Red Lacryma Christi of Vesuvio D.O.C.

Characteristics

The Red Lacryma Christi D.O.C. is a wine characterized by a ruby ​​red color and a pleasant aroma of red fruit and spices and by a dry taste with a balanced but complex and full bodied aroma. It goes perfectly with pasta or polenta with meat sauce, roasts, game and piquant cheeses.

Tradition

“Haec iuga quam Nysae colles plus Bacchus amavit”

“Bacco loved these hills more than his native hills of Nisa”

- Marziale

Lacryma Christi takes its name from an ancient Christian legend. It is said that Lucifer, the angel more beautiful and shining of Paradise, and beloved of Christ, has stolen a piece of heaven to bring it to Earth. From this piece of paradise would be born the Gulf of Naples with its fertile and hospitable lands.

Christ, aware of the theft, reluctantly expelled the angel from heaven, he fell down on the Earth and within it, creating the Inferno. The Creator wept bitterly for the great sorrow and his tears spilt on the dark land of Vesuvius, giving birth to an extraordinary vine and a heavenly wine.

The historical reality is more concrete, putting at the heart of the wine-growing tradition the work of Greek colonists. It was the eighth century BC when a group of exiles departed from Thessaly to colonize the coasts of Campania. They were the Aminei, people whose name still resists in Neapolitan toponymy, with Mount Amineo, where the first crop of Vesuvius wines were born.

Several centuries later a tiny congregation of Cappuccini monks, kept the secrets of this wine. They lived in "Turris Octava", the ancient Roman settlement eight miles from Naples. In time, thanks to the work of these winemakers monks, the settlement took the form of the city and took the name of Torre del Greco.

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