A few miles west of Florence in a remote Tuscan farmhouse in the tiny appellation of Carmingano lies what could be one of Italy’s best kept secrets - Villa di Capezzana. Filippo Bartolotta tastes one of the last bottles from the "outstanding" 1930 vintage, as part of a historic vertical.
vinum absinthiatum, the precursor to vermouth, as noted in first century AD recipe book
De re coquinaria, attributed to Apicius. Much later, in 1570, Giovan Vettorio Soderini, a Florentine agronomist, wrote that “wine of wormwood, rosemary and sage is still made in Hungary and is drank in Germany” (
Trattato della coltivazione delle viti, e del frutto che se ne puô cavare), while in 1773, Volterra-born Giovanni Cosimo Villifranchi stated in his
Enologia toscana that “nowadays, a medicinal and digestive white wine with the Germanic name Wermouth is much esteemed in Tuscany and elsewhere”. History lesson aside, Antonio Benedetto Carpano is credited with making vermouth a viable commercial drink by adding sugar and upping production in Turin in 1786.