Where water really turns to wine

IT SEEMS such a long time since we had good news from Italy. The last time it happened I paged a friend on his bleeper to tell him about it.

This year and 2019 have certainly brought turbulent times for Italian tourism. Severe overcrowding of Italy’s set-piece cities of Rome, Venice and Florence due to excessive tourism has, until recently, been top of the agenda.

The Trevi Fountain has gone from an old stone basin in which Roman shepherds washed wool to a major world tourist attraction now off-limits because of the sheer number of visitors — pre-coronavirus. And of course as we know, Italy is now the European epicentre of COVID-19 coronavirus so there are no tourists on the streets now.

So, back to the good news. Readers, raise a glass to the residents of the village of Castelvetro in Modena who found Lambrusco wine coming out of their taps. Lambrusco from the nearby Settecani winery started gushing into the domestic taps. Because of a “technical fault” wine gushed into the local water supply.

The locals, naturally, began filling bottles, pans, urns — and are likely to be self-sufficient in the sparkling Lambrusco for the foreseeable future.

Which is handy enough, as the place is in lock-down. But might I add a word of warning here to the Castelvetroans, from the philosopher Boniface Oinophilus — no stranger, I’m sure to readers of this column, and probably not to the citizens of Settecani, an area to which he was a regular visitor.

His indispensable manual In Praise Of Drunkenness (published in 1812, but you should still be able to get a copy from your local library) contains some invaluable advice, such as in the chapter entitled DRUNK, RULES FOR GETTING: (1) Not too often; (2) In good company; (3) With good wine.