barrels

Right now in a disused cottage outside of town, the men of the Forti family are brewing up this year’s batch of vino cotto, following a recipe that historians reckon dates back about 3000 years. For the next 10 days, Simone and his father Decimo will cook around six tonnes of it in an operation that runs 24 hours a day. At Simone’s restaurant last week he told me what they were up to and invited me to come check it out – so I did, with my mate Al Langan who was in town for the week.

Once outlawed but now protected by ministerial decree, vino cotto figures hugely in local culture around Macerata and in particular Loro Piceno. Roman officials in Urbisaglia drank it at the end of banquets. During the harvest, farmers in the fields often drank vino cotto from a typical earthenware jug called a trufa to keep their strength up. And mothers rubbed vino cotto into the arms and legs of their babies, believing that it would make them stronger. Though it was once traded widely in Europe, now you’re only likely to find it in the land where it was born: around Macerata in Le Marche and in some parts of Abruzzo to the south.

The first steps in making vino cotto are identical to making wine. The grapes are minced up and then pressed – in this case using a press like a giant inverted car jack. For vino cotto, both red and white grapes are used, though Simone tells me red are preferred. Here’s the grapes going into the mincer and being pumped straight into the press.

And now the grapes being car jacked. Note the grape must flowing out of the bottom of the press.

At this point like Sherman McCoy we career off the viniculture highway into the dangerous and murky underworld of blackmarket homebrew. Instead of putting the must directly into barrels, it’s pumped into great copper cauldrons where it’s boiled down to around half of its original volume to concentrate the sugars. An over abundance of sun and lack of rain this year have not only pushed forward the harvest (this is all taking place three weeks earlier than normal) but spiked the grapes with extra sugars. As a result Simone only needs to cook down the vino cotto by a third, taking around 12 hours.

The reduced wine is then left in a vat to cool while the next batch of must is boiled down. Once it has cooled to 50°C it is pumped into waiting barrels where it will achieve alcohol levels of over 20%. Immediately on our arrival, Al and I had large glasses of vino cotto thrust into our hands (along with dishearteningly thick slices of nutella tart, but that’s incidental). I asked what year this vino cotto was brewed and received sharp looks from the men running the show. Here’s why:

Making a barrel of vino cotto is a continuous process spanning years, in some cases many decades. According to Simone, if you put 100% reduced grape must into a barrel it will quickly become undrinkable and certainly won’t be vino cotto. But if you take newly reduced must and add it to an existing barrel of vino cotto (at a ratio of up to two parts new to three parts old), in a short time the new must will take on the mystical characteristics of the existing brew and will never spoil. So like a newbie I asked the obvious question: if the only way to make vino cotto is to add it to an existing barrel, who made the first batch all those years ago and how did they do it? Blank faces. And then the predictable response: there has always been vino cotto. Ah, Italy – wonderfully romantic but when you’re looking for a straight answer you end up with a load of crap.

Here are two 450kg cauldrons of must boiling down:

The tour ended with Al and I sinking another glass of vino cotto with the boys and staring into the embers beneath the copper cauldrons. I’m pretty sure we were speaking Marchigiani dialect, including Al who had no previous knowledge of Italian, which is remarkable. And we’d have stayed like that indefinitely but the angry ring of my mobile phone reminded me that we were already late for picking up our wives for dinner at the Taverna.

If you fancy trying some, you can always contact Simone at Da Luana in Loro Piceno (check out the tile work in the bathroom in those photos. We regularly stayed in that apartment while waiting for work to finish on our house but always had to dim the lights before walking in that bathroom to avoid marble blindness). Or if you’re ready to dive in at the deep end, come down for the vino cotto festival in Loro Piceno, held every August.