14 L. Bonardi

Lavaux, of Wachau, of the Moselle and the Rhine, and of the Rhone’s Haute Côte, are part of this type of framework.

Clearly, the peri-urban localisation strategy could only represent a partial solution to the overall problem of wine, leaving unanswered the problem, among others, of the demand from non-producing areas, in particular from central and northern Europe.

The location and very existence of part of European terraced viticulture represents a response to this last problem.

2.4How Water Made Wine

The fluvial, lacustrian and maritime geographical frameworks (Table 2.1), which embrace about 70% of the areas being considered, define as a whole a macro-category centred upon a strong relationship between terraced viticulture and a water environment.

In certain continental contexts, such as those of the Wachau, the Moselle, the Rhine and other areas of German terraced viticulture, the location along the sides of great river valleys can be partly explained by the influence of the micro-climate created by the great rivers. Nevertheless, it is above all their role as important waterways that should be looked at to gain a comprehensive understanding of this relationship.

As can be easily realised, the waterways that influenced terracing are almost always navigable, even if occasionally with difficulty and the need for operations to improve the river’s course.4

In a number of cases, water transport was, and at times still is, the only way of reaching the vineyards. Circumstances of this kind are found on the Calabrian Costa Viola, at Ischia, in the Cinque Terre, in Ribeira Sacra and in Alto Douro.

Above all, however, it was the possibility of transporting wine for long distances that determined the central position of navigable routes in the development of viticulture. Rivers, canals and lakes, apart from serving the neighbouring urban markets, were often the first artery of a more extensive network that used the sea as the principal means of international trade. The position of the great wine-growing regions of Europe, terraced and not, above all in France, Spain, Portugal and Germany, is evidence of the undoubted role played here by waterways.

Even more so, the importance of transport by water explains the directly coastal and micro-insular and insular position of many extensive terraced viticulture systems on the Mediterranean or Atlantic: Cinque Terre, the Amalfi coast, the

4Linked to the necessity for expanding viticulture are the works carried out at the end of the eighteenth century to alter the Portuguese course of the Douro, in the stretch through the Valeira gorges. These works enabled major viticulture exploitation of the slopes in the upper reaches of the valley (d’Abreu 2007). For the advantages given to viticulture around Vienne by the eighteenth-century engineering works on the course of the Loire, see Gadille (1978).

Calabrian Costa Viola, Pantelleria, the Azores, the Canaries, etc. This relationship, however, is not restricted to wine-growing, but is also part of other specialised growing, such as that of olives and citrus fruits (Ferrigni 2011).

Nor should it be forgotten that the sea carried considerable quantities of wine products destined for the direct provision of the military and commercial navies. It is significant that an amply terraced viticulture such as that around Etna had reached its greatest expansion (eight thousand hectares of cultivated ground in the whole of the province of Catania) between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thanks to trade with the French, Austro-Hungarian and British navies (www.cervim.org).

Provisioning the British navy, for whom were intended large quantities of wine coming from the terraced regions, seems a key factor in the development of viticulture in the Mediterranean and Atlantic areas. For different terraced regions, the demand coming from Britain represented the principle driving force for bringing land under cultivation, but, as the markets closed, it also represented productive decline and abandonment. The history of terracing and the wines of Douro and Banyuls-Collioure fit amply into this scheme of things, together with those of other regions producing fortified wines such as Madeira, sherry and Marsala. The history of the area of Cap de le Nào, in the province of Alicante, shows the importance of the British market. As shown by Courtot (1990), the great development of terracing in this region, linked to the production of raisins to satisfy the demands of the British market, fell into crisis as soon as British importers found markets to supply them in Greece and Turkey that were more conveniently and easily reached after the development of steam navigation.

Analogous dynamics, part of a changeable geopolitical and commercial picture, are behind the rapid development and subsequent crises of the terraced viticulture of Tenerife, in the Canaries, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Unwin 2005).

The history of European viticulture is one that constantly interweaves the destinies of different regions of production. Tensions and conflicts between states, the politics of customs duties and tax systems interventions have determined the continuous market repositioning of those wine-producing regions strongly directed towards trade, including, almost always, the terraced ones.

The localised constraints outlined here were broken in the nineteenth century by the improvement of the network of road communications and, even more, by the establishment in the second half of the century of communication routes opened up through the railways (Fig. 2.2).

2.5An Apparent Exception: The Wines of the Alps

The second key to localisation of terraced wine-growing is to be sought in the position of the Alps, straddling Europe between its heart and the Mediterranean, and in the specific geological, geomorphological and climatic characteristics of some of its areas. The existence of important terraced complexes in the Alps can be

between the slopes. One of the best known examples is the cultivation of a coppice of chestnuts on the Valtellina Orobie Alpine slope, which were used to provide stakes for supporting the vines grown in the Rhaetic Alpine terraced vineyards (Lorusso forthcoming).

The inland position and longitudinal orientation of these valleys determine a common climatic picture for many stretches that have terraced viticulture. These zones receive low rainfall, significantly less than that received by the neighbouring Alpine sectors that have, however, a different exposure to the flow of the prevailing seasonal currents. The most representative cases of this influence are those of the eastern sector of terracing of Valtellina, Vallese, and, to a more limited extent, Val d’Aosta.6 The low rainfall and strong exposure to the sun guaranteed by the southern aspect represent the best possible conditions for viticulture, even if in situations not devoid of water stress. Therefore, it is not by chance that, with the sole exception of the slopes along the Brenta Canal, once given over to intensive tobacco cultivation, all the major Alpine terraced systems were exclusively dedicated to the production of wine.

These environmental conditions gave rise to systems of generous proportions, thanks to the relative proximity of important market outlets, represented both by neighbouring urban centres, as in the case of Vallese, and by regions beyond the Alps. The terraced viticulture of Valtellina (Scaramellini 2014), of Ossola (Moschini 2017) limited today to few productive fragments and of Val d’Aosta (Moreno 2012: 171–172) was historically dependent on their position alongside Switzerland and so of export to the Swiss cantons. This factor was particularly, and more importantly, seen in Valtellina, whose production, thanks to its centuries-long affiliation with the Grigioni, penetrated deep into the German, Alpine and continental world (Scaramellini 2014).

Not very different, along the side of the western Alps, the once flourishing viticulture of Val di Susa is explained by the protectionist policy imposed in late mediaeval times by the local controlling class, “against the wines of Lombardy and the Po to favour the sale of wine produced in the area both locally but above all in the transalpine regions (in the direction of Briançon and its area), reaching at the beginning of the modern age a spread of viticulture (with terracing as well as intensive planting in the valley bottoms) that had a certain anomaly in view of the environmental context”7 (Varanini 2003: 657).

Alongside the morpho-climatic and geographical location aspects, it is probable that the development of terraced vines on the Alpine watershed had been at some point also supported by climatic conditions. In this sense, a relatively significant

6The most significant minimal rainfall of this valley, around 500 mm annually, is measured in the area of Aosta, therefore further to the west compared to the location of what is today the most important productive terraced system of the region.

7“contro i vini lombardi e ‘padani’ per favorire lo smercio in sede locale, ma soprattutto verso le regioni transalpine (in direzione di Briançon e della sua regione) del vino prodotto in zona, arrivando agli inizi dell’età moderna ad una diffusione della viticoltura (con terrazzamenti, oltre che con intensivi impianti in fondovalle) certo anomala rispetto al contesto ambientale”.

Fig. 2.3 Transport of wine barrels over Bernina Pass at the turn of twentieth century

role may have been played by the worsening of climatic conditions that, above all in the second half of the sixteenth century, led to a deterioration, both qualitative and quantitative, in wine production in central Europe (Petit et al. 2012; Vinea Wachau 2014). This could have triggered a major recourse to wines coming from more “sheltered” southern Alpine lands and, therefore, an incentive to bring new ground under cultivation in these regions.

Together with these particular elements should not be forgotten the integration of the terraced lands, both Alpine and those beside fluvial and maritime transport routes, in the more general dynamics that have involved European viticulture in the course of the modern and present age. The principal factors underlying the expansive processes are those generally connected to demographic growth, and so of consumption, and those of a progressive growth, from mediaeval times, of the symbolic value of wine as an indication of social status (Pini 2003), particularly in central and northern Europe (Unwin 2005).

To the decrease in the acreage of terraced viticulture from the late nineteenth century, various factors, peculiar to the world of terraced agriculture in general, contributed (Fig. 2.3).