Enrico Dandolo, the Doge who made Venice and Malvasia prosperous.

The fortunes of Malvasia wine, from its discovery to its successes in the markets of the time, can be traced back to the political and diplomatic intelligence of Enrico Dandolo—qualities he used, sometimes unscrupulously—who was elected the forty-first Doge of the Republic of Venice on June 21, 1192, when he was 85 years old.

We are in the early 13th century in Champagne, specifically at the castle of Ecri, where Theobald, Count of Champagne, then twenty-two years old, sent messengers to Rome to ask Innocent III to officially call for the Fourth Crusade, which the pope approved. Meanwhile, six knights led by Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, were sent to Venice to define the costs and modalities for transporting troops to the Holy Land, negotiations conducted in person by Doge Enrico Dandolo, who was an excellent negotiator. Venice ultimately committed to providing a sufficient fleet for the enormous sum of 85,000 silver Imperial Marks. Additionally, the Serenissima obtained the promise that it would receive half of the treasures conquered. The Doge finally reached an agreement and accepted command of the naval expedition. On November 8, 1202, the fleet set sail. Another masterstroke by the Doge, who, to balance the books, ensured that the crusaders would be used to secure Trieste, Muggia, and Zadar for the Serenissima, where they spent the winter. They resumed sailing but, instead of heading toward the Holy Land, directed their ships toward Constantinople. In Zadar, during the winter, Alexis, the son of Byzantine Emperor Isaac Komnenos and brother-in-law of Philip of Swabia, arrived to seek the help of the crusaders against his paternal uncle, also named Alexis, who had imprisoned his father, the legitimate emperor of the East, usurping the throne. The Doge, the King of Germany, and the other marquises and barons commanding the crusaders saw unexpected economic advantages. Enrico Dandolo, whose subtle plan was taking shape, particularly understood it: once Constantinople was conquered, the Serenissima would gain control of the most important ports of the Aegean and Adriatic. Thus, the crusaders abandoned the plan to fight the Saracens and directed their ships to the imperial city, where the fleet arrived on June 24, 1203. Constantinople was conquered and sacked on April 9, 1204.

In 1248, the Venetians, thanks to good relations with Geoffrey of Villehardouin, penetrated into the interior of Monemvasia and discovered the delicacy of its wine.

This Malvasia, the savvy Venetians thought, “is a true nectar, to be taken home and imposed in the markets, also because, robust as it is, it withstands travels by sea and land.” Thus this ultramarine wine, or navigated wine, reached Venice: it is expensive and therefore precious; drinking it and offering it soon became a symbol of personal prestige. For the merchants handling it, Malvasia was a certain source of profit; they kept its price high because in Venice “el bon marcà rovina le scarsèle,” meaning a low price ruins the pockets.

This is the beginning of the story of Malvasia.

Venice and wine, a dialogue between the Author and Attilio Scienza.

What follows is a sort of dialogue between the Author and Attilio Scienza, who has conducted significant research on the relationship between Venice and wine, particularly Malvasia. Once a full professor of Viticulture at the University of Milan and one of the leading experts in the field worldwide, Attilio Scienza is a multifaceted scholar due to his ability to interpret the history of viticulture transversely, combining archaeology with semantics, climate change with economic and political history, even to being part of the first study groups on the DNA of vines. Truly an omen nomen, Attilio Scienza. In our dialogue, we do not talk about viticulture or enology, but rather attempt to organize the many facets that have made Malvasia a global brand for over four hundred years.

The dynamics that led Malvasia to prevail in the markets for four centuries.

To understand the reasons and dynamics behind the great success of Malvasia, which lasted at least four centuries—a unique case in the history of world enology—we must refer to the history of Venice, which had a special relationship with wine, upon which many of its economic fortunes were based. Venice is a city-state characterized by the assembly management of power. Venice is not only the easternmost of the great Western cities, but it is also an Eastern city. The conditions under which Venice took shape in the High Middle Ages favored the consolidation of particular forms of mentality and civilization that originated from its special bond with Byzantium, making the city a hinge point between the great cultures of the time.

On commercial routes, not only goods and money traveled but, above all, ideas. Venice apprehends that it is necessary to transform wine from a food item into an object of cult, into an icon. If the Greeks had linked wine to Dionysus for the ritual use in the symposium, Venice infused Eastern Mediterranean wines with secular values, transforming them into a fashion, a remedy for body and spirit during an era afflicted by famine and the Black Death due to the consequences of the “Little Ice Age.” Venice does not use the Greek symbolism of death and resurrection (from grape to wine), nor that of the mystical blood of the Christian rite, but the more modern symbolism of status, closer to models from Imperial Rome, of place of origin and rarity. It adopted, ante litteram, the most effective methods of contemporary communication, linking those wines to an elitist consumption, gifting them to the rulers of the day, offering them during official banquets where the diplomatic corps of all Europe could sample them. It imposed high tariffs on these wines to restrict their consumption to only the wealthy classes. It emphasized the sense of origin, the distance from mysterious territories controlled by the Byzantines, using the name of the place to market it—a groundbreaking novelty in a time when wines were designated with very generic indications, such as simply being from “plains,” “mountains,” or “vineyards.” It presented consumers with a type of wine unknown in the West at the time: sweet and aromatic.

Venice seized the opportunities presented by some specific aspects of that phase of the Middle Ages, such as the need, in a market economy, for food supplies from distant territories, and the growing demand for a particular type of wine among emerging social elites (the merchants and the bourgeoisie), stimulated by its preciousness and the consequent high cost that increased its symbolic value.

These aspects of food needs were dramatically highlighted for Europe by the cooling climate that did not permit sufficient grain production and the necessary grape ripening levels required to ensure the longevity of European wines.

The whims of climate and the Little Ice Age.

The centuries around the year 1000 offered Europe a warm climate, encouraging viticulture to expand to very high latitudes, even into Scotland and to unusual altitudes in the Alps, around 1200 meters above sea level.

During this phase, known as the climatic optimum, viticulture expanded even within Alpine valleys, accompanied by olive cultivation, occupying entire regions of continental Europe spurred on by monastic institutions.

Climate has always had, at times decisive, influences on various moments of human life. From the end of the 5th century, the “Little Ice Age of Late Antiquity” began, triggering the coldest period of the entire late Holocene. It was the era of the dark ages, the “dark centuries” of social and political regression, at least for the western part of the planet, stretching on, more or less, until the 10th century. This was the starting point of the so-called medieval climate anomaly that lasted until the late 13th century. A three-century oscillation, caused by two events of greater impact: a decrease in volcanic activity between 960 and 1000 and a more vigorous solar output (also defined as the great solar maximum), leading to a global warming of one or two degrees on average, with peaks in the far North of up to four degrees. An unusual period of relatively warm climate particularly affected much of the northern hemisphere, from North America to China. The phenomenon had extraordinary effects, albeit heterogeneous, from one area to another. In the extreme North, glaciers melted. Regions that had been impenetrable, such as the interior of Russia, Iceland, Greenland, and Northern Canada, became accessible. In many areas, humans and crops shifted northward and upward. New types of wheat established themselves in Scandinavia, particularly in Norway. Grapes grew in England several hundred kilometers further north than current limits, reaching Scotland. Subtropical plants like the fig and the olive found spaces in regions such as Germany and northern Italy. Glaciers receded. Conditions influencing the environment, crops, and daily life, including the quality of wines and foods, were affected. The climate maintained a stable configuration, with evident effects on global demographic leaps, until a symbolic date: the feast of Santa Lucia, December 13, 1287, when a terrible flood struck lands extending from the coasts of England to those of present-day Holland and Germany. Waves from the North Sea inundated lands, destroyed dunes, buried villages, and devastated everything. There were reports of 30,000 deaths. A perfect storm.

Prelude to a climatic phase that would be called the “Little Ice Age.”

It marks the beginning of the end of feudalism, and the localization of vineyards in Europe experiences drastic changes: viticulture disappears from England and all inland valleys of the Alps. One could cross the Danube in Vienna, the Main in Frankfurt, and the Rhine in Strasbourg on horseback across the ice. The great freeze of 1709 would destroy most of continental viticulture. The Little Ice Age officially concluded with the “Irish potato famine” of 1850.

The food famine created by the lack of grain due to poor climatic conditions was the cause of the spread of the Black Death and, in viticulture, the production of low-grade wines unable to survive the spring without spoiling.

During the Great Solar Maximum period, to reconnect with Venice, Europe’s wealthy classes had grown accustomed to consuming high-quality wines: rich, sweet, velvety, pleasant—and not “garbi,” as the wines of the people were defined in Venice: astringent, terrible.

Nobility and high clergy were reluctant to drink such low-quality wines and turned to the productions from the Eastern Mediterranean, whose fame dated back to the time of Etruscan trade and the Roman Empire.

It is in this context that the perfect political, legislative, commercial, and relational organization of the Republic of Venice entered the scene, a city-state that had invented what we would now define as an economy controlling the entire wine supply chain: from production to sale, including logistics (the Malvasia warehouses) and trade.

Thus, thanks to the mercantile activities of the Republic of Venice, the Malvasias, Vinsants, and sweet Moscato wines from the southern Mediterranean began to arrive in Italy and Northern Europe—regions that had been spared from this climatic crisis and became the privileged areas for producing sweet wines.

The commercial success of these wines is enormous, stimulating the production of similar products in many places in Italy and along the eastern Adriatic coast. The process of production and “delocalization”—as we would say today—is also favored by the Turkish conquest of Crete in 1564, which removed the vineyards from Venice that accounted for the majority of Malvasia production. Yet the Serenissima did not renounce the rich Malvasia market and stimulated the production of these sweet and aromatic wines with local grape varieties different from the original, still calling them all Malvasia.

Around Malvasia, the Serenissima built a modern example of a supply chain, where production was decentralized while distribution and political-commercial relations remained firmly in Venetian hands. The supply chain was based, at its source, on the principle that production—the vineyards and transformation—should be close to ports (which they either dominated or had strong commercial relations with). From there, its fleet came into play, linked to the logistics of the city-state—the warehouses, one of which was called “of Malvasia,” from where the distribution phase to various markets would then begin. The foresight of the Venetian state had ensured the construction of ships in the Arsenal.

It is thus the global market, the network of its trades, that made Venice a city no less exotic, in terms of modernity and cultural contamination, than the Chinese or Indian ports where all the commercial powers of Europe would dock in the following centuries, aided by an efficient and sophisticated espionage network.

Malvasia was somewhat the passport, the key to open and manage the richest markets. One example among many? The year England lost Bordeaux—1453—and the Turks conquered Constantinople, the Venetians sent eight barrels of Malvasia to the English royalty, thus conquering that market.

Venice could not have competitors. It could not, for example, manage a production as we have today, with so many DOCs and thousands of independent producers each with their label. Its trade was monopolistic, like Amazon. The market was theirs and only theirs. Those producing did not know the ultimate destination of the wine, the final customer. And this monopoly lasted for over four centuries, an eternity compared to the rapid commercial changes of today. This dominance began to crack with the arrival of countries on the international scene that, after the discovery of the Americas, became maritime powers like England, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands.

With the Venetian merchants, the goods offered changed profoundly: wines were no longer recognized solely by their color (white or red) or by the name of the grape from which they were made (vernaccia, ribolla, schiava, etc.) but by the places from which they came.

It is the first example in Europe where a wine, by its name, denotes many grapes, without genetic relationships between them, and distinguished not by adjectives related to the place of origin or grape characteristics but by the fact that they give rise to a sweet, aromatic, alcoholic wine.

A wine, Malvasia, that is based on very precise, standardized organoleptic characteristics and thus easily recognizable due to its high alcohol content and transportability without altering the flavor. It was the triumph of the standardization of taste, against which quality winemakers around the world are now fighting.

The loss of Candia (Crete)

The Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean took away from the Venetians, as we have seen, the island of Candia in 1564, along with a good portion of Malvasia production. This was the crucial event that led to the birth of many Malvasias in the Mediterranean. On one hand, Venice did not renounce its rich market, and on the other, the fame of the wine had stimulated, through emulation, the production of similar wines, even though obtained from different grape varieties, in many Italian regions and among competing French and Spanish producers. Venice, in effect, commissioned the production of sweet, aromatic, and alcoholic wines akin to Malvasia from many producers, particularly from the territories it controlled politically, such as Istria, the Dalmatian coasts, and the Adriatic inner lands of Veneto and Friuli. The oldest written testimonies about the cultivation of Malvasias in Italy date back to between 1500 and 1600 and represent attempts to challenge Venetian hegemony in certain local markets for this wine, but they also show that Venice had already created a network of subcontractors close to it for a greater availability of this wine before the loss of Candia.

Many grape varieties thus change name to become Malvasias, which will eventually lead, over time, to having different Malvasias, with the fact that there are as many as nineteen registered in the National Register of varieties in Italy, each deeply distinct in morphological characteristics and wine quality.

Therefore, given the significant genetic differences among them, the Malvasias cannot be defined as a varietal family, further confirmed by numerous investigations conducted analyzing the DNA, which have highlighted their genetic distances. It is also worth noting the lack of a genetic link between Greek, Italian, and Istrian Malvasias, which can be justified by the fact that in the production areas of Malvasia in the Peloponnese, other grape varieties were used, such as Liatico, Vilana, Thrapsathiri, etc. In Greece, in fact, there is only one grape variety called Monemvasia or Monemvasitica, cultivated in the Cyclades and Euboea, while other varieties termed white and black Malvasias are scattered in other Greek viticultural areas, such as Santorini.

Also singular is the case of some white Malvasias (from Dubrovnik, Bosa, Sitges, Madeira, the Lipari Islands, Greco di Bianco) currently cultivated in various Mediterranean locations, and, not coincidentally, represented by ports, which DNA analysis has identified as the same grape. It has been demonstrated that the Malvasia of Basilicata derives from spontaneous crossing between Verdeca and Plavina, thus confirming the links of this southern grape variety with Primitivo, between Pugliese and Dalmatian viticulture in Croatia.

We should not forget some grape varieties named after Malvasia, chiefly cultivated along the Mediterranean coasts, including Malvoisie à gros grains or Vermentino, Malvoisie du Roussillon or Torbato, Malvoisie du Valais or Pinot Gris, Malvasia rosé or Veltriner, Malvasia di Candia, and Madeira used for producing Malmsey, Malvasia Rei from Portugal, Malvasia bianca from the Aegean Islands (especially Paros and Syros), and Malvazija from Croatia.

The most cultivated Malvasias today in Italy and Istria are curiously the ones farthest from the sensory imaginary that this wine had in the Middle Ages, as they are only slightly aromatic and hardly suitable for drying (except for the one from Dubrovnik, which is the same as that of the Lipari Islands).

The commercial success of Malvasia wines, however, is nearing its end, partly because Venice’s declining economic power no longer controls wine trade in the Mediterranean compared to English competitors and partly due to the “beverage revolution” that swept through Northern Europe between 1600 and 1700, which shifted consumer interest towards wines from Sauternes, Porto, Andalusia, and Vermouth.

Wine consumption in Venice

Venice was a capital of wine not only for trade but also for consumption. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, Venice became the major Italian center for wine consumption. It had a population fluctuating between 130,000 and 160,000 inhabitants, making it the second or third city in the Peninsula. An estimate from 1673, which calculated a population of 200,000 people (including many clandestines and sailors of the fleet docked at the wharves), forecasted an annual consumption of one amphora (about 6 hectoliters) per inhabitant, about 1.5 liters per day, including men, women, and children.

This estimate can be considered reliable as the Republic was very precise in applying entry duties.

From the mid-1700s, there was a gradual contraction in wine consumption attributed not only to the demographic decline of the towns but also to the effects of the so-called “beverage revolution” that favored the consumption of coffee, tea, chocolate, and spirits, the latter substituting not so much generic wine but Malvasia, which, considered a “luxurious and sumptuous head” and therefore “not necessary for human life,” was subjected to very high taxation.

The service of wine at the table, pioneers of the sommelier

Once again, alongside product innovation and process, the availability of economic resources allows these wines to become symbols of wealth and distinction, hence consumed by the wealthiest classes. It is curious how bottles quickly became a status symbol, not only because they are a convenient container. Venice, about a hundred years earlier, with the development of glassmaking in Murano, produced not only heavy glass wine bottles but a series of accessories for serving it, made of clear glass and with great stylistic finesse, which allowed, for the first time, consumers accustomed to pewter, silver, or tin containers to see the color of the wine they were drinking in transparency. The innovation brought by the bottle did not just extend the life of the wine to facilitate transport but introduced a new aspect to its commerce, represented by the possibility of storage, enabling monitoring not only of the evolution of wine over time but through the management of supply: avoiding price drops due to the need to sell wine due to precarious stability and longevity.

This innovation, now seemingly ridiculous, is exemplified in the painting by Veronese from 1563, “The Wedding at Cana.” From that day on, wines, especially sweet ones, present on important tables, were served from carafes and clear glasses described as “in the Venetian style,” exquisitely crafted, having to be clear and thus produced using more refined enological techniques than in the past.

 

It is worth noting that in Venice, since 1505, there was a guild of wine merchants, which in 1609 was accompanied by the brotherhood of sellers, carriers, and wine transvassers. This craft erected, as a stable venue for their meetings, a building — still visible today — facing the Campo di San Silvestro, not far from the Fondamenta del vin where most boats for unloading, storage, and wholesale sale of various wines arriving in the Dominante docked.