Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
from the Italian
aspro,
or the Latin term
asper,
meaning tart. In fact, this grape will never be
accused of low acidity; not surprisingly,
asprinio has been sold throughout the centu-
ries to producers from Italy and abroad who
enlist its help in making sparkling wines.
The exact origin of the grape has been clari-
fi ed recently by Attilio Scienza and his team at
the University of Milan. It was once thought
that Asprinio was related to the
Pinot
family
and imported into Italy by the French at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, but it is
now clear the variety is truly native, most likely
deriving from the domestication of wild, local
vines thousands of years ago
.
Asprinio looks
and behaves like a wild vine species, with
extremely long creepers growing high above
the ground between trees such as poplars, and
is able to thrive even in very shaded environ-
ments. Even today, it's common to see vines
running free as much as twenty meters above
the ground, wrapped around and hanging
between poplars and oaks that act as live sup-
ports. This training system of vines is called
alberate
(from
albero,
tree, and not to be con-
fused with
alberello,
which is a different grape-
vine training system), and it is beautiful, creat-
ing a barrier of leaves and grapes in a jungle-like
environment. Asprinio is an extremely vigor-
ous variety: producers once culled up to two
hundred kilos of grapes per vine, which is
unheard of for any other quality wine grape
variety.
Always abundant in the area north of
Naples, Asprinio's potential for fi ne wine was
much appreciated throughout history. In a
rental agreement signed by a notary in 1495,
the owner was to receive two containers of
wine, one of them asprinio (the other was
ver-
desca,
but we don't know which modern variety
that name refers to, or if is now extinct); the
new tenant also had to replace all the dark
grapes on the property with vines of Asprinio
and Verdesca. In the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, Asprinio was commonly grown in
Puglia too, where it was known as Olivese or
Ragusano.
Between 2009 and 2011, the Adolfo Spada
estate sponsored and led a series of research
studies on Asprinio, in collaboration with the
agriculture department at Portici in Naples, the
Istituto Sperimentale per la Patologia Vegetale
(Institute of Plant Pathology Research) in
Rome, la Fondazione Edmund Mach of Santo
Michele all'Adige in Trento, and the Istituto per
la Virologia Vegetale (Institute of Plant Virol-
ogy) of CNR in Grugliasco. Forever to his
credit, Enrico Spada wished to “rediscover”
asprinio, a wine that in his view was not only
rare, but also was no longer made in the man-
ner it once had been. Historically, asprinio was
always a very light, high-acid wine, averaging
alcohol levels of 10 percent and total acidity of
7.5 grams per liter (most wines hover below
6 grams per liter), fi gures which are admittedly
very different from the numbers sported by
some alcoholic fruit bombs sold as “asprinio” in
these recent, rather degenerate, times.
Research (Monaco, Nasi, Paparelli, and
Spada 2011) has confi rmed Asprinio's general
morphologic similarity to Greco (in fairness, a
similarity noted already by Nicola Columella
Onorati in 1804), as both have compound clus-
ters and a noteworthy sensitivity to viral dis-
eases. A few experts (I am not among them)
believe that the wines of the two also share
similar aromatic profi les, though Monaco's lat-
est research results do indicate that there are
more similarities between the wines than was
once believed. These similarities have led some
researchers to investigate further, and in 2005
Costantini, Monaco, Vouillamoz, Forlani, and
Grando wrote that Greco and Asprinio were
identical. A similar fi nding was reported by
Cipriani, Spadotto, Jurman, Di Gaspero, Cres-
pan, Meneghetti, et al. (2010), though it is dis-
puted by others (Scienza 2011). I have a hard
time believing the two are identical, and there-
fore have kept Asprinio separate from Greco in
this topic; the National Registry also distin-
guishes between them (see
GRECO
GROUP,
chapter 3). In any case, Asprinio has a remark-
ably homogenous population, with very few, if
any, biotypes. There are few Asprinio clones,
