Good Things From Italy - Le Cose Buone d'Italia

Italians were the first to deliberately induce effervescence in their winemaking, despite the practice commonly being misattributed to the French Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon. Contrary to popular myth, at one time an important part of his job as cellar master at the Abbey Saint-Pierre d’Hautvilliers, was to prevent a secondary fermentation in the juice under his watch.

Although fizziness in wine has been noted as far back as ancient Greek and Roman times, the first written account of its intentional creation was in 1622 by Francesco Scacchi, an Italian monk and physician from Fabriano. In his work, De Salubri potu dissertatio, he described adding sugar to wine to create bubbles, then conjectured whether they were good or bad for one’s health, including spiritual. [...]

Via Mariano Pallottini