The scene of this adventure is quite unique: the Barony of Cape Milazzo, a plateau of about 30 hectares suspended over the sea with nearly nine hectares of vineyards, and the rest covered with antique olive groves which, however, have been in a state of abandonment for years.
The project of recovering and revitalizing Mamertino also seeks to protect the vineyards in the area. In collaboration with professor Attilio Scienza, among the top experts in the world on vineyards, Planeta will trace back the history of this wine to attempt to reproduce the wine that Julius Caesar enjoyed so much. The first suggestions are that it is a red wine from vines grown by the sea, based on the great indigenous grapes in the north of Sicily.
‘It will be, as always for Planeta, an enormous amount of work (the first harvest is expected in 5 years) along with passionate and exciting research,’ says a spokesman for the Sicilian winery, ‘certainly neither easy nor quick. We believe and hope – just as today when we look back to other areas in Sicily where we have produced wines that are now a tangible reality – to be able to say one day: it was worth it.’