Heroic viticulture in the Chiessi and Pomonte valleys

In 1931, the writer Pietro Pancrazi described the arrival of the packet boat at the foot of the Pomonte Valley, which had the appearance of a pleasant and fruitful landscape with droves of donkeys trotting down the mountainside bringing farm produce for loading. The view of Mount Capanne's slopes, crossed by the stream flowing down from the mountain, must have different to the current one with the slopes now covered with Mediterranean maquis. The place must have resembled a great amphitheatre, delineated by rows of terraces and regular paths and steps for accessing them, with thousands of canes and heather rods supporting the grapevines, from sea level up to an altitude of nearly 500 metres, creating an idyllic setting; a true winemaking paradise built over centuries of heroic viticulture.

Cultivation on dry stone walls began at village level and climbed gradually upwards in short, linear sections, seemingly embedded among great boulders on that land known as a scaldeto, or 'suntrap', a very rocky floor that absorbs the sun's heat. The terraces on the hillsides around Chiessi would have been similar, rising up the mountain to below San Bartolomeo hill or reaching Capo hill. The rows were dense, with 80-100 cm between them and the grapevines set 30-40 cm apart, filling every usable space, the vines and grapes sometimes resting directly on the hot boulders in the vineyards. Today, we can only imagine that landscape before harvest time, the vines bearing great bunches of bright green Biancone, golden-yellow Procanico and black or deep blue to vermillion Aleatico grapes.

Work on the terraces was hard because everything was done manually, not to mention the physical effort of climbing each day up to the vineyards situated at higher altitudes. In these higher vineyards there were storehouses, small huts used for sheltering tools. They also housed basins for grape pressing, performed in situ, and sometimes also fireplaces for daily shelter, stopping to eat in the warm or even sleeping on occasion. The wine would then have been brought down the valley from those mountain refuges on donkeyback in leather wineskins.

(Antonello Marchese, translation from Italian)