Orvieto DOC - History

History

Viticulture was introduced to the Orvieto region by the early Etruscans, who carved out cellar-like caves from volcanic soil that could house wine production with long, cool fermentation and produced the type of sweet wine that was popular in the ancient world. From the Middle Ages to the mid-20th century, the Orvieto region was known for the sweet dessert wine made with the noble rot, Botrytis cinerea. Unlike most botrytized wine, such as Sauternes, where the grapes are introduced to the Botrytis cinerea fungus while they are on the vine, the grapes of Orvieto were exposed to the fungus after harvest, when they packed into crates and barrels and stored in humid grottoes carved out of the tufa stone. Made primarily from the Trebbiano sub-variety Procanico, which produces smaller berries than the Trebbiano used in Tuscan wines, these sweet wines were deep gold in color, described by the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio as "the sun of Italy in a bottle". While the production of fully botrytized wine is rare, in ideal vintage years some producers will make a sweet muffato from partially botrytized grapes.