**a wine older than the word for wine**
There is a particular kind of humility that comes from holding something ancient. Not museum-ancient, not archive-ancient - but alive-ancient, still fermenting, still changing in the bottle, still being tended by six hundred pairs of hands in the hills above Benevento.
The grape is called Greco. The name is not subtle. Greek colonists brought it to southern Italy around the seventh century BCE, which means it was already old when Rome was still a muddy argument between hills. Greco belongs to a genetically complex family of Italo-Greek varieties, and it has been growing in Campania long enough to have witnessed the rise and fall of several civilizations that no longer exist.
The appellation is Sannio DOC, in the province of Benevento. Sannio takes its name from the Samnites - an Italic people who fought Rome for decades in the third century BCE and once, at the Caudine Forks, forced an entire Roman army to pass under the yoke in ritual humiliation. Rome eventually won, as Rome tended to do, and then quietly borrowed the Samnites' military innovations and built an empire with them. The Samnites got a province named after them. History is like that.
The winery is Cantina di Solopaca, a cooperative founded in 1966. Six hundred members. Over eleven hundred hectares of vineyards at the foot of the Apennines. Not a corporation with a logo designed by a Milanese agency. A community of small farmers who decided that together they could do what none of them could do alone. There is something quietly radical about that, something that gets lost in the language of premium and prestige.
The line is called Prime Vigne - first vines, best parcels. The Italians have a talent for naming things simply and meaning them completely.
The wine itself: dry, 12 to 13 percent alcohol. In the aroma, notes of citrus, white apple, pear, a faint almond somewhere underneath. The acidity is pronounced. The minerality is present and accountable. It is traditionally served chilled, between 8 and 10 degrees Celsius, which is cold enough to be serious about.
Wisława Szymborska once wrote about the miracle of the ordinary - the extraordinary patience required to find meaning in a thing that simply exists, without drama, without performance. She was writing about a stone, or a cat, or perhaps both. She was also, without knowing it, writing about white wine from southern Italy made by six hundred farmers who have been doing this since before the Common Era began counting.
In Poland we have a habit - or perhaps a tradition - of discovering the south slowly. Students of archaeology from Kraków and Warsaw excavate Roman sites in Bulgaria and North Africa. Hikers in the Bieszczady carry Italian wine in their packs and argue about Apennine geology by firelight. The connection between the Polish north and the Italian south is not official, not sponsored, not on any tourist map. It exists in the way that quiet affinities always exist: privately, persistently, over a glass of something old.
The Greco grape arrived in Campania when the Greek world was still the center of the known West. It survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Byzantine period, the Norman conquest of southern Italy, the Spanish Habsburgs, the Bourbons of Naples, two world wars, and the Italian economic miracle. It is now being tended by a cooperative of six hundred people who get up early and work in the sun.
There is no moral here. There is only the wine, and the history it carries without being asked to, and the acidity that cuts clean and clear, and the temperature at which it is best encountered - 8 to 10 degrees, which in Benevento in July means someone had to think ahead.
Szymborska would have approved of the thinking ahead. She approved of most things that required attention without requiring spectacle.
Details at darwina.pl - search Greco Sannio Prime Vigne.
darwina.pl
