Don’t Upset the Natives

What does indigenous mean in the beautiful mess of Italy?

Indigenous is a big and beautiful word. We enlightened moderns celebrate indigenous cultures, plant native plants and prefer wine made with fabulous indigenous grapes (preferably fermented with wild, indigenous yeasts).

It’s a sign of the times that in our synthetic digital world we’ve become suckers for “authenticity” and heirlooms that existed before the combustion engine or at least pre-TikTok.

I’m right there on all of that. It’s one big reason I love analog Italy-- arguably Europe’s biodiversity champ with a stunning variety of produce and more than 340 varieties of “indigenous” wine grapes.

But what is indigenous really? It’s complicated. Especially in the long-overgrown labyrinth of Italy.

We think of indigenous species as being as being “born”—or cultivated from the wild for the first time—in a specific place. But Italy is no Galapagos Islands. It’s a messy anti- Galapagos.

For more than 2000 years Italy has expanded and contracted, conquered and was conquered, imported and exported and experienced waves of immigration and emigration. All of it had an impact. And just as the Romans famously incorporated the gods of new territories with their own, Italians have appropriated whatever they found useful.

Start with Rome. The empire that brought plumbing all the way to Britain was the world’s first globalized power, importing most everything from lands outside of its original borders: wheat from Sicily and Egypt, olive oil from Spain to Greece, silk from China. Romans were fighters not farmers. A Roman would likely be baffled by why anyone would value “Km 0” cuisine.

Long after the fall of the Empire, the Arabs brought citrons, lemons and bitter oranges to Sicily. In her excellent book The Land Where Lemons Grow, Helena Attlee shows how genetically unstable citrus produced new mutations that spawned local varieties for which Italy is famous.

Other ingredients viewed today as essential building blocks of the Italian larder were also transplanted: dried pasta from North Africa; eggplant, garlic and basil from Asia; and tomatoes from their native South American Andes.

Domestication of vitis vinifera is believed to have begun millennia ago in the Caucasus and was later spread through the Mediterranean by Phoenicians, Greeks and of course Romans who took wine production to the far reaches of Gaul in Burgundy.

At different times through its history Italy has imported prized varieties from Greece, Spain, France, and elsewhere. And of course, since the phylloxera blight of the late 19^th and early 20^th century 99% of all vines are grafted on American rootstock. Where is the purity in that?

With such a complicated family history, it’s practical to accept indigenous as meaning something that’s laid down roots in a place for centuries without say the sophistication that brought Cabernet Franc from Bordeaux to Tuscany’s Carmignano 400 years ago.

In this way, Grenache can be native to Spain as well as Sardinia (as Cannonau) though there’s debate as to whether Spanish conquerors brought the wine with them or took it from the island.

Another problem with origin stories in Italy is all the deceptive names and weird synonyms. My Italian immigrant grandmother’s favorite pasta was alla Genovese, a slow cooked sauce of poor meat cuts and onions. Despite the name, it hails from her native Naples and has nothing to do with Genoa.

Similarly, in wine, Montepulciano grapes have no relationship to that Tuscan town. Sicilians sometimes call their native Nero D’Avola “Calabrese” after the mainland region across the Strait of Messina. One of Campania’s most famous indigenous white grapes is Greco-- called that because it came from Greece, or because it resembled the prized wines from there?

For anyone who cares about such things Italian, the Bible is Ian D’Agata’s Native Wine Grapes of Italy.

I love old books and early this year I bought a vintage copy of Luigi Veronelli’s Wines of Italy, first published in 1964.

Veronelli was the pope of the Italian wine Renaissance. He wrote about Italian wines as a critic, archaeologist and poet.

“The wines produced in Sicily are strong, rich in flavour and impetuous, wines which flash like a knife and which leave the unprepared drinker more dead than alive,” Veronelli wrote. “The lower classes liken it, with an almost poetical association, to Etna – to lava and fire.”

So what did the great Veronelli have to say about Nerello Mascalese—Etna’s indigenous red grape that serves as the basis of Etna Rosso (80%) codified in Sicily’s first appellation in 1968?

Nothing.

He describes Etna Rosso as “grapes of the Sangiovese, Morello and Trebbiano varieties. Suitable for aging… Dry, tasty, genuine, noble and sustained quality, well balanced.”

Whaaaat? Morello is a sour cherry. Trebbiano is science fiction. Sangiovese? D’Agata cites a 2010 study showing Nerello Mascalese to be an offspring of Sangiovese and Mantonico Bianco.

So what went wrong? Was Veronelli spellbound by the Sicilian sun? Did he get bad information? Surely the contadini of more than 60 years ago were not as technical or literate as growers today.

In the Anglo-Saxon world we used to believe in objective truth. It was this kind of superpower of the British and later the Americans. Then it all vanished.

Italy never had objective truth so at least its remained consistent.

What I’ve learned here is that things are called by different names. They are what people say they are and the stories change from locale to locale.

In the Mediterranean world that is an indigenous trait.