Italian wines Liguria

Liguria preserves some of the most rugged and terraced vineyards of Italy, and also among the most beautiful ones. A look at the Cinque Terre is enough to understand that viticulture in this place has something extraordinary.


Plants hang by a thread, overlooking the sea. Albarola and Bosco are the two varieties that share the denomination, wines that retain a remarkable and salinity that hold the scent of the sea. From Riviera di Levante, instead, we find Pigato, Vermentino, Ormeasco and Rossese. Each grape variety is a unique expression.


Despite the binding difficulties caused by the landscape, since ancient times in Liguria the presence of a certain wine production is attested. It is believed that even the Phocaean, around the sixth century BC, were the people who taught the residents of the region the vine cultivation.


However, only in the Middle Ages viticulture in Liguria acquired importance. The inhabitants of the region, most of all boaters and fishermen, devoted to the peasantÂ’s activities only the periods in which they were not embarked, and dedicated to the different crops, and in this case to vines, small plots of land on ridges on the lower slopes of the Apennines. During their travels in the Mediterranean Sea they came into contact with several coastal populations, tasted local food and wine and brought with them, among other products, some rooted cuttings of different species that then cultivated on their terraces. This explains why in Liguria there are so many different varieties of grapes (about a hundred).


During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Ligurian viticulture lived its moment of maximum splendor. But since the eighteenth century it experienced a decline: on the one hand, the Maritime Republic of Genoa had the Dutch trade as competitor, on the other hand the cultivation of olive trees became predominant. It was Napoleon who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, wanted to include the revival of viticulture in his reorganization rules (although phylloxera gave, shortly after, the final straw to the sector).


During the twentieth century the wine was gradually replanted. Quality, for decades, was overshadowed by quantity, and, despite the high potential of the vines and soils influenced by the maritime climate, the Ligurian wines never actually imposed on the Italian market. Fortunately, in the most recent decades there was a reversal of trend, and companies that invest in a selective production are increasing, careful to obtain a wine able to compete with the wines from other regions of the peninsula.