The history of Primitivo loses in the night of the times. It arrives in Puglia probably from the other side of Adriatic thanks to Illyrian people, absorbed in the cultivation of the vine and it began to be commercialized in all Mediterranean from Phoenician. And when Greeks colonized the south of Italy ( VII century b.C), in particular in Campania and in Lucania, the Hellenic wine didn’t arrive in Puglia because here the black and dense wine existed. Infact in the Roman age next to the word “vinum” there was also the word “merum” to indicate the pure wine in comparison with the first which indicated the wine mixed with water and honey. Well while the word “vinum” is used in all Indo-European languages, the word “merum” is used instead in the regional speeches of Puglia, where the good wine is called “mjier” or “mieru”. The wine produced in Puglia was “merum” in the sense of pure and true.
So the Primitivo can be considered the heir of old “merum” , the historic wine of the Puglia, which became famous near Taranto, where Orazio compared the “mera tarantina” with the most famous wine of Romans, the Falerno of Campania.
Pliny defined Manduria (today principal centre of production of this wine), the town “full of vines”. Also many others writers mentioned and praised these wines, as Martial, Ateneo and Varro. Those who cultivated that lands were free men in free and confederate towns, as the citadel of Monte Sannace in Gioia del Colle, where the archaeological excavations have brought to light wine-making systems or that messapian citadel of Brindisi where on the coin the image of the music and writer Ario was stroke. The writer, with a bunch of grapes and a goblet in his hands, rides a dolphin because he, inventor of Dionysian dithyramb, was thrown in the sea by tyrrhenian pirates and saved by a dolphin attracted by his bacchic song. Instead Romans diffused the large landed estate and slavery. The menial cultivation little by little took away wines of Trento their special peculiarity, due to the climate , to the land and to the vine, but also to the free men work and its technique of cultivation and preservation, which want so many care and individual love.
It began so the decline that lasted for the whole Middle Age when some monks of Salento and the benedictine monks on the Murgia kept alive the cultivation of the wine according to the old habits of the local farmers. The quality obtained from local grapes was so good that the monks started a good export with their native country (Lebanon, Syria) from the ports of Taranto, Gallipoli and Brindisi. Also in modern age Lorenzo the Magnificent appreciated the wines of Salento, serving them during the symposium of honour.
The first documents about the diffusion of this extraordinary wine go back to the second half of 1700, when a church man, don Francesco Filippo Indellicati, noticed that there was one that maturated first of others presented in his vineyards. So it was born the first single-crop system of “Primaticcio” which thanks to its good quality in short time extended in all Campania, Gioia del Colle, Altamura etc.
It will be in the land of Salento and in Manduria and Maruggio that this wine will find its favourable habitat for its improvement.