I
Some years' residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar
with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough _Inferno_,
generous _Forzato_, delicate _Sassella_, harsher _Montagner_, the
raspberry flavour of _Grumello_, the sharp invigorating twang of
_Villa_. The colour, ranging from garnet to almandine or ruby, told me
the age and quality of wine; and I could judge from the crust it forms
upon the bottle, whether it had been left long enough in wood to
ripen. I had furthermore arrived at the conclusion that the best
Valtelline can only be tasted in cellars of the Engadine or Davos,
where this vintage matures slowly in the mountain air, and takes a
flavour unknown at lower levels. In a word, it had amused my leisure
to make or think myself a connoisseur. My literary taste was tickled
by the praise bestowed in the Augustan age on Rhætic grapes by Virgil:
Et quo te carmine dicam,
Rhætica? nec cellis ideo contende Falernis.
I piqued myself on thinking that could the poet but have drank
one bottle at Samaden--where Stilicho, by the way, in his famous
recruiting expedition may perhaps have drank it--he would have been
less chary in his panegyric. For the point of inferiority on which he
seems to insist, namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep well
in cellar, is only proper to this vintage in Italian climate. Such
meditations led my fancy on the path of history. Is there truth,
then, in the dim tradition that this mountain land was colonised
by Etruscans? Is _Ras_ the root of Rhætia? The Etruscans were
accomplished wine-growers, we know. It was their Montepulciano which
drew the Gauls to Rome, if Livy can be trusted. Perhaps they first
planted the vine in Valtelline. Perhaps its superior culture in that
district may be due to ancient use surviving in a secluded Alpine
valley. One thing is certain, that the peasants of Sondrio and Tirano
understand viticulture better than the Italians of Lombardy.
Then my thoughts ran on to the period of modern history, when the
Grisons seized the Valtelline in lieu of war-pay from the Dukes of
Milan. For some three centuries they held it as a subject province.
From the Rathhaus at Davos or Chur they sent their nobles--Von
Salis and Buol, Planta and Sprecher von Bernegg--across the hills as
governors or podestàs to Poschiavo, Sondrio, Tirano, and Morbegno.
In those old days the Valtelline wines came duly every winter over
snow-deep passes to fill the cellars of the Signori Grigioni. That
quaint traveller Tom Coryat, in his so-called 'Crudities,' notes
the custom early in the seventeenth century. And as that custom
then obtained, it still subsists with little alteration. The
wine-carriers--Weinführer, as they are called--first scaled
the Bernina pass, halting then as now, perhaps at Poschiavo and
Pontresina. Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the pass of the
Scaletta rose before them--a wilderness of untracked snow-drifts. The
country-folk still point to narrow, light hand-sledges, on which the
casks were charged before the last pitch of the pass. Some wine came,
no doubt, on pack-saddles. A meadow in front of the Dischma-Thal,
where the pass ends, still bears the name of the Ross-Weid, or
horse-pasture. It was here that the beasts of burden used for this
wine-service, rested after their long labours. In favourable weather
the whole journey from Tirano would have occupied at least four days,
with scanty halts at night.
The Valtelline slipped from the hands of the Grisons early in this
century. It is rumoured that one of the Von Salis family negotiated
matters with Napoleon more for his private benefit than for the
interests of the state. However this may have been, when the
Graubünden became a Swiss Canton, after four centuries of sovereign
independence, the whole Valtelline passed to Austria, and so
eventually to Italy. According to modern and just notions of
nationality, this was right. In their period of power, the Grisons
masters had treated their Italian dependencies with harshness. The
Valtelline is an Italian valley, connected with the rest of
the peninsula by ties of race and language. It is, moreover,
geographically linked to Italy by the great stream of the Adda, which
takes its rise upon the Stelvio, and after passing through the Lake of
Como, swells the volume of the Po.
But, though politically severed from the Valtelline, the Engadiners
and Davosers have not dropped their old habit of importing its best
produce. What they formerly levied as masters, they now acquire by
purchase. The Italian revenue derives a large profit from the frontier
dues paid at the gate between Tirano and Poschiavo on the Bernina
road. Much of the same wine enters Switzerland by another route,
travelling from Sondrio to Chiavenna and across the Splügen. But until
quite recently, the wine itself could scarcely be found outside the
Canton. It was indeed quoted upon Lombard wine-lists. Yet no one drank
it; and when I tasted it at Milan, I found it quite unrecognisable.
The fact seems to be that the Graubündeners alone know how to deal
with it; and, as I have hinted, the wine requires a mountain climate
for its full development.