And below are a few more facts about this wonderful Italian wine!
Enzo Ferrari and Gilles Villenueve
The apex of Lambrusco’s popularity in the world was in the ‘70s of last century. TheUnited States alone imported more than 3.5 million cases every year in that period,mainly industrially produced “fizzy, semisweet” Lambruscos, aiming at “sugar-craving Americans reared on soda pop”, as Peter Asimov wrote in the New York Times in 2007, in an article titled “Not So Fast: Don’t Dismiss Lambruscos”.
It was at the end of that decade that Gilles Villeneuve, the great Formula 1 driver, was photographed with Enzo Ferrari in the boxes, with a bottle of Lambrusco in his hands. But the same period coincided with the decline of the quality of many Lambruscos. People got the impression that all the Lambruscos were cheap wines, closer to a bubbling fruit juice than to a wine – a very mistaken impression indeed, because, although it could not boast of the history of French Champagne, this wine certainly had figured in the history of wines always as an important and quality one. Asimov again wrote in his rehabilitation of Lambrusco: “Real lambrusco has as much to do with the candied industrial stuff as assembly-line Beaujolais nouveau resembles good cru Morgon. While many variations exist on the Lambrusco theme, a good Lambrusco secco is dry and fresh — frothy and almost purple in its classic version, yes, but full of tangy fruit and subtle, earthy flavors that are ideal on a summer night”.
Bronze medal of the
International Exposition, Paris, 1900
“
Lambrusco was the nectar of the Gods in the eternally celebrated peasants’ universe, which, according to the tales of our grandparents, seemed organized to rotate around those magic ‘pistoni’.” These are the words of one of the most known Italian singers and writers,
Francesco Guccini, a great lover of Lambrusco. ‘Pistone’ was a unit of capacity for wine vessels equal to two litres but it was also the popular way to call the bottle of wine, and a bottle of Lambrusco in particular. “
And since those bottles weren’t around every day, it was a real celebration each time we could open one”, remembers
Guccini.
Lambrusco was a valuable wine not only for the peasants. In the 19th century and at beginning of 20th, in locande and trattorie (popular Italian restaurants) in Modena, it was sold at a price three times higher than common wine. Often it was more expensive than an entire meal. And Lambrusco was sold always in bottles, another indication of its importance, while the other wines on tap.
Giosuè Carducci
The fame of Lambrusco grew abroad as well; in 1900 the wine was granted one of its first most prestigious international distinctions; at the World Exposition of Paris it was decorated with the bronze medal and received honourable mentions.
By those years it was already the wine of poets and writers, such as the Nobel laureate (1906) Giosuè Carducci, who used to drink the wine that God made “to water” the meat of pork, the animal loved by Saint Anthony Abbey, in an osteria (18 colonne) in Modena.
Luigi Veronelli
Apparently,
Lambrusco was the wine of the revolutionaries, socialists and anarchists. This was the opinion of one of the greatest Italian wine writers of all times,
Luigi Veronelli, who pronounced a famous brindisi to Lambrusco: “
in the moment of the fight they (the revolutionaries) rose their glasses full of Lambrusco, the darkest one, perhaps a sign of their rigueur, determination and sharing of destiny.” Veronelli, himself an anarchist, wasn’t always friendly to Lambrusco. In the years of the excessive industrialization of its production (starting from the ‘70s) he dismissed it as a ‘gassosa’ (carbonated soft drink), but then changed his mind. Not by chance, his last public appearance was at an event called “
Il vin dell’avvenir: il Lambrusco del Contadino (The wine of the future: the Lambrusco of the peasant), in 2004, in the town of Brescello, in the province of Reggio Emilia.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
But Lambrusco wasn’t only popular among the leftists. It was the favourite wine of the
Futurists, the
literary movement that prospered in the years dominated by the Fascism. In 1931 it was the star of an ‘aero banquet’ of Futurist cuisine, organized in Bologna, on a table that had the shape of an airplane, from which
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – the founder of the movement – pronounced the famous “we are flying at an altitude of 8000 metres” when an orange risotto, called “the roar of the take off”, was served. Soon the other diners started yelling: “Give us the fuel, Give us the fuel.” The “fuel” was the Lambrusco that Futurists described as
“a wine in movement, alive, vital, young, fizzy,”served for the occasion in tanks of gasoline. When the League os Nations imposed sanctions to Mussolini for the invasion of Abyssinia, Lambrusco became the Champagne of the autarchy.
Giovanni Guareschi
In reality, Lambrusco was so popular that, according to a legend, in Emilia the
peasants used to baptize their children with it. That’s why,
when Fascism ended on the 26th of July 1943, the celebrations were all wetted with Lambrusco. Soon the wine became popular in the rest of Italy as well. The Italian Prime Minister of the post war period, the moderate catholic
Alcide De Gasperi, was a Lambrusco lover. In those years, the
series of novels and movies based on the bitter sweet stories of
Peppone and Don Camillo, contributed greatly to the popularity of Lambrusco in the rest of Italy and all around the world. Created by the writer
Giovanni Guareschi, in the decade of the ‘50s of the last century, Peppone and Don Camillo were respectively the mayor and the Catholic parson of a small town (Brescello, again) near the Po River. Both had a vivacious personality, as the Lambrusco (Reggiano in this case) that they loved to drink.
Guareschi himself was a producer of Lambrusco, with grapes from the area of Corticelli San Secondo (Parma). By that time Lambrusco was
on the wine list of renowned Italian Restaurants, such as
Savini and Biffi in Milan, where famous people, for instance the great opera singer,
Maria Callas, used to dine when she was singing at La Scala. Actually,
the Divina used to accompany her meagre meal (steak tartar and fruit) with a glass of good Lambrusco, her favorite wine.
Maria Callas
It was thanks to another great opera singer, the Italian Luciano Pavarotti, who was born in Modena, that Lambrusco gained popularity in many international contexts. Pavarotti used to take the wine with him – that of good quality. Once in New York, in a very famous Italian restaurant, he was served with a bottle of Lambrusco, which had been expressly air freighted from Italy. He didn’t hesitate to decline the wine because it didn’t have the correct lively color (it was too cloudy - torbido), perhaps due to travelling. Pavarotti at one point bought a vineyard with Lambrusco but he sold it very soon. "Wine must be made by people who know how to make it. Like the opera must be done by people who know how to sing," the tenor said.
Luciano Pavarotti
Then at the beginning of last decade, small and big producers of Lambrusco, began to work increasingly on the quality of their products. Promising results, at both national and international level, arrived in the middle of years Zero of this century. In 2012 the prestigious guide to Italian Wines by Gambero Rosso assigned 3 glasses to 3 Lambrusco Wines: Concerto Lambrusco Reggiano DOC Medici Ermete, Vecchia Modena Premium Lambrusco di Sorbara DOC Chiarli, Leclisse Lambrusco di Sorbara DOC Paltrinieri. The postmodern, quality Lambrusco was born.
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