Agriculture Reference
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identical varieties. However, the converse is
also true: when nurseries were asked for
Bombino Bianco, they were just as likely to
send one of the other varieties. For example,
most of the producers in Emilia-Romagna I
have talked to over the years have told me that
the nursery grapevines available over the last
twenty or thirty years in Emilia-Romagna were
undoubtedly of Bombino Bianco and not of true
Pagadebit (or Mostosa). Unfortunately, situa-
tions such as these further compounded prob-
lems and added to the confusion, because all
these varieties behave differently in the fi eld
and do not produce wines of similar quality. So
while many farmers and scientists believed
they were dealing with Bombino Bianco, it is
likely they were actually growing or studying
mixtures of distinct if similar-looking varieties:
older vines of the original variety were inter-
planted with newer vines of another variety
right in the same vineyard. This explains why,
over the years, I have never ceased to be amazed
at how many producers told me
their
Bombino
Bianco grapevines behaved differently—and
their wines tasted different—from those of
other estates in other regions of Italy.
So today we have a situation in which farm-
ers and producers in Puglia, Lazio, Abruzzo,
and Emilia-Romagna are all supposedly grow-
ing Bombino Bianco and making wine with it,
when in fact some are using the true Bombino
Bianco, others Trebbiano Abruzzese or Mostosa
or Ottonese, and many a mix of all of these.
Under these conditions, to draw conclusions
about the characteristics of the grapevine and
the wine becomes next to impossible. This is
why there is disagreement over Bombino Bian-
co's true merits: some think it's a high-quality
cultivar, others are less impressed. Currently,
Bombino Bianco, Trebbiano Abruzzese, and
Mostosa are all listed separately in Italy's
National Registry, mainly on ampelographic
grounds; and in the absence of defi nitive SSR
profi ling results that tell us otherwise, I also
treat them as distinct varieties in this topic.
For example, there are two schools of
thought about Bombino Bianco's productivity.
One says that it produces high yields. Indeed,
many of its synonyms—Caricalasino (one of
many “load up the donkey” varieties), Stracci-
acambiale (“rip up the promissory note”), But-
tapalmento (“fi ll up the tank”), and Schiaccia-
palmento (“crush the tank”)—attest to large
yields that endear it to farmers everywhere. But
a second school says it's far from being a gener-
ous producer: Girolamo d'Amico, Louis Rapini,
and Ulrico Priore (owners of the D'Arapri estate
in Puglia: the name is an acronym of their ini-
tials) certainly agree that it is not. Sebastiano
De Corato of the Rivera estate in Puglia says
that Bombino Bianco is “a great variety, easy to
work with: sparse bunch, thick skin . . . but it's
a rather miserly cultivar, and that is precisely
one of the reasons why it went into decline in
the twentieth century.” And it's true that for
the greater part of the twentieth century, the
Bombino Bianco vines in Puglia suffered the
same plight as other varieties that are high on
quality but short on productivity: it was gradu-
ally replaced by Trebbiano Toscano, Malvasia
Bianca Lunga, and even Cococciola. Whereas it
represented 90 percent of the surface under
vine in the province of Foggia (Puglia) in the
1900s, this had been reduced to 40 percent by
the 1950s. Angelo Paradiso, who helps run the
large social cooperative in Cerignola founded
by his grandfather, says that “at the beginning
of the new century we wished to make a 100
percent Bombino Bianco wine but had great
diffi culty in fi nding decent grapes—and the
farmers didn't want to plant it.” This contradic-
tion—that Bombino Bianco's many synonyms
hint at copious yields, while at least in Puglia it
appears to be a low-yielding cultivar—coupled
to different morphological characteristics,
makes it apparent that at least some of the
Bombino Bianco vines of one region are not the
Bombino Bianco of another. Or at the very least
that the variety behaves very differently in
diverse habitats.
True Bombino Bianco is characterized by
conical, sometimes conical-cylindrical bunches
that are medium-large; the round berries are
also fairly large. All of its phenological phases
