It is one of the six most cultivated vines in the world; in France, in the middle Rhone valley, its wine is called Hermitage rouge, in the rest of the world Syrah. Its first historical mention is from 1665, when it was already a sought-after quality wine that was counterfeited by unscrupulous traders. Gradually its fame became international and from 1800 foreign winemakers began to import its plant and the cultivation spread first in Australia, South Africa and California, to be produced today in every continent.
One day in a small restaurant between Lazio and Umbria, choosing the wine from the list, I decided for a bottle of Syrah, proposed by a renowned Orvieto winery and I was conquered: it had the color of an impenetrable ruby with purple reflections, an intense, pleasant and balanced aroma, which tasted of spices and fruits. In the mouth it was soft and reminiscent of ripe cherry. In short, a wine to convert even the most inveterate teetotaller.
I had made this choice contrary to my usual support for Italian genetic heritage, because I was very intrigued by the Arabic name of the wine and at the same time puzzled, since, as everyone knows, in that part of the world today we do not produce alcohol as well as we do not raise pigs. Still, as early as 1826 the opinion that the Syrah came from the East by some medieval monks was the most widespread. The holy men would have settled on the 320-meter-high hill overlooking the small town of Tain, on the eastern bank of the Rhone, in southern France. This is the place where our wine was born and where it still maintains the name of Hermitage, that is, the wine of the hermitage. On the hill there are no vestiges of buildings that hosted the religious, but in its 137 hectares there are natural caves that, we know, the most rigid observants of penance often preferred. Almost on the top there is also a small medieval church dedicated to St. Christopher, the saint who protects travelers and those who transport them.
In 1843 the French writer and historian Alphonse Balledier told a different story about the birth of the hermitage: a valiant knight, Henry Gaspard de Sterimberg, after participating in a crusade that lasted twenty years, in which there had been no mercy for women or children, asked in 1225 to be dismissed from the militia and obtained from the Queen of France, Bianca of Castile, the usufruct of that hill that belonged to the abbey of St-Andre-le-Bas in the city of Vienne. Aspiring to redeem himself by practicing penance in that peaceful solitude, the Crusader would have installed his hermitage near the chapel dedicated to St. Christopher. There he would also dedicate himself to cultivating the vine, offering a glass of wine to the pilgrims who stopped by him to invoke their patron saint. After his death, other hermits would also live on the hill, caring for and improving the vineyard.
These stories of hermits and crusader winemakers clearly highlight one thing: that Christianity is a wine-friendly religion, as it is normal, since it comes from the region where Neolithic men first domesticated our vitis vinifera, selecting the same fruity and aromatic tastes that we still love today. The Middle East retained its oenological primacy over time and again in the sixth century AD. the Palestinian cities of Gaza, Ascalon and Yamnia dominated the production of wine in the Eastern Roman Empire and exported throughout the Mediterranean basin their highly valued and high-cost aromatic red wine.
From the seventh century those territories, however, became conquest and domination of the Muslim Arabs, whose holy book contained a condemnation of wine, in somewhat contradictory terms, to be honest. In fact, while in some suras (=chapters) wine is considered a typical pleasure of the pagans, there are two in which it is considered an innocent drink. The exegetes of the holy book try to explain this contradiction by saying that the text positively considers only sweet wines, low in alcohol, and therefore morally acceptable. If this interpretation were correct, the Qur'an would preserve the trace of a very ancient line of thought: in fact, even the ancient Romans believed that a sweet wine, made light by interrupted fermentation, was “harmless” and therefore allowed it to women, for whom the consumption of intoxicating drinks was instead morally reprehensible. One of those wines was called Passum, a name very similar to moder italian passito.
However, the prevalence of the sures of condemnation caused a progressive collapse in production and demand for wine, in correspondence with the increasing conversion of the inhabitants of those regions to the new cult. However, where the peasants remained faithful to eastern Christianity, especially in the most isolated and protected areas such as the mountains of Lebanon, the production of those excellent red wines continued. The arrival of the Crusaders in the region at the end of the XI century In particular, the wine of the city of Tyre became the most expensive wine in the world. The Knights Templar also introduced to Europe another famous wine, Kumandaria, sweet and amber, obtained with a blend of red Mavro and white Xynisteri. It came from the large Greek island of Cyprus, very close to the Syrian coast. The English ruler Richard the Lionheart during the Third Crusade called it the king of wines and the wine of kings, while in France poets compared poets the Cypre (pronounced Shipre) to the brightest star of the firmament.
The Crusades, therefore, actually produced the consumption and admiration for the eastern vines, but at the same time it would not be at all agreed to the noble knights lose the monopoly of such a lucrative trade, allowing the plant in the West. And as it is completely improbable the hypothesis of crusaders returning home from the Holy Land with vine seedlings as souvenirs, thereby destroying their income, equally unreliable appears the story concerning the crusader Sterimberg, since the war to which it refers was carried out exclusively in the West, in southern France, to exterminate the Albigensian heretics. In addition, the territories of Tain and the Hermitage, in the thirteenth century did not belong to the kingdom of France, but to the Holy Roman Empire, like all the lands east of the Rhone river and therefore the French monarchs would not have had any title to assign fiefs to anyone.
What certainly the Middle Ages produced in culture was the association with the East of every product that shared in some degree the same characteristics of great quality and pleasantness. The soft and fruity taste of the Hermitage wine was reminiscent of that of oriental wines and the "syr" root of the name Syria was probably used to give a name to the vine that produced it (in Arabic Suria the region and Sur the city of Tyre). After the initial uncertainties about the graphic variants: scyras, syrah, serine, syrac, sira, sirrah, serene, syra,, there are only two left: Syrah and Shiraz, the latter is the name used in the Anglo-Saxon world, which refers to an even farther East: Persia, of which Shiraz is a famous city.
Today, however, all these colorful legends have been given a blow: the tests carried out on the DNA of the vine have shown that it is instead native to the Alpine region: it is a natural cross between a red vine: the Dureza, no longer cultivated, and a white one, the Mondeuse Blanche of Savoy, of which biology has revealed the genes present in the current Syrah. The analyses also reveal that it has a “cousin” of Italy, with which it shares part of the dna: it is the Teroldego, the big red to the Trentino region and therefore, we can safely use with full our satisfaction instead of French wine, if we are to sustain our fragile and beautiful biological wealth.