frascati

In the hills southeast of Rome, where the old crater lakes of the Castelli Romani shimmer between volcanic ridges, the town of Frascati takes its name from a simple piece of Italian: frasca, a leafy branch. Medieval tavern keepers throughout central Italy hung a bough of leaves or a green bush above their doorways to signal that new wine was available. The custom had a Latin precedent: a vine wreath above the door of a taberna indicated wine for sale. Over time, the branch became so associated with the wine-place that inns in the Lazio hills were called frascate (leafy places), and the hilltop town above ancient Tusculum took that name permanently.

Frascati the town has been a retreat from Roman heat since the time of Cicero, who owned a villa at Tusculum, just above the present town. The wines from the volcanic soils drew Roman aristocrats who found the combination of altitude, cool air, and local Malvasia and Trebbiano grapes produced a white wine of unusual freshness. Pope Paul III spent summers here in the sixteenth century, and Cardinal Richelieu was rumored to keep a cellar stocked with it. The volcanic tufa of the Alban Hills gave the wine a mineral quality that distinguished it from the flatter whites of the Roman plains.

The DOC designation for Frascati was established in 1966, one of the first formal protections for an Italian wine. At the time, Frascati was already familiar to a generation of postwar tourists who had drunk it in Rome's trattorias, where it was served young, cold, and local. The wine's reputation suffered in the 1980s when mass production diluted quality, but a reform of the DOC rules in 2011 raised minimum Malvasia content and restricted yields. The better producers returned to the volcanic hillside vineyards that had made Frascati worth drinking in the first place.

The word frascati arrived in English wine writing sometime in the mid-twentieth century, used without translation, as English drinkers assumed the name meant the wine. In Italian, frasca still means a branch or a country tavern. A frascata is still a rustic meal taken at such a place. The wine and the branch share more than a name: both are temporary, seasonal, and better fresh.