Italian wine traditions: the birth-year bottle, San Martino and the wine fountains

This is the first instalment of a small series on Italian wine traditions. Every now and then we will gather customs, festivals and sayings linked to wine and the grape harvest, the ones handed down in families and villages, which tell you better than any tasting note what wine has meant to the people who made it. We only include traditions we have found a source for: there are enough legends repeated without roots already.

The birth-year bottle

Some families, when a child is born, put away a bottle from that vintage, to open together on their eighteenth birthday or at their wedding. It is a simple and beautiful gesture: a bottle that ages alongside a person, and that on the day it is opened tells the story of that year better than any photograph.

In Chiavenna, a small town in Lombardy near the Swiss border, a wine shop has turned it into a service for thirty years: il vino nato con tuo figlio, “the wine born with your child”. The idea, they say, comes from a tradition in their own family.

There is just one practical piece of advice: eighteen years is a long time, and not every wine can handle it. You need a wine made to age, and a place where it can do so in peace.

San Martino, when the must becomes wine

A San Martino ogni mosto diventa vino, goes the Italian proverb: “at San Martino every must becomes wine”. The 11th of November, the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, is the symbolic day when the new wine from the harvest just finished is tasted for the first time. It is no coincidence that tradition made him the patron saint of winegrowers and innkeepers.

But San Martino also closed the farming year: it was the day the harvest accounts were settled and the contracts between farm workers and landowners expired. In the Po Valley, those whose contract wasn’t renewed loaded their family and their few belongings onto a cart and set off for the farmhouse where they would work the following year. That is where a saying comes from that has survived to this day in many parts of northern Italy: fare San Martino, “to do San Martino”, meaning to move house.

The fountains of Marino, where wine flows

In Marino, one of the Castelli Romani towns in the hills just south of Rome, the first Sunday of October is the day of the Grape Festival, the Sagra dell’Uva, founded in 1925 on the idea of the poet Leone Ciprelli. The moment everyone waits for is the “miracle of the fountains”: for one afternoon the Fountain of the Four Moors in the main square runs with wine instead of water, and people queue up with glasses and bottles.

The barrels that race uphill in Montepulciano

In Montepulciano, the Tuscan hill town of Vino Nobile, on the last Sunday of August the town’s eight districts compete in the Bravìo delle Botti. Each district has two “pushers” who roll a barrel weighing about 80 kilos for more than a kilometre, uphill, through the streets of the old town to Piazza Grande. The prize is a painted banner.

The race has ancient roots, in a palio already mentioned in the town statutes of 1372, but the barrel version is recent: in 1974 a parish priest, Don Marcello Del Balio, had the idea of replacing the horses with barrels. In a wine town, it was perhaps inevitable.

Tell us yours

This series lives on stories you won’t find in books. Do you know a tradition from your town linked to wine or the harvest, a saying, a festival, a family habit? Write to us at [email protected], and tell us whether and how you would like to be credited: the best ones will appear in the next instalments.