Tag: culture

Tropea Onion: Calabrian survivor

7.4.2019

There is a product which does not show the sign of time passing by: a bulb made up of layers of purplish-red tunics, oval, long or round, the red (violet) “onion of Tropea”.

This everlasting fruit of the land of Calabria is authentic and mediterranean, known of different varieties, including spring onions, early store onions and late harvest onions.

Pliny the Elder cited this vegetable in his “Naturalis Historia”, declaring that it was curative as well as more nourishing and tasty. And it is impressive the fact that in that ancient land, Calabria, even if it was invaded by Greeks, Arabs, Franks, this onion survived to these cultural passages.  Namely, many historical and bibliographic sources attributed the introduction of the onion to the Phoenicians and later the Greeks. Historians since 1700 and 1800 spoke of red-violet onions of Tropea.

Due to its unique sweetness, Tropea onion is the most famous and appreciated onion of Calabria, abroad. It grows, typically, on the cliffs that descend from Mount Poro towards the sea between Cape Vaticano, Zambrone, Tropea and Briatico, in the provinces of Cosenza and Vibo Valentia, but the larger land of this onion is the coastal medium-high Tyrrhenian of Calabria, areas of the provinces of Cosenza, Catanzaro and Vibo Valentia, where the cultivars belong to fresh soils, overlooking the sea, with conditions of humidity, typical of the area of the upper-middle of the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria.

The cultivars of Tropea’s onions, belonging to the lily family, are three:

  • “cipolla da serbo”, dry, crunchy, sweet;
  • “cipollotto”, sweet, soft and white;
  • “cipolla fresca”, more red/violet, with a long stem.

The fruit is sweet, fleshy and light, with a rather delicate fragrance, so that it is excellent for preparing lots of different dishes. Nowadays, it is essential to so many recipes that they cannot miss such element, for example any Calabrian daily soups, omelettes, jams, salads fresh and sweet delights of summer. Further, Tropea onion can be prepared in several different ways: baked, boiled, for production of delicious onion marmalade, as appetizer and on roasted peppers.

The fruit has, anyway, many organoleptic properties, given that it is diuretic and laxative and highly digestible and rich in vitamins. It is so rich in antioxidants and healthy as well as excellent anti-inflammatory, that sometimes we can even forget to remember its unmistakable sweet flavor. Further, recent studies have again shown that this onion has further hypoglycemic and anticancer properties, in addition to its antiseptic functions, alleviating both cold and flu symptoms. It was evidenced that it strengthens the cells and tone the arteries, lowers blood pressure, and can be used in dermatology.

Greco di Bianco, ancestral wine

17.2.2019

Everyone tasted, once in a lifetime, at least, the liqueur wine, and sweet, which passes under the popular name of passito or malvasia wine.
Even Alexander the Great, a great drinker of raisin wine, seems to have also died from the effects of a solemn hangover (of raisin wine), during a last banquet with his generals in 323 B.C.; further, starting with his death begins the famous Hellenistic age and the historical connubbio between Greek and Roman culture.

It is as saying that passito opens a new era in human culture.

Perfect with cheese

CALABRIAN PASSITO WINE: GRECO DI BIANCO

The grape of passito wines are the so called Mediterranean Malvasias. These grapes are present in different countries and, there, each is always located many kilometers apart from the other. They are unique and rare, each with its own peculiarities. They have an enormous evocative power, and are linked to myths and legends that span a time span of over three thousand years of human history.

All the Mediterranean Malvasias accompany the marvelous voyage of the domestication of the vine from East to West, and the delicious nectar of Calabrian Greco di Bianco is almost certainly the greatest demonstration.

Echo of a glorious past

COMMON ORIGINS OF DIFFERENT GRAPES

Some in-depth genetic research has classified our very ancient “Greco di Bianco”, a vine from which the homonymous wine is obtained, like a malvasia. This Calabrian grape was formerly considered as distinct cultivars from the Malvasias of the Lipari, of Sardinia (of Bosa and of Cagliari), the Greco di Bianco (or of Gerace), Malvasia di Sitges, Malvasia dubrovačka (Croatia), the candid white of Madeira (Portugal) and Tenerife (Canary Islands).

Instead, all the mentioned grapes have shown an “identical molecular profile”, they all come from Calabria!

According to prof. Attilio Scienza, University of Milan, it is not known from which specific Mediterranean region Malvasia grapes left, nor what was the chronology of their stages of diversification in the West, but as shown by some DNA sequences, it seems that this vine did not arrive in Spain from Greece, but from Magna Graecia and therefore perhaps from Calabria.

Vineyards descending towards the sea

The cultivation of these Mediterranean Malvasias is still today located near the sea, as in Calabria; this shows that their wines were for the compositional characteristics suitable for long journeys and the object of intense trade.

A TRACE OF PAST IN THE GRAPES NAME: MALVASIA

In the past there was a lot of confusion between the Malvasia wine and the Greek wines, very similar for the organoleptic characteristics of the wine, as evidenced by the synonymy of Malvasia with Greco di Bianco or Gerace, the only one among the group’s vine varieties in all likelihood, to Greek colonization. In Dalmatia and in Spain it arrived in the Middle Ages to emulate the Venetian malvasias.

A solution of the problem can be found in the history of the name “Malvasia”, as it follows.

According to some studies the name derives from “Monemvasia”, an old commercial port of Laconia, in the Peloponnese. The first written document of a Malvasia dates back to 1214, when the Archbishop of Ephesus Nicola Mesarites referred to a wine called “Monovasia” or “Monemvasios” together with the wines of Chios, Lesbos and Eubea. The Italianisation and diffusion of this term is linked to an active wine trade in the Middle Ages, especially by the Venetians, who began marketing the Vinum de Malvasias in 1278.

Malvasia, the grape, and a glass of liqueur

The name Malvasia referred to the sweet and aromatic wines of Greece (produced in the Peloponnese, in Rhodes, Crete and in the Ionian islands) and after the latter was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, new production centers were created along the sea routes of the Mediterranean. In Italy the first to speak about the various Malvasias was Andrea Bacci at the end of the sixteenth century: in his work he reports that Giulio Cesare Scaligero of Riva del Garda, a humanist cousin him, claimed that the etymology of Monobaticum wine derives from the Greek Monobasiten ( Μονοβασίτήν) term by which Athenaeum of Naucrati (3rd century AD) called a particular wine “the sole basis and foundation of the goodness of all wines”.

Drying the grapes on the reeds

TASTE AND HISTORY

The above mentioned hints of history and oenological science are enough to make clear what experience awaits the lucky drinker of this fantastic sweet and liqueur wine of Calabria, called “Greco di Bianco”.
We wish everyone to drink it in happy company (and at a temperature just below 18 degrees)!