The discovery of a forgotten wine and a search for clues that leads to the underworld

Ferrari - The discovery of a forgotten wine and a search for clues that leads to the underworld

It all started with an old Ferrari that my parents found by chance in the cellar. It was a dusty thing that someone had forgotten about, hidden behind various pieces of sports equipment and jars of preserves, and nobody can now say exactly where it came from. The Ferrari in question has (almost) nothing to do with cars. This Ferrari fits in a bottle. Its story is the story of three Italians. One wanted to steal the champagne from the French, the others panicked their way to dubious fame. A search for clues that leads to the gangster milieu.

It's easy to overlook this peculiar bottle. Narrow, with a long neck and screw cap, it is more reminiscent of cough syrup than wine. If it weren't for the faded, worn label with the seven sonorous letters that promise exclusivity: FERRARI. When I think of Ferrari, I think of Enzo, of course, of fast cars and the heat of Italy. And I think of Andy Warhol, of this one black and white picture of him at table with his entourage, a bottle of champagne in front of him. The picture has become famous, as has the champagne. It too is a Ferrari - and anything but a promotional gift from the car manufacturer.

When champagne became Italian

In Italy, everyone knows Ferrari Trento. This is the winery that made sparkling wine Italian. So to speak. That was 120 years ago. And it all started with one man: Giulio Ferrari. He had walked through the vineyards on a trip to Champagne in France, looked at the grapes, the surroundings and then succumbed to a kind of megalomaniac fit. He suddenly wanted to do what the French had long been able to do - produce a top-quality sparkling wine in his native Trentino. A noble undertaking in a region where, in 1902, wine came primarily from the tap (vino sfuso), the Chardonnay grape was unknown and nobody had a clue about bottle fermentation.

Today, Giulio Ferrari, once derided as a crank, is celebrated as a pioneer. Ferrari Trento has become a global player and his sparkling wine business is a multi-million business. The wines are now exported to more than 50 countries. And when the corks pop on the Formula 1 podium these days, it is not champagne that bubbles out of the bottle, but Ferrari sparkling wine.

Could have been worth something. But it's just adulterated crap.

A relic from Giulio Ferrari's early days?

Is this bottle, which has been "maturing" in his parents' cellar for decades, a relic from Giulio Ferrari's early days? Perhaps even a valuable collector's item? I send a picture of the bottle to Camilla Lunelli. Together with Matteo and Marcello, she belongs to the third generation of the same family that took over Ferrari's business in the early 1950s and made the sparkling wines famous throughout the world. Camilla is in charge of public relations at the company and reacts with some surprise. It's the first time she's seen a bottle like this in her life. "But I'm sure it has nothing to do with us. Brand protection was not common back then," she writes.

So I keep looking until I come across a scuffle in Ascoli Piceno in 1968. Suppliers to the local wine cellars had come to blows with alleged thieves over a few bags of sugar, the carabinieri intervened and pulled off the coup of their lives. The sugar stood for a much bigger offense, for rampant adulteration in wine production. At the time, Der Spiegel reported on two dozen wine producers who were later arrested. Among them were two men named Ferrari.

Giuseppe and Bruno Ferrari owned the "Casa Vinicola Ferrari" in northern Italy, one of the largest wine houses in the country at the time. They also exported to Germany. If anyone knew how to make wine, it was these scoundrels. From the mid-50s, they are said to have sold masses of wine that wasn't wine. If there were any grapes in the swill at all, it was only ten percent. Instead, they mixed delicacies such as dried ox blood, potash, pomace waste, sugar, water and various chemicals together to make an artificial wine, of which they sold millions of liters a year, according to the investigation. Bruno and his sons Giuseppe and Gianfranco were among the 202 people indicted in a mammoth trial in 1968 for, among other things, producing the fake wine, selling it and forming a criminal organization.

One look at the label is enough to know that, how could it be otherwise, our bottle of course does not come from the cellars of Giulio Ferrari, but from those of the legendary Ferrari family of crooks. So the supposed sensational find is nothing more than garbage. That was obvious.

Sources: Ferrari Trento, Spiegel