Cisalpine Gaul

The route's name is a Roman administrative fact, and the wine names still carry it. The Barolo and Barbaresco consortium records that the Romans called the impenetrable forest where the Ligurians had taken refuge barbarica silva, because it stayed outside the boundaries of their domains, and that the ancient place name barbaritium derives from that expression and evolved into the modern Barbaresco.

Two namings, a millennium and a half apart, bracket the Langhe. The Barolo and Barbaresco consortium repeats a legend that the Gauls came into Italy attracted by the wine of barbaritium, of excellent quality. In the second half of the 1800s the modern names were fixed: Domizio Cavazza, first headmaster of the Royal Oenological School of Alba, helped define Barbaresco while Cavour and the Marchioness Falletti were naming Barolo.

Stop five is where Roman wine logistics survive as standing stone. Aquileia's river port was laid out on the old course of the Natisone and Torre, which flowed east of the ancient city and widened here to nearly fifty metres. Fondazione Aquileia records the embankment, quays, inclined planes and road ramp connections as still well preserved. The Aquileia stop anchors the Friuli leg.

Aquileia's port engineering is legible on the ground. The facilities were excavated in the 1930s and run for over three hundred metres along the right bank, close to the republican walls; the whole installation was rebuilt in the early first century AD with new quays and a long building opening onto the river. Blocks with a vertical through hole still stand at intervals along the quays.

Valpolicella's signature is a process, not a grape. Amarone is made by drying the harvested grapes in the fruttaio for about 100 to 120 days, during which the sugars and polyphenols in the berries increase; the dried fruit is vinified in winter, and a slow fermentation yields a dry wine of high alcohol. The consortium suggests serving it between 16 and 20 degrees.

Recioto is Valpolicella's drying process stopped early, and the trellis above it is older than either wine. Recioto grapes must lose at least half their weight before vinification, and fermentation is halted, which leaves the valley its only sweet wine. Overhead, the pergola carries more than 2,000 years of history there and remains the traditional training form; Guyot only arrived around 1870.

The two ends of the route are governed by opposite arithmetic. Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG is made only from Glera across 15 communes at 13.5 tonnes per hectare, with 43 Rive bottlings picked by hand at reduced yields, and Cartizze confined to 107 hectares under rules of its own since 1969. Barolo, by contrast, is one grape across 11 municipalities.

Time is the Langhe's regulating instrument. Barolo must age at least three years beyond the two months following harvest, eighteen months of that in wood, and may carry riserva only after five; Barbaresco needs two years with nine months in oak, and four years for riserva. Only Barolo, Serralunga d'Alba and Castiglione Falletto sit wholly inside the Barolo zone; eight further communes are partly in.

The eastern end of the route keeps its own Roman claim, and it belongs to the consortium that makes the wine. The Consorzio del Soave records that Soave stood on the ancient Via Postumia and was an important centre under the empire, and that the Romans called the wines of Soave and Recioto retico, praised by Virgil and Suetonius as a favourite of the emperor Augustus.

What the pierced blocks along Aquileia's quays were for is still an open question, and the Fondazione says so: experts maintain they may have been used to moor boats or to accommodate wooden cranes to help load and unload cargoes. The port itself died by construction. The later city walls were raised on top of the quays, and with the river bed narrowing the harbour was progressively abandoned.