Drink - Victoria Moore can't match the Medicis with the wines they drank
Giuliano de' Medici was a fine-faced man with jet-black hair and a long, hooked nose. And at 25, if Botticelli's portrait of him, currently displayed in the "Renaissance Florence" exhibition at the National Gallery, is to be believed, neither his complexion nor his physique displayed any sign of the many dinners and banquets he enjoyed. Despite "sumptuary laws" that forbade excessive indulgence - but God knows how they defined excessive - the historian Villani, writing in 1338, estimated that Florentine weekly wine consumption averaged a gallon per person. One hundred years later, things were still swinging. Whether Giuliano would have developed thread-like broken veins and a blubbery gut in middle age is anyone's guess. Alas, he did not live that long.
In 1477, some of the power-thirsty Pazzi family, in league with the pope, were busily hatching a plot to rid Florence of Lorenzo, head of the politically powerful Medici family, and his brother Giuliano. By the next year, Giuliano's bloody corpse was lying on the floor of the Duomo, his skull nearly split in two by the force of the dagger blow that killed him. Lorenzo reacted more quickly when, at the tolling of the sacristy bell, two priests pulled daggers from beneath their robes. He escaped.
Indeed, the lives of the Medicis and their associates read like a spiced-up Jacobean tragedy in which no one was allowed a part unless given to grand - and often life-ending - gestures. When Lorenzo did eventually die, at 43, his shamed physician hurled himself down a well. Those fiery Italians stopped at nothing that would sound good in the history books 500 years later. You would imagine, then, that they would have required some immensely fortifying liquor to keep the hot blood coursing through their veins.
Yet according to Christopher Hibbert in his Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, though more than 300 barrels of wine were drunk at Lorenzo's wedding feast, most of it was Trebbiano and Vernaccia, and these scarcely seem wines to fuel such passions.
Vernaccia - a white wine probably made from the several unrelated vine varieties that bear the same name - was synonymous with luxury. We drank it here, too, according to the records of London wine merchants from the Middle Ages. Until the 14th century it came only in sweet form, but the dry version, Vernaccia di San Gimignano, named after the towered Tuscan hillside town it is from, is still drunk today. At best, it can be a crisp, light drink yet, in Oz Clarke's dismissive view, "the wines have a certain body but not much character". Nevertheless, Vernaccia wins a mention in Dante's Purgatorio, where Pope Martin IV purges himself by abstaining from his customary fare, eels cooked in Vernaccian wine.
As for Trebbiano, it was made from yet another white grape producing refreshing but insipid and unexciting wines. Despite this, though perhaps largely thanks to the vine's great resilience, Trebbiano is Italy's most widely planted white grape. Indeed, there is so much of it around that earlier this century its inclusion in Chianti was sanctioned, though this effectively diluted and diminished the colour and quality of the red wine. Because Trebbiano wines are relatively low in alcohol but high in acidity, the grape is also put to use as a base for brandy, particularly in France, where it flourishes under the name "Ugni Blanc".
So how did these watery wines succeed in inspiring the dastardly adventures of the Medicis and the Pazzis and the lauded art of the renaissance? Surely the only truth must be that the Florentines needed no extra spice in their lives. Only in these miserably gentrified days when cloaks and daggers belong on the stage and villains are not flung deservedly out of state buildings with a noose round their neck do we take refuge in the overblown but distracting flavours of the New World. Then again, looking more closely at the Botticelli portrait of Giuliano, I can't help noticing that his eyelids are drooping. A bit too much Trebbiano with his lunch, perhaps?
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