All of Italy offers a great variety of sweet wines, dessert wines wines or meditation wines: producing them is difficult and expensive and they are less and less common. Antonella Amodio offers us a selection of those from Campania.

Campania’s sweet wines in recent years have been significantly abandoned by the restaurant industry, replaced by cocktails offered as an end to a meal (the after dinners). Sweet wine has always been a pleasant conclusion to a meal, often Accompanied by a cheese cart or paired with desserts, but on the wine list it has virtually disappeared, and it is not even found in bakeries, where in the past it was often sold with the purchase of dessert. A category that has ended up in the forgotten and which wine producers have partly abandoned, partly because of high production costs.

A historical and geographical excursus

It seems that the first wines produced in ancient times were sweet, known for their longevity and ability to improve over time. Precisely because of these characteristics, they could even be exported and reach places far from the lands of production. For the Hittites and Thracians, only kings could afford to drink sweet wine; for the Sumerians, however, pure wine was sweet and was reserved for the gods. The Hyksos, a Semitic population of ancient Egypt, made sweet wine from black raisins. Ancient poets dedicated poems to this type, one among them Homer, who describes it as a divine drink that had something magical about it.

One of the oldest sweet wines in Italy is the Moscato of Syracuse, native to Sicily and mentioned in numerous works by Alexandre Dumas. In his 1873 Dictionary of Cooking it is among the most famous liqueurs. The protagonists of the novel ” The Three Musketeers” toasts with Moscato di Siracusa, while the Count of Monte Cristo, in the novel of the same name, regularly offers it to his guests.

In Tuscany, the Vin Santo represents one of the oldest symbols of Tuscan hospitality and finds its first mention in 1348, when there is mention of a Franciscan friar who employed a wine to cure plague victims, the same wine that the brethren used to celebrate Mass. We cannot forget the Romans, who appreciated the Falernum, made by bending the stalk of the bunch to promote drying, and then served with honey and spices. The tradition of sweet wines also extends to Pantelleria, in Veneto with the renowned Recioto di Soave, in Alto Adige and in other regions of Italy.

Sun drying is the oldest method and exerts a direct and higher concentration of sugars, and has incredible appeal, although induced and controlled drying is often used today.

A tour of Campania and its dessert wines

Without going into the merits of the process, what is important is to reevaluate the “meditation wine.” as Veronelli called it, as an added value to our country’s wine culture. Each region offers us a niche that represents local grape varieties, territories, and culture. The Campania, with its rich soils, temperature ranges and variety of grape varieties, offers a nice selection despite the fact that the number of total bottles produced is small. We have selected five of them.