Heroic, ancient, and mythical, the viticulture of the Amalfi Coast is one of the most romantic wine regions in the world. It is sublime in its landscapes as well as in its wine production, which may be marginal in terms of quantity but extraordinary in the emotions it can evoke with every sip.
By Alessandro Brizi
The Amalfi Coast, with its winding landscape between the sea and mountains, offers numerous itineraries to timeless travel destinations. In this context, travel is understood as discovery, pilgrimage, daily experience, and an opportunity for personal and economic growth. Against the rocky backdrop of cliffs plunging into the sea, mountains reflected in waters, terraces of grapes, vegetables, lemons, and fishing villages, emerges the figure of the heroic winemaker: a child of Prometheus, as well as the nymph Amalfi, the lover of Heracles, and further, Leucosia, Partenope, and Ligea, untamed sirens ruling over this slice of the marine world.
From the late 18th-century inspirations of the painter Christoph Heinrich Kniep on his journey between Capri and Punta Campanella, to those of Goethe amidst the sirens’ rocks of Capri, and all the way to the poems of the Teutonic fugitive hero August von Platen, each story of the Amalfi Coast expresses an overflow of nature, extreme and sublime, as suggested by the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. It subdues and annihilates the bucolic idea of Campania Felix outlined by Pliny the Elder and Virgil.
It is a romanticism of both men and the environment that unfolds, titanic, overpowering, and “terrifying,” in the eyes of Grand Tour travelers as well as today’s tourists. Those who love wine, especially its Mediterranean origins, cannot help but quench their thirst from this source.
The grapevines, sometimes ungrafted and nearly a hundred years old, and at other times as wild as the nights of Arcadian Lycaon, are the androgynous voice of the coast: sharp, fragmented, and ever-changing. The terraces are, at the same time, the Olympus and the Avernus of the heroic winemaker (sometimes also a fisherman on these shores): a patchwork of vines, lemons, and olives clinging to the earth, meager but wildly reaching towards the enchanting song of the sea.
A journey through history and production
Ancient is the legacy of grape cultivation, dating back to 860 AD, on lands cleared from the forest. Historical documents from the city of Amalfi from that era already tell of a kind of zoning:
It was the centuries of the Early Middle Ages, the recovery from the fall of the Western Roman Empire more than 380 years earlier: a period in which, here and there along the Peninsula, the resurgence of organized viticulture was consolidated, although still deeply intertwined with other crops.
Today, it is the Costa d’Amalfi DOC that dictates the rules of winemaking, with its three subzones of Furore, Ravello, and Tramonti. The territory spans 13 municipalities, located at different altitudes, along the southern slope of the Lattari Mountains, which extend towards the sea, dividing the Gulf of Naples from the Gulf of Salerno. For its natural beauty, this stretch of coastline was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The grapevines thrive, more or less orderly, on terraced vineyards often reached by narrow paths completed with winding flights of stairs, supported by dry-stone walls. “Macère” is the name of these ancient supports, and their construction involves the exclusive arrangement of stones on top of each other, without the use of cement. Over the centuries, to create these structures, soil had to be manually brought in to fill the terraces and give final shape to the cradle of each individual vine.
Training systems include both espalier and pergola, with short, long, or mixed pruning. The vineyards themselves are traditional and can be arranged in a non-typical radial fashion (with long shoots distributed on horizontal poles like spokes of a wheel) with chestnut poles supporting the shoots (poles that are hand-stripped in early spring, aged for at least a year, and then burned at the top) or with a single support pole that holds multiple vines tied through a willow branch.
The regulations specify that vineyards suitable for wine production must be cultivated on hilly terrain at an altitude not exceeding 650 meters above sea level, with a maximum yield per vine not exceeding 7 kilograms for the Red and Rosé types and 8 kilograms for the White, and a planting density of no less than 1,600 vines.
The original soil formed at the end of the Pliocene, when the relief structure was formed, culminating with the peak of Monte Faito (1,279 meters above sea level). The geological platform consists of dolomitic-limestone rocks that surface in several areas, forming the basis of all cultivable soils in the Costa d’Amalfi. These rocks have been covered, more recently, by volcanic stratifications composed of tuff, sand, lapilli ash, and vulpegna soil, a clayey soil with the color of a fox’s coat.
The protagonists, along with the winemakers, in this ancient and unique winemaking production are the local grape varieties: unique, over a hundred years old in origin, and, as mentioned earlier, ungrafted. Fenile, Ginestra, Pepella, Ripolo, Tintore, and Tronto mingle here with Aglianico, Biancolella, Falanghina, Piedirosso, Serpentaria, and Sciascinoso, creating one of the most diverse and typical scenarios in the ampelography of our country.