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Italy’s holy wine falls prey to bad weather

Vin santo, the celebrated Italian dessert wine from Tuscany, could be in scarce supply after one of Tuscany's biggest producers revealed it will not be making any in 2014.

Published: 7 November 2014 08:31 CET

Italy's holy wine falls prey to bad weather

Vin santo, the celebrated Italian dessert wine from Tuscany, could be in scarce supply after one of Tuscany's biggest producers revealed it will not be making any in 2014. Photo: McPig

Tenuta di Artimino, a 732-hectare estate centred on a Medici villa that is a world heritage site, said on Thursday it had also decided to forgo production of its top red wines after a freak hailstorm on September 19th badly damaged grapes just as they were about to be harvested.

"The harvest was far from easy this year," said estate manager Alessandro Matteoli. "Despite the rainfall and the other vagaries of the weather, the grapes were healthy. But then we had this real hailstorm after the harvest had already started.

"It was a difficult decision to take but rather than disappoint customers who know the quality of our wines, we have decided not produce any vin santo or Carmignano Riserva this year," Matteoli told the Italian news agency Ansa.

Artimino, located in the hills west of Florence, usually makes two types of vin santo (literally holy wine): the amber version made from dried white grapes and the rarer Occhio di Pernice (Eye of the Partridge), a rose version made from red sangiovese grapes.

Both versions are often enjoyed along with cantucci, dry almond cookies that are dipped into the wine.

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Italian researchers discover 14 descendants of Leonardo Da Vinci living in Tuscany

Vinci, the Tuscan village where Leonardo Da Vinci was born. Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

The researchers behind the project, which has spanned several decades, say they have so far found 14 living relatives aged one and 85.

All of them live in the region of Tuscany, where the painter, scientist, engineer and architect was born in 1452.

READ ALSO: Eight things you might not know about Leonardo Da Vinci

The findings form part of a decades-long project, led by art historians Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato.

The study’s findings, published in the Human Evolution journal, document the male line over the past 690 years, through 21 generations.

Though Da Vinci never married and had no children, he had at least 22 half-brothers, according to researchers.

Born in the Tuscan town of Vinci, he was the illegitimate son of a local notary.

READ ALSO: Vinci, the Tuscan paradise where Leonardo’s genius bloomed

Vezzosi told the Ansa news agency that by 2016 “we had already identified 35 of Leonardo’s living relatives, but they were mostly indirect, in the female line, as in the best-known case of the director Franco Zeffirelli.”

“So they were not people who could give us useful information on Leonardo’s DNA and in particular on the Y chromosome, which is transmitted to male descendants and remains almost unchanged for 25 generations”.

He said the 14 living descendants identified in the study, through painstaking research over the decades, were from the male line.

READ ALSO: Da Vinci’s ‘claw hand’ left him unable to hold palette: researchers

“They are aged between one and 85, they don’t live right in Vinci but in neighbouring towns as far away as Versilia (on the Tuscan coast) and they have ordinary jobs such as a clerk, a surveyor, an artisan,” Vezzosi said.

The relatives’ DNA samples will be analysed in the coming months by the international Leonardo Da Vinci DNA Project, led by the Jesse Ausubelof Rockefeller University in New York and supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

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