Talking about Cinque Terre winemaking and the dry-stone walls is a little like talking about a complicated, passionate, overwhelming love story. It is also talking about the history of this stretch of the Italian Riviera, and about my own roots.
A history written in stone
Tradition has it that the first vines were planted here by Greek sailors, and wine has been the basis of local life ever since. To make it possible on this near-vertical coast, generation after generation of men and women built a dense web of terraces, held up by dry-stone walls, that the locals call ciàn.
It is a staggering feat of environmental engineering. Laid end to end, the Cinque Terre’s dry-stone walls run to something like 6,700 kilometres, longer than the Great Wall of China, all built by hand, without mortar, on cliffs plunging to the sea. And today, sadly, much of it lies abandoned.
I cannot think about any of this without thinking of my grandfather Antonio, and his love for these narrow rocky terraces and their fruit, and the countless sacrifices they asked of him.
The winemakers today
The Cinque Terre are now on millions of bucket lists, and travelling the world I have found that everyone knows them. Yet even many who have visited the five villages do not really understand what they saw. The villages are gorgeous, even under grey skies, even in the rain, and it is hard to go home without beautiful photographs, but that is only the postcard.
People love to call the Cinque Terre “tiny cosy fishing villages”. It is so wrong, and it is our own fault for not showing our region’s true identity, which means we are not truly respecting it. These are five villages that have lived, forever, on desperately hard winemaking and olive-growing. In the nineteenth century the luckier families had men working in the naval and arms yards of nearby La Spezia, or shipping out on cargo and cruise lines; the rest lived a simple, often poor, farming life.
The winemakers still live much like that. Tourism brings more income, yes, but the daily work is as heroic as ever: no machinery, because the terraced, parcelled land is too vertical and too cramped, and no economies of scale, with an average of around 5,000 bottles a year per producer. Not exactly profitable.
Heydi is a friend, one of the local winemakers working hard to raise quality and keep the tradition alive, producing his Possa wines in Riomaggiore, one of my heroes, like the growers at CheO above Vernazza and Cà du Ferrà, a bit further North, in Bonassola, whose work is forever challenged by the need to maintain those dry-stone walls.
The walls, and how you can help
Since the devastating 2011 flood, every autumn has grown more perilous, with rainfall arriving like sudden monsoons that wash out walls and, with them, whole vintages, and threaten the villages’ safety. Rebuilding a collapsed wall is enormously expensive, and, given the slowness of Italian bureaucracy, and despite the efforts of the local councils and the National Park, the burden falls largely on the winemakers themselves. A few years ago, Heydi and some of his colleagues, helped by a group of determined women, even ran a crowdfunding campaign, Grapes & Heroes, to fund wall restoration, an early sign of a problem that has not gone away.
If you want to help, the most useful thing you can do is also the most enjoyable: buy the real thing. Seek out the small local producers, visit their cellars, taste and take home their Cinque Terre DOC white and their Sciacchetrà, and choose the wine of the “crazy angels” who keep these terraces, and this landscape, alive. Every bottle helps hold up a wall.
Frequently asked questions
It is winemaking on the near-vertical terraces of the Cinque Terre, held up by hand-built dry-stone walls, where no machinery can be used and everything, from tending the vines to carrying the harvest, is done by hand, often with the help of tiny monorail trolleys. The extreme difficulty, low yields (around 5,000 bottles a year per grower on average) and the constant upkeep of the walls are why it is called “heroic viticulture”.
They are the terrace walls, built without mortar over many centuries, that make cultivation possible on the steep coast. Laid end to end they would run for thousands of kilometres, longer than the Great Wall of China, a monumental, hand-built landscape. Many are now abandoned, and their collapse during increasingly violent rainfall is a serious threat to both the vineyards and the villages.
Chiefly a crisp, mineral white, the Cinque Terre DOC, from local grapes such as Bosco, Albarola and Vermentino, and the rare, prized sweet passito wine Sciacchetrà. Production is tiny and largely sold locally, so the best (and most authentic) way to try it is to visit a small producer’s cellar in the villages.
The simplest and most effective way is to buy wine directly from the small local producers and to choose their DOC wine and Sciacchetrà, since the income helps fund the back-breaking maintenance of the dry-stone walls. Travelling in the shoulder season, respecting the terraces and paths, and supporting local farming all help too.
Further reading
- The sweet wine of these terraces: Sciacchetrà
- Visit a cellar: CheO above Vernazza and Cà du Ferrà
- The region’s other liquid gold: Ligurian olive oil
- My home region, coast to coast: the Cinque Terre and Liguria
