::

:: Gabriel Alonso de Herrera (c.1475 - c.1540) ::

:: Obra de Agricultura, Alcalá de Henares, 1513 ::

:: as transcribed from the Medina del Campo edition of 1584 ::

:: When Herrera first published his Obra de Agricultura in 1513, it was only the second general treatise on agriculture to have been written in any European language in more than 1000 years; thus, by any standard, a pioneering work. Yet in it he describes an approach to making wine essentially unchanged during that entire millenium; for that matter, in Spain and Portugal today, nearly 500 years later, one can easily find those same techniques in routine use, as they have been, in other words, since the fall of Rome.
:: Since this cannot be said of any other Western European country, it lends a particular fascination to the study of Iberian wine-making, and to reading Herrera. Like so many of his countrymen of the Siglo de Oro, he was a genuine pioneer, yet from a cultural tradition of the most extreme conservatism, and it is an unusual combination.
:: About his life, not much is known. He was born to an agricultural family in Talavera de la Reina sometime between 1470 and 1480, and speaks frequently about how much he learned from his father about working the land. At about the age of 15, in 1492, he turns up in Granada, apparently under the protection of Hernando de Talavera, appointed archbishop of the city after its fall to the forces of Ferdinand and Isabel in that same year. He remained in Granada for ten years or so, as a student not only of the usual scholastic and classical subjects, but more particularly of agriculture, of which the Moriscos of Granada (whether still Muslim or not) were the generally acknowledged masters.
:: At the end of that time, by 1503, he was an acknowledged master of it himself, and began a decade of travel and study about which we know little. We do know that by 1513, he had been granted the all-important patronage of Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, then the most powerful cultural figure in Spain; had acquired a remarkable knowledge of classical agricultural literature; and had written his Obra de Agricultura. Ximenes thought the work important enough not only to publish it at his own expense, but to distribute copies to anyone who he thought might be inspired to improve the agricultural welfare of Spain by reading it.
:: About his later life we know next to nothing, except that he returned to Talavera, and corrected subsequent editions of his text. It is assumed that his final corrections were to the edition of 1539, and that he died in about 1540. In any case, his Obra (or later Libro) de Agricultura went on to at least a dozen editions in the 16th century alone, and continued to be reprinted, as a manual for practical use, until as late as 1858, 345 years after its first appearance.

::

:: As usual, I think it's fair at this point to ask why any of this should matter to us now, for other than academic reasons. The answer is the education of the senses, in the profound sense of an éducation sentimentale (for which, of course, the equivalent term - a sentimental education - exists in English but is no longer comprehended; perhaps because the process isn't either).
:: In the case of Herrera, it means to enter through his writing into an intensely tactile imagination of being present in 16th-century Spain. For a wine-maker, it is hard not to smell the fermenting must; not to be intrigued by the details of applying melted pitch to the insides of heated clay tinajas; not to wonder at just what it would taste like to flavor white wine with orange blossoms. And it is hard not to come back from such an experience without a deeper and richer sense for what wine - to say nothing of sense, experience, and life itself - might possibly be.

::

:: NOTES:
1. Almost uniquely for any work transcribed on this site, a modern critical edition of this text exists, and so far as I know, is currently in print. It is: Gabriel Alonso de Herrera, Obra de Agricultura, edición y estudio de José Urbano Martínez Carreras, Ediciones Atlas, Madrid, 1970. I have relied on it for my biographical summary above, and I strongly recommend it to anyone seriously interested in Herrera. The Carreras text is a transcription of the first edition of 1513, with notes on later additions presumed to have been made by Herrera himself.
2. The transcription which follows, however, is my own, and is taken directly from the Medina del Campo edition of 1584. I have compared it with the Carerras critical edition above; and there are significant differences between the two texts.
3. I have not attempted to indicate all of these differences, but I have enclosed some in red brackets ( [ así ] ) which I felt significantly altered the meaning of the text, and did so by way of additions possibly - in fact, probably - not made by Herrera himself. As examples, in one such addition, he strongly condemns the use of gesso (common to this day in making sherry) as injurious to human health ("matador de todo aquel que lo usa beber"); in another, he warns that because fermenting must is hot, it is "porous", and therefore easily damaged; in another, he recommends the use of vinegar as a general deodorant for barrels and tinajas; in another, he flavors wine with orange zest & flowers, among other things; and yet none of any of this appears in the editions transcribed by Carreras. Unfortunately, Herrera's best one-liner ("la vasija para tener vino ha de ser tan limpia y tan lavada como la copa para beverlo" - "containers for making wine must be as clean and well-washed as the glassware for drinking it") appears to be a later addition as well.
4. As usual, I have transcribed the text precisely as it lies on the page. I appreciate that this makes an already difficult text even harder to read; but I really do think it tastes better that way; so, it's another of those subjective decisions wine-makers have to make, and another reason the education of subjectivity is so important. ::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: POLIDORE VIRGILE (1470-1555) ::

:: The origins of Poetrie, Hystories, Musyke, Wyne, Vyneyards, Bere, Hoores, Daunsyng, Maiyng, Mummyng, & Midsomer Bonefyres, in the Tudor English translation & abridgement of the De Inventoribus Rerum by Thomas Langley. (In English)

:: The following excerpts are from An Abridgement of the notable worke of POLIDORE VIRGILE conteignyng the deuisers and fyrst fynders out aswell of Artes, Ministeries, Feactes and ciuil ordinaunces, as of Rites, and Ceremonies, commonly vsed in the churche: and the originall beginnyng of the same. Compendiously gathered by Thomas Langley. Imprinted at London vvithin the precincte of the late dissolued house of the grey Friers, by Richarde Grafton Printer to the Princis grace, the xxv. daie of Ianuarie, the yere of Our Lorde, M.D.XLVI. [1546]

:: Polidore Virgile was Polidoro Virgilio (1470-1555), a native of Urbino, who came to England in 1502. His De Inventoribus Rerum, of which this is an English-language abridgement, was a Renaissance best-seller, going on to at least 110 different editions in a half-dozen languages. The first printed version of it was published in 1499, although expanded editions appeared for years later; and it was written originally at the request of the Duke of Urbino, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, son of Federigo da Montefeltro, who had made Urbino the quintessential symbol of enlightened Quattrocento culture, and made his own Palazzo Ducale the symbol of Urbino.
:: Still, when I was last in Urbino myself, I arrived just in time for the "Day of Solidarity with the Comanche Tribe of Aztec Indians," at the highpoint of which a member of the "tribe" floated down from the sky in a hang-glider powered by an outsized sort of sputtering model-airplane motor, wearing a superbly generic "Indian headdress" that reminded me only of the observation that "English-women's shoes look at though they were designed by someone who had heard shoes described, but had never actually seen any." He landed in front of the Palazzo Ducale amidst the cries and war-whoops of his tribemates, all similarly feathered, all somewhat other than Comanche, who opened a bottle of wine, cheered, and went back to selling souvenirs to the audience.
:: So, while Polidoro's book was of course intended to provide a serious survey of the origins and first instances of nearly all things, I think it's perfectly fair to read him with an eye to the Italian genius for public festivals of the marvellous and the strange, particularly given the splendidly archaic & sonorous Tudor prose of his translator, Thomas Langley. Furthermore, I suspect that Langley, former chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer and later Canon of Winchester Cathedral, may have had quite a bit more to do with the text's more sulfuric fulminations against Daunsyng, maiyng, mummyng & Midsomer bonefyres than did Polidoro himself, who, good son of Urbino, I prefer to think enjoyed such things.
:: The original text is in a Gothic typeface I have not tried to imitate; but I have kept the long "s", and the scribal (~ ), which, when placed over a letter, indicates that an "n" or "m" is understood to follow. And as usual with early printed texts, the "u" substitutes for "v" in the body of a word, whereas the "v" substitutes for "u" at the beginning. Thus, "inuentiue" = "inventive", but "vnusual" = "unusual". So, no whining; it's not hard to read once you get the hang of it.

TO THE TEXT

::

:: CLAUDE COTEREAU ::

:: Les Douze Livres de Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella des choses Rusticques, Paris, 1551 ::

:: An astonishing Renaissance hymn to mankind, to the wonder of the human hand, to the ravishment of body and soul, and to the dignity of agriculture, by Claude Cotereau ( b. 1499), canon of Notre-Dame de Paris, from his preface to the first translation of Columella into French.

TO THE TEXT

::

:: JACOBUS PRÆFECTUS ::

:: De diversorum vini generum natura liber, Venice, 1559 ::

:: A Renaissance symposium, which in this excerpt discusses the mysteries of the origins & nature of flavor & aroma in wine. (In Latin)

:: About Jacobus Præfectus, little is known that he himself does not tell us on the title-page of this text. According to Oberlé (Fritsch, 58), two other works by him are known, but nothing else; according to Auvermann, Præfectus was physician to Pope Paul III, and may have circulated this text in manuscript at the Papal court under the title Symposium de vinis, as a memorial to a splendid banquet held in honor of Paul IV.
:: In any case, it isn't here because it's famous, but because it's an interesting Renaissance discussion of what it means that wine tastes and looks as it does, set in the form of a classical symposium of friends, in this case Calistus, Cleobolus, Rota, and Menippus.
:: The text was published in 1559, which, at the moment, is 442 years ago.
:: If, in the next 442 years, anyone should stumble on this site who has any interest in any of this, and reads Latin - perhaps a severely misguided Space Alien seeking to understand our ways? - I recommend a similar discussion by Tirelli, also on this site. ::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: LEONARDO FIORAVANTI ::

:: De Capricci Medicinale, Venice, 1564 ::

:: In this brief excerpt, Dr. Fioravanti, who spent many years learning to distinguish Trebbiano from urine, shares with us why it is important, and how it is possible, to make that distinction. (In Italian, with a summary in English)

TO THE TEXT

::

:: ESTIENNE & LIÉBAULT ::

:: L'Agriculture et Maison Rustique, Paris, 1564/ca.1582 ::

:: The most popular text ever written on the managing of a rural life, and the first ever written in French; including the most important early description of the wines of France, which, for reasons unknown to myself, few seem to realize exists ::

:: Estienne & Liébault's L'Agriculture et Maison Rustique was not the first such text to have been written after the fall of the classical world: that would be the Crescenzi. It was not the first to be written after the invention of printing: that would be the Herrera. It was not even the French text most French historians would say was the most important of its kind: that would be the de Serres. But it was the first to be written in French, and it was undeniably the most popular.
:: Granting all this, I think it's fair to ask why we should be interested in such books to begin with. And, to begin with, I would answer by asking: is it possible to encounter the rural landscape of, say, France or Italy, without realizing that its astonishing beauty is even more an ancient, communal, and infinitely patient work of art, even more the emblem of an entire culture, than any cathedral? Once this is clear, then if the cultural ecology that produced such extraordinary results is a matter of interest, that is the first reason to read such books as these; they are the instruction manuals, the encyclopedias of such cultures, the texts, the bible, that would have been there on the mantle even in households where no one could read.
:: The second reason is related, but more specific: which is to understand the details by which the actual substance of such an ecology took form, & out of which its material substance was created; the details by which each such world was actually composed & out of which the actual material presence that comprised it, as a world, came into being.
:: So for me, an interest in these texts is an interest in a form of space travel, a desire to taste the wines of alternate universes; and by that I really don't intend a slightly stupid metaphor. This is, after all, a site about wine. Wine was invented by the same folks who invented civilization, at about the same time, as an integral part of that process; it has been made ever since in so dizzying an infinity of contexts and realities as science fiction could not begin to imagine. To be able, however tenuously, to enter even one such reality, and to be able, however conjecturally, not just to neutrally "taste" the wine it produced, but to experience the pleasure that wine produced in those who tasted it then, within the world within which it and they actually lived; how could that fail to interest anyone whose job description it is to produce such pleasures in our own particular alternate universe, the here and now, wherever that may be? And aside from wine, isn't it simply interesting, not to say enlightening, and perhaps even amusing, to listen in to the discourse of men who would have been such enlivening company, had one lived in their time?
:: If "Aristotle sayeth, That the seed of drunkards becommeth dead and fruitlesse, and their children blocke-headed groutnolles", we stand forewarned; and if Jean Liébault warns that the flesh of tomatoes "is good for such men as are inclined to dallie with common dames, and short-heeld huswiues, because it is windie, and withall ingendreth cholericke humours, infinite obstructions and head-ach, sadnesse, melancholicke dreames, and in the end long continuing agues: and therefore it were better to forbeare them", we are amazed again.
:: So the ultimate reason for reading these texts is, the many pleasures of reading them; I just think one should never underestimate how many and varied such pleasures are.

::

:: Understandably, the principal author of L'Agriculture et Maison Rustique de MM. Charles Estienne et Jean Liebault is normally taken to be Charles Estienne. Born circa 1504 into the most famous family of printers in France, Charles showed a strong bent for medecine and classical scholarship. In keeping with the latter interest, he produced, during the 1530's and 40's, a series of small books intended to teach the terminology of classical (Latin) agriculture to the young; in 1554, he put these all together in a single volume, which he published under the title, Prædium Rusticum. Exasperatingly, perhaps because the titles resemble each other, bibliographers have for centuries blandly pronounced the later Maison Rustique to be the translation into French of Estienne's earlier latin text; to which in fact it bears no resemblance beyond the general subject of agriculture.
:: At some point in the 1550's, Estienne's daughter, Nicole, married a young doctor and scholar with an apparently brilliant career ahead of him, Jean Liébault (c.1535-1596). That Liébault collaborated with his father-in-law in writing the Maison Rustique is obvious from the title-page; but the details of their working relationship are unknown, and no doubt shall remain that way. In any case, Estienne had been obliged to take over the family firm when his brother, Robert, fled to Geneva; with the unfortunate result that, in 1561, Charles was sent to debtor's prison, where he remained until his death in 1564 - the very year that L'Agriculture et Maison Rustique de MM. Charles Estienne et Jean Liebault was first published.
:: It was a astonishing success. It is not known to me whether anyone has ever seriously tried to total all the editions and translations that eventually were made of it, but the number is certainly in the hundreds.
:: Eighteen years later, thus ca. 1582, Liébault made very substantial revisions and additions to the original text, including most of what I have transcribed here; and of course he must be regarded as sole author of these additions, as well as being, in my own opinion, the probable principal author of the original text as well.
:: Tragically, and I have no idea why, none of this success helped Liébault any more than Estienne. Oberlé recounts Pierre de l'Estoile's description of Liébault, dying of hunger, seated on a stone in the rue Gervais-Laurent in Paris, in which city he died in 1596.

::

NOTES:

:: 1. For our purposes here, by far the most important addition Liébault made to the original text of 1564 is his extensive Discours passager sur l'invention, nature, facultez, difference & necessité du vin, which, in the Rouen edition of 1665 that I have used for this transcription, occupies some 22 pages of quite small type at the end of the sixth book.
:: 2. The most important part of this Discours is the section entitled, Les differences des vins, selon la proprieté des pays, which I have transcribed in its entirety. It is incomparably the most extensive and important early description of the wines of France, and I cannot imagine why it is not more generally recognized as such.
:: 3. It is particularly amusing to note the extreme differences between Liébault's list of the great wines of France and those common today. Given that, as we know, greatness is all a matter of terroir, apparently there have been some extraordinary & otherwise unrecorded geological upheavels in France since the 16th-century.
:: 4. Among the endless translations of this text is the particularly beautiful one made by Richard Surflet into Elizabethan English. First published in 1600, it was reprinted in 1606, then revised and published again by Gervase Markham in 1616 under the title, Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme. English-speaking readers are strongly urged to refer to my transcription from this translation, which appears in the early 17th-century part of this site; it is a great treat simply as language, but also, of course, contains by far the most important early description in English of the wines of France, just as the original does in French.
:: 5. As part of a growing subset on this site of texts relating to cider, I've transcribed Liébault's long and quite detailed description of 16th-century cider-making; Surflet's translation of this is included in my transcriptions from the Markham as well. ::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: GIROLAMO CARDANO ::

:: Les livres de Hierome Cardanus medecin Milannois, intitulez de la Subtilité, & subtiles inuentions, ensemble les causes occultes, & raisons d'icelles. Traduis de Latin en Françoys, par Richard le Blanc (Paris, 1566) ::

:: Volupté ::

:: Although the life of Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) might seem as though it could only have been written by Dostoevsky, in fact Cardano wrote it himself, in a book entitled De vita propria liber. It is perhaps the most intensely confessional autobiography of the Renaissance, and is the reason we know as much about him as we do.
:: This matters here only in the sense that Cardano's brilliance was as precocious as his perversity, and it is hard not to feel that a painful dialectic of these same forces drove both his life and his work, with results equally complex and startling in both. Certainly a man who could admit to "the habit, which I persist in, of preferring to say above all things what I know to be displeasing to the ears of my hearers", is not one to blanch in the presence of an unusual idea. And he had many; but what made him such an archetype of the Renaissance Man was the openness with which he welcomed them.
:: As is abundantly illustrated in the work that immediately concerns us, which is the 1566 Paris edition of Les livres de Hierome Cardanus medecin Milannois, intitulez de la Subtilité, & subtiles inuentions, ensemble les causes occultes, & raisons d'icelles. Traduis de Latin en Françoys, par Richard le Blanc; thus, the French translation by Richard le Blanc of Cardano's De subtilitate libri xxii, published originally in Latin in 1550. The following excerpts from it should provide surprises enough for any modern reader; and to comment usefully on these texts would require more text than the passages themselves, so I won't attempt to do so.
:: Suffice to say that they amount to a brief but remarkable Renaissance treatise on pleasure and the senses, and are presented here not for details about wine, of which there are none, but solely for the delectation of those who take as much pleasure as I do in the amazements of the human mind. This is only appropriate, since pleasure is a major topic of this site, and is the subject of Cardano's commentary: what the senses are, why they exist, what pleasure is, what beauty is, the nature of desire and love; delectation: why animals do not experience it (it would distract them, making them too easy to kill), whether angels do (hard for us to imagine, since they exist in eternal bliss, and our pleasures can only exist in contrast to our sadness and pain); followed by a treatise on angels and higher intelligences in general (he doesn't know how many such beings exist, although he doubts they are few, since "it seems unreasonable that so many calamities would be given to humanity in so confined a space [as the earth], while happiness would be granted to so few, in so large and ample a space [as the heavens]").
:: Last but not least, Richard le Blanc's French is to French as Elizabethan English is to English, which means a wonderful pleasure in and of itself, but not particularly easy for the modern reader. As usual, I've transcribed it quite exactly as it is on the page; including the long "s" (which looks pretty much like an "f"); the "u" and "v" changing places with each other; and the use of the tilde
(" ~ ") to indicate that something deemed obvious has been omitted. Thus it is assumed the reader will know that a tilde over a "q", indicates that the word "que" or "qui" should normally be read; over a vowel, that an "n" or "m" should normally be added; and the meaning of some words in themselves won't necessarily be obvious ("gerre" = "genre", for example).
:: So it requires some deciphering; but far less than most other puzzles; and is certainly worth the effort for the pleasures of le Blanc's prose and of Cardano's thoughts on the many puzzles of pleasure itself. ::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: AGOSTINO GALLO ::

:: Le Dieci Giornate della vera Agricoltura, e Piaceri della Villa, Venice, (1565?) 1566 ::

:: The complete wine-making instructions from the most important agricultural text of the Italian Renaissance, in its very rare first edition ::

:: Even though Agostino Gallo (1499-1570) wrote what is undoubtedly the most important agricultural text of the Italian Renaissance, describing it as such gives an almost misleading impression both of the text and of its author, perhaps because we so often assume that agricultural writing will be bland and the Renaissance elegant, while Gallo most emphatically was neither. In fact, the emotional passion of his devotion to the details of agriculture can be downright alarming, and could hardly have been less elegantly expressed. But I'm sure this made him all the more convincing to the only audience he would have cared about, or that would have cared about him: those enough interested in such details themselves to understand that if Gallo wrote as though human life depended on them, that's because it does.
:: I imagine Gallo wasn't much different from his book, and I imagine the portrait available separately on this site, although an 18th-century engraving from a painting unknown to me, reproduces him very much as he was. This is not a face to be trifled with: these are eyes in the focus of whose gaze the term "piercing" might seem uncomfortably inadequate; and despite all the drapery and other Renaissance conventions, it credibly gives us an image of him as a physically powerful man, with the large flat hands of someone given to forceful work, and as it turned out, to forceful writing as well.
:: The book he is holding could well be a proof copy of just the one that concerns us here, Le Dieci Giornate della vera Agricoltura, e Piaceri della Villa. Many bibliographers list 1550 as its original publication date, but this is almost certainly untrue. From one of Gallo's own letters reproduced in the book itself, it appears he only began work on writing the manuscript in about 1552, and I have been able to find no believable record of any published edition prior to 1565. In any case, the present transcription is of the complete "Giornata Quarta"- in other words, the complete wine-making instructions - from the Dieci Giornate, as published in Venice by Giovanni Bariletto in 1566. Gallo quickly added three more chapters to the book, which then became Le Tredici Giornate; and again quickly added seven more to make Le Vinti Giornate, in which final version it first appeared in 1569, going on thereafter to be republished, essentially unaltered, in at least two dozen further editions over the next two hundred years. It was translated into French by François de Belleforest, whose translation of this same chapter (from the slightly altered version in Le Vinti giornate) is available elsewhere on this site. Given so many editions of Le Vinti Giornate, it isn't all that hard a book to find, by antiquarian standards. Not so, Le Dieci Giornate, which is extremely rare: I've been able to trace less than a handful of surviving copies. Such rarity, and the fact that it is the original edition of the text, would be more than enough reason to choose it for transcription here.
:: But that's only part of the reason I actually did.
:: The fact is, I like Agostino Gallo. I'd have been thrown out of his house for disagreeing with him as often as I would have; but that goes with the territory, as one says in American. Or the terroir, as one says in French; and if there is any better example than my friend Agostino to illustrate that terroir is actually a person, I don't know who it would be. So I wanted to present his text as it was before it was fined and filtered, as it was in Le Vinti Giornate.
:: Because Gallo not only made his own wine, he spoke his own language, and did both with a prickly individuality that seems to me to be the essence of his nature. It is true that this does not make for cool and limpid prose. Even in 1569, his own publishers thought the general reader wouldn't know what he was talking about part of the time; so they produced a list of terms translated from Gallo's own Brescian dialect into the then-current version of what has since evolved into "Italian". Thus, for example, it turns out that "lora" isn't a personal pronoun, it's a funnel; and so on. This in itself is useful information; but they went on to clean up his prose in general. Which makes it smoother, as filtration generally does.
:: But it tastes different.
:: And since the essence of Gallo was that such differences passionately matter, I felt that in representing him, they mattered equally.

::

NOTES:

:: 1. There are two images that accompany this text file, and I do recommend that you download them if you intend to read the text itself. The first is the portrait referred to above, which appears as the frontispiece to the edition of Le Vinti Giornate published in Brescia in 1775. The second is a woodcut of a wine filter that Gallo describes in detail, but which would be difficult to envision without the illustration, which is taken from the 1591 Borgomineri edition of Le Vinti Giornate. Both are available on the website.
:: 2. Given my insistence on not filtering him - nor, for that matter, my own wines - it's a little ironic that he should be the first person I know of to describe a workable wine filter; but there it is. His filter was a set of tapered sleeves, preferably of unshorn sheepskin with the fleece on the inside; the tops of the sleeves attached by loops to a frame which suspended them above buckets; the cloudy wine was poured in from the top, passed through the fleece and into the buckets below. When the flow stopped, the sleeve was removed, washed, and returned; and so the process continued. It was what we would now call "depth filtration", and it derived from an ancient alchemical and pharmaceutical filter, similar in design, called "Hippocrates' sleeve".
:: 3. In our own era, the thought of adding water to wine is so obviously unacceptable that it may be hard to imagine that in other eras it was highly recommended, and for reasons having nothing to do with economics. Gallo was from the Brescian nobility; he didn't need to sell his wine to anyone, and there's no indication he ever did; if he added water to it, he thought it tasted better that way. This is entirely consistent with his general opinion about wine, that it should be as light, delicate, and elegant as he may or may not have realized he wasn't. ::

TO THE TEXT

PORTRAIT OF AGOSTINO GALLO

GALLO'S WINE FILTER

::

:: AGOSTINO GALLO ::

:: Secrets de la vraye agriculture, Paris, 1572 ::

:: A beautiful translation, by François de Belleforest, of the wine-making instructions in the most important Italian agricultural text of the 16th century, Agostino Gallo's Le Vinti giornate dell'agricoltura et de'piaceri della villa (1569). (In French)

:: Agostino Gallo (1499 - 1570) was a nobleman & staunch patriot of the city of Brescia, and for whatever reason, unlike most noblemen of his time, a fervent believer in the virtues of agriculture. Even more unlike most agricultural authors of his time, he believed in agriculture not because he'd read about it in Virgil, but because he practised it, experimented with every detail, thought about the results, and then, and only then, described them. He is often called, by the few who've ever heard of him, the father of Italian agriculture, and it's easy to see why; he's worth reading. I'm sure that most of my Californian enological brethern will be distressed to learn that someone so genuinely central in the history of Italian viticulture and wine-making should have been named "Gallo", but I'm afraid that such is the case.
:: Theoretically, the first edition of his work was published in Brescia in 1550 under the title, Dieci Giornate della vera Agricoltura, although I haven't yet found record of any existing copy of that edition. The book appeared in a revised version (Tredici Giornate) in 1566; the completed text was published in 1569, as Le Vinti giornate dell'agricoltura et de'piaceri della villa, and went through numerous editions thereafter.
:: The present excerpt is from the first & only French translation of the Vinti giornate, titled as follows: Secrets de la vraye agriculture, et honnestes plaisirs qu'on reçoit en la mesnagerie des champs, pratiquez & experimentez tant par l'autheur qu'autres experts en ladicte science, diuisez en xx. iournées, par Dialogues. Avec un discours de tout ce que doibt faire un diligent mesnager champestre, tous les mois, & selon que les saisons du temps sont bonnes, ou mauuaises. Traduits en Francois de l'Italien de Messer Augustin Gallo, gentil-homme Brescian, par François de Belle-Forest, Comingeois. A Paris, Chez Nicolas Chesneau, ruë Sainct Iacques, à l'enseigne de l'Escu de Froben, & du Chesne verd. M.D.LXXII. Auec priuilege du Roy.
:: So it's a translation into French by François de Belleforest, published in Paris in 1572. For some reason, many contemporary French authorities are remarkably grumpy about de Belleforest, as though he were some textual daughter of joy who sold his services to anyone & didn't know what he was doing. Well, those two things don't follow the one from the other, and he was good at it, whatever the arrangements. This is a excellent & serious translation, particularly given the difficulties of Gallo's Brescian dialect.
:: We may ask why I present it here, in French rather than Italian, since there's no great evidence it had a significant effect on French viticulture, other than - perhaps - on Olivier de Serres, who appears in a starring role elsewhere on this site.
:: I simply thought some Francophones might be interested. Maybe not, but that would be a pity. It is one of the classic texts of Renaissance wine-making, extremely interesting to read; and besides, Gallo greatly admires the lightness and delicacy of French wines, so, for my French colleagues, he should have at least that to recommend him. ::

TO THE TEXT

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:: ALESSANDRO PETRONIO ::

:: Del Viver delli Romani et di Conservar la Sanità, Rome, 1592 ::

:: Since we now think of sparkling wine nearly exclusively in terms of Champagne and its imitations, it is easy to assume that wine didn't sparkle until the Champenois taught theirs to do so, and found bottles to put it in.
:: But there is in fact a quite separate tradition, far older and more generalized, which is what this excerpt is about. Such wines were called vini raspati (vins râpés, etc.), and since they far predate the introduction of commercial bottling, were never intended to be bottled. They were household wines, intended to provide a pleasant drink for daily use, which they could still do in restaurants today, if anyone cared to go the trouble to make them.
:: In a winegrowing district, it wouldn't even be much trouble, and depending on certain microbiological imponderables, might produce a very agreeable and lighthearted wine for many months after harvest. The idea, with innumerable variations - some of which Petronio discusses - was to take a clean barrel, remove the head, fill the barrel loosely with whole uncrushed grapes, fill the remaining space half with good older wine, half with fresh must, and close up the barrel. Once the initial fermentation was over, the barrel was kept tightly bunged, except when wine was drawn from it for use; each time that was done, the barrel was topped up with more wine (or even water) and re-bunged. So the only troubles here are that God is in the details, and that most of us haven't a clue how to remove and reset barrel heads. The second of these problems is solvable: several companies manufacture drums, and even barrels, with removable heads.
:: The excerpt itself is from Alessandro Petronio, Dell Viver delli Romani et di Conservar la Sanità, Rome, 1592, which is the Italian translation of the same author's De victu Romanorum of 1581. Petronio died in 1585, having practised medicine in Rome for more than 60 years. His translator, Basilio Paravicino, says it cost him more pain to translate the book than it would have taken to write an entire new one of his own; but this passage, at least, was worth the trouble. It is charming in itself; it tells us what a fad there was for sparkling wine in 16th-century Rome; and the author makes an earnest attempt to analyze why sparkling wine pleases us (and clearly him) quite as much as it does.

TO THE TEXT

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:: GIOVANVETTORIO SODERINI ::

:: Trattato della Coltivazione delle Viti e del Frutto, che se ne puo' cavare ::

:: A remarkably complete, eccentric, and interesting treatise on wine-making by a Florentine Renaissance aristocrat, Giovanvettorio Soderini. (In Italian)

:: Giovanvettorio Soderini (1526-1596) was a Florentine nobleman of the highest rank, and I don't know what turned him toward agriculture. But, while living - apparently in exile - at the "deliziosa Villa di Cedri," a property of the Alamanni family near Volterra, he produced a four-volume manuscript on agriculture & the related pleasures of a country estate. Perhaps it's only a coincidence, but I would imagine not, that Luigi Alamanni (the elder) had himself written a famous work on agriculture, in the manner of Virgil's Georgics, called La Coltivazione.
:: None of Soderini's manuscript was published during his lifetime, although at the time of his death, he was arranging to have it printed by Filippo Giunti in Florence. In 1600, Giunti published only that part of the work which relates to viticulture and wine; what follows here is a complete transcription of the section on winemaking, which I have taken from the Accademia della Crusca's corrected edition of 1734. It is not clear to me whether the complete manuscript has ever been published, nor do I know where it now is; but it was in the Strozzi library, & presumably still exists, since an edition which I have not seen was published from it in the early 1900's..
:: In any case, it is not generally known as an important text on Renaissance wine-making, and I think it should be, which is why I'm publishing it here. In fact, until reading it myself, I had assumed from the title that it dealt only with the cultivation of grapes, but that is not the case: on p. 69, Soderini says: "Ma fin quì sia detta a bastante della coltivazione delle Viti. Resta, che ora parliamo alquanto del modo del trarne il vino, e della cura, e diligenza, che si deve porre in abbonirlo, e conservarlo", & devotes the next 39 pages (of a total of 128 in this edition of the book) to nothing but winemaking. So, I have transcribed that entire section complete: it is a serious work - an eccentric & more or less continuous series of observations & techniques, closely observed, clearly the result of long personal experience, much of it original, and all of it extremely interesting.
:: As usual, I've preserved the typography of the original text, including the long "s", and so on; the notes in red between brackets were side-notes printed in the margins of the original pages. ::

TO THE TEXT