Maybe a Grapevine Should Grow up a Tree

Which Started with the Question: What Drink Really Goes with Pizza?

Country Folk Resting beneath the Vines in the Hills above Solfatara, with a View of Ischia, Procida and the Bay of Pozzuoli. Painting by Jacob Philipp Hackert. 1793. Private collection.

WHEN I FIRST BEGAN to think about pizza, I wondered about drinks. In Italy, light mass-market beers (Peroni, Moretti) were popular with pizza. In its home city of Naples, there had always been wine, although Neapolitans weren’t great consumers of wine. Traditionally sold on the street were water, lemonade, and orangeade (the lemon and orange continue to be sold). I was learning as much as I could before visiting the city. The one specific wine mentioned with pizza was Asprinio, made from a white grape grown not far from the city around Aversa and Caserta. Extraordinarily, it’s raised in an ancient way by training the vines up living trees, a method called ad alberata, from albero, “tree.” But I didn’t find any Asprinio in the pizzerie of Naples, and when I asked Antonio Mastroberardino, the great wine producer of Campania, about Asprinio, he dismissed it as tasting like lemon. (It wasn’t the most appropriate question to have asked him.) Asprinio comes from aspro “tart.” The wine is known for its acidity and freshness.