Emilia Romagna, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Bosa in Sardinia and the Aeolian Islands in Sicily. What do these, like other areas of Italy and Europe have in common? The cultivation and breeding of a grape and the creation of a legendary and imaginative wine which has been produced for centuries and flows in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea and which takes its name from the Greek peninsula of Monemvasia, in Laconia, where the Ionian seas Aegean meet: Malvasia .
Different typologies that populate the Mediterranean area in particular and that give life to very heterogeneous wines; territories and people, destinations close to the sea or inland and winemakers who work every day to carry on an identity and quality production. This is the premise from which Paolo Tegoni , gastronome, traveler and professor of food and wine at the University of Parma and at other universities, started to investigate, over the course of an entire year, the Malvasias produced in Italy and beyond, which today are the protagonists of Malvasia, a Mediterranean diary , published by Terrae Opificio Culturale Enogastronomico.
The volume was also supported in crowdfunding by the Unione Restaurants del Buon Memory , which had the pleasure of contributing to its creation with a view to enhancing Italian food and wine in which the participating restaurateurs have been engaged since its inception, which took place in 1964 .
A real travel report full not only of interviews and insights into the grapes and their production environments, but also of cultural and tourist cues, since writing about wine is equivalent to telling and describing an entire society. Make way then for geopoetics, history and gastronomy of the places that from time to time the author deals with in the course of the narration, considered part of the wine itself and of that terroir which ends up with it in the cup of the curious researcher and of all those who wish to know all these realities and embark on the journey.
« This book - says Tegoni - will lead you to places fundamental for the birth and diffusion of Malvasia wines and will tell you, page after page, stories, memories, legends and traditions unknown to most. Starting from the very name of the wine, which originates from a small peninsula of the Peloponnese, or rather a still semi-unknown rocky monolith of breathtaking beauty resting on the Myrto Sea, named Monemvasia, in Greek "place with only one entrance", from which this wine left from the Middle Ages to be marketed and made known to the world by the Serenissima Republic of Venice ».
The volume, born from an intense research work that Tegoni has been carrying out for years on the methods and traditions of different areas of the Mediterranean, is enriched by the shots of Francesco Zoppi , a Genoese photographer who develops photographic projects passing from documentary photography to that for commercial purposes and in particular those related to the enhancement of the territory and its inhabitants, and from the maps of the illustrator from Reggio Emilia Lucia Catellani , who painted on paper the many territorial realities and the people who alternate from time to time.
For each chapter dedicated to the Italian territories, the presence of the Buon Memoria restaurants was signaled and recommended as standard bearers of the excellence and extraordinary nature of each Italian regional cuisine, in which Malvasias have an absolute place in the wine list.
A work whose pages scroll countless geographies, from Venice to the island of Salina, from Parma and Piacenza to Chianti, from Slovenia, passing through Istria and Dalmatia, to Greece, which will certainly be an invitation to study and journey and which will stimulate the desire to learn more about the kaleidoscope of wine districts and topics covered with a glass of Malvasia in hand.
