WINE
A tale worth telling Sebastian Morello sings the praises of the eccentrically named, Est! Est!! Est!!! di Montefiascone DOC, Trappolini
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owering over the town of Montefiascone, in Italy’s Viterbo Province, is a huge baroque Duomo. In 1719, inside this great Cathedral of St Margaret, were married the ‘King over the Water’ James Francis Edward Stuart and Maria Clementina Sobieska, the parents of the Bonnie Prince and the Cardinal Duke of York. To this church I frequently walked to attend Holy Mass when I lived in this town for a little over a year in the early 2010s, occupying a damp and uncomfortable room in the old episcopal palace. Here I first tasted the local wine, eccentrically named Est! Est!! Est!!! This name may be odd, but the Latin ought to be appreciated by this readership. When subjected to the scrutiny of wine experts, Est! Est!! Est!!! tends to receive a hard time. Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson, in their World Atlas of Wine, refer to it as ‘the dullest white wine with the strangest name in the world’. Well, let them think what they want – I love the stuff. Est! Est!! Est!!! is crisp but not sharp, coloured like it has captured the Italian sun. Even its bouquet is refreshing. The taste is sweet and vanillary without losing the dryness and zesty finish which makes it such an excellent companion to anything cooked with chilli. The Est! Est!! Est!!! I recommend is an interesting blend of Malvasia and Trebbiano Toscano from vines which have been nurtured with devotion by the Trappolini family for generations, whose members attend with great sensitivity to the needs of the volcanic soil from which they bring forth their elixir. This wine is always ‘fined’ for three months before release. Do try it, but perhaps wait until spring comes back around, and then drink it outdoors with a friend or your beloved. The tale behind the name is worth telling. In the year 1111, Bishop Johannes Defuk travelled to Rome in the entourage of the Holy Roman Emperor with
WINTER 2020
the intention of being noticed by the Pope. Each evening, when the caravan stopped for the night, Defuk, who had an intemperate love of wine, sent his servantsommelier out to the surrounding towns to taste what was on offer. The servant, having found the town with the best wine in the area, would scratch ‘Est!’ – ‘It is!’ – onto the town gates as a sign for his master, to whom he would then return to give directions. Defuk would drink his fill, fall asleep, and return to the Emperor’s convoy by the time of departure in the morning. When the Emperor’s caravan reached the Viterbo region at dusk, Defuk sent out his servant to conduct the invaluable research. The servant soon reached Montefiascone, whose wine so impressed him that he scratched ‘Est! Est!! Est!!!’ onto the gate. Defuk arrived a little later to drink the wine and, wholly agreeing with the judgment of his servant, proceeded to drink more than usual. Glass after glass he drank, deeming it the best he had ever tasted, finally dying at midnight of alcohol poisoning.
It seems to me that we have cause for gratitude to this wine. The last thing the Catholic Church needs – in any age – is another careerist cleric. Today, we know this well. We have witnessed the unedifying sight of bishop after bishop, on their visits to Rome, wearing the same silver pectoral cross as the Holy Father, quoting him in every other sentence, in the hope of signalling they are the company men he needs. Or those bishops who pitifully leap on the bandwagon of every petty secular cause to show how ‘relevant’ they are, and how in need the Church is of their promotion. Such things mark a demoralising spectacle from which their flocks ought to be spared. Or worse, the display of careerist priests retweeting and Facebook-sharing every burp and hiccup of their bishop to demonstrate their school-girl enthusiasm, hoping for that next promotion to some diocesan title which will mean nothing at the eschaton. There is a yet darker side to this prioritising of private worldly aspirations over the supernatural goods of the Church. It is precisely by utilising ambition that priests and bishops have been guided into disregarding elementary requirements of both the law of the land and the social doctrine of the Church. The abuses, cruelties, and injustices to which the Church’s faithful have been so frequently subjected could never have been possible without the toxic presence of careerist clerics. Perhaps, then, Est! Est!! Est!!! saved a whole diocese from the malign legacy of another careerist cleric. I suppose we know of Defuk’s unfortunate end because the account of it was spread far and wide at the time. In turn, I suggest, if you purchase a bottle of Est! Est!! Est!!!, that you raise your glass to the lay-run Catholic press, who often courageously expose clerical careerism in the Church, thus providing one of the few checks to the spreading of a poison infinitely worse than ethanol.
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