Region & History

Long before anyone cared about Rome, the Etruscans shaped this plain. Their trading city of Spina, in the marshland near Comacchio, was a hub between Etruscans and Greeks. In the more than four thousand graves of its necropolis lie Attic amphorae to this day, most of them made for wine. Inland stood Kainua, today's Marzabotto, one of the most important cities of this Etruscan stretch of the Po Valley. It was connected to Spina and to Felsina, ancient Bologna. Even Virgil, Cato, and Varro wrote of the labrusca, a wild vine that climbed up trees at the edges of forests. Its name lives on today in Lambrusco.

Well into the twentieth century, wine here remained above all a farmer's drink: light, fizzy, quickly drunk. That changed with the tank method. From the sixties onward, Lambrusco could be produced cheaply and on a massive scale. American importers sold it by the gallon as a sweet party wine, and the press in the US soon gave it a nickname: Italian Coca-Cola. Millions of bottles crossed the Atlantic, and the wine's reputation sank with every case sold.

The answer came decades later from the same villages that had once invented the sweet mass-market wine. Small producers remembered an older technique: fermentation directly in the bottle, unfiltered, cloudy, and dry, just as it had been poured in the osterias of Modena back in 1865. The sugar disappeared from the bottles, the acidity remained, and the party drink became a serious wine once again.

At the same time, a white wine was fighting for recognition. Albana has grown in the hills around Bertinoro since late antiquity. Legend has it that around 400 AD the Empress Galla Placidia took a sip there from a clay bowl and declared that she should not be drinking from something so plain, but from gold. That, so the story goes, is how the town got its name: bere in oro, to drink in gold. In 1987, Albana di Romagna became the first Italian white wine ever to be awarded the country's highest designation of origin. That decision is still disputed today, as many found the wine too light to deserve it.

Today both stories stand side by side. Lambrusco, which lost its standing and then painstakingly won it back. Albana, which received its title before the world outside was ready to believe in it. Both tell the same story about this plain: it was always underestimated.