Where the Bell Tower Meets the Vine

There is a scene that happens in small Italian villages — it has happened to us already, though we have barely begun — where the late afternoon sun drops behind the campanile and the shadow of the bell tower falls across the nearest vineyard. Stone and vine. Faith and fermentation. Two things that have been inseparable for so long that separating them would require dismantling about three thousand years of Western civilization.

That is, in essence, what Two Vintage Vagabonds is about.

We are Jake and Maureen, and this is our first dispatch. Before we land in Puglia — before we find our first trullo, before we uncork our first Primitivo, before we stand inside a church so old it predates the written name of the village it anchors — we want to tell you how we got here. And the story, appropriately, begins not in Italy but in California.

The Mission Grape: America's First Nexus of Wine and Faith

If you have driven California's coastal highway and stopped at any of the 21 Spanish missions strung like rosary beads from San Diego to Sonoma, you have already encountered the original nexus of wine and religion in the New World.

The story of wine in California begins with the Spanish Franciscan Missionaries, starting with California's first mission: Mission San Diego de Alcalá in 1769. Just as palm trees were planted so there would be palm fronds for Palm Sunday, vineyards were planted so there would be wine for communion. That first variety, planted by Father Junípero Serra, became so ubiquitous it became known as the Mission grape — the preeminent variety until 1880.

The grape has been identified, five centuries later, as Listán Prieto, a red grape believed to have originated in the Castilla-La Mancha region of Spain. Cuttings gradually spread from Mexico to New Mexico in 1620 and ultimately to Alta California in the late 1700s under the care of the Franciscan padres.

The logistics behind this viticultural colonization were strikingly sophisticated. The friars' familiarity with Mediterranean climates facilitated cultivation suited to the region's conditions. They strategically located missions close to the coast, harnessing Pacific Ocean fog and cool breezes, and operated agriculture with a business mindset — generating surplus produce for trade and barter with merchants and sea captains.

But there is a darker current beneath this history that responsible storytellers cannot ignore. California's first vineyards originated in the Spanish conquest and colonization of the region. The Franciscan friars conscripted California Natives to plant vineyards and construct mission churches. Although California Natives labored to produce wine from Mission vineyards, Spanish imperial regulations prohibited them from freely consuming wine outside of the mass.

We tell this part of the story not to diminish the architectural and viticultural legacy of the missions — which is genuinely magnificent — but because honest engagement with wine history requires acknowledging who actually tended the vines. The same tension between spiritual ambition and earthly power will surface repeatedly as we move through the medieval churches and monastery-owned vineyards of southern Italy.

From the missions to the phylloxera crisis of the 1870s — when the vine louse Dactylosphaera vitifoliae first appeared in Napa in 1872 — the Golden State's relationship with the vine has always been bound up with faith, ambition, and survival. It is, in miniature, the same story playing out in southern Italy over two millennia.

Oenotria Tellus: The Wine Land at the Heel of the Boot

The ancient Greeks had a name for southern Italy: Oenotria — the land of wine. It was not a casual observation.

Winemaking traditions are known to have been established in Italy by the time the Phoenician and Greek colonists arrived on Italy's shores around 1000–800 BC. However, archaeological discoveries on Monte Kronio in 2017 revealed that viticulture in Sicily flourished at least as far back as 4000 BC — some 3,000 years earlier than previously thought. What the Greeks added was not the vine itself but systematic, sophisticated viticulture: the science and philosophy of growing wine with intention.

From 800 BC, a number of Greek city-states colonised south Italy, creating the so-called Magna Graecia. Sicily, together with Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, and Puglia, played a key role in the introduction of viticulture to Italy during Greek colonization and its subsequent spread along the Italian Peninsula to reach southern France and western Spain.

The genetic fingerprints of that colonial moment are still in the glass today. At least two of Puglia's supposedly native grapes — Negroamaro and Nero di Troia — are thought to have been brought over by the Greeks. What the Greeks began, the Romans ran with, turning Puglia into a wine powerhouse. Wine produced in Puglia was enjoyed throughout the Roman Empire, with amphorae shipped from Brindisi and Bari.

Brindisi. The terminus of the Via Appia Antica — the Appian Way. The road that will be our spine.

The Appian Way: Road of Emperors, Monks, and Wine Merchants

Built beginning in 312 BC by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus, the Appian Way stretched from Rome south to Brindisi — the port city from which Rome projected power into Greece and the East. For centuries it was the most important road in the Western world.

It is also, not coincidentally, a corridor that passes through some of the most extraordinary undiscovered churches and wine country in all of Italy. The region south of the Brindisi–Taranto line, which traces the southernmost stretch of the Appian Way, is where wines are made from grape varieties almost unique to the area — and where the villages feel most genuinely themselves.

Our plan is to work this road and its tributaries: beginning in the deep south of Puglia, discovering the villages and vineyards and sanctuaries that the tour buses do not reach, moving gradually northward toward the outskirts of Rome over the coming seasons. Each village. Each church. Each enoteca and cantina. One at a time, with the attention they deserve.

The Church as Patron: Who Built What, and Why

Here is a question we will be asking in every village we enter: Who paid for this?

The answer, for most of the churches we will visit, is some combination of three forces: the papacy, the great religious orders, and the local noble families seeking divine favor — and lasting prestige.

With the rise of Christianity, wine became central to the Eucharist, where it represented the blood of Christ. Christian monks preserved and refined winemaking throughout the Middle Ages. Benedictine and later Cistercian orders maintained vineyards, recorded techniques, and improved quality while ensuring that wine retained its economic and religious value, even during periods of general instability.

Benedict founded the monastery of Monte Cassino in 530, and by the eighth century the Benedictines dominated the monastic life of Early Medieval Europe — and its vineyards. One can still walk alongside vineyard walls that the Benedictines laid down over 700 years ago.

Remarkably, this tradition is not entirely past tense. The Cistercian Sisters of the Strict Observance, 30 miles north of Rome in the town of Vitorchiano, today produce wine as part of a fully self-sustaining community under natural winemaking principles. We intend to visit.

The Wine Geek Corner: Puglia's Cultivars, Their Origins, and One Remarkable Coincidence

What We're Looking For

Each dispatch and episode we produce will be organized around a single village. We will find the church — usually the oldest, frequently the most overlooked — and spend time inside it: reading its art, its architecture, its donor inscriptions, its frescoes, the names carved into the floor stones of the nave. We will find the local cantina or enoteca, sit at a table with whoever will have us, and ask the questions that lead somewhere unexpected.

We are looking for the church patron whose portrait hangs in the apse and whose family has been making wine on the same land for four hundred years. We are looking for the 14th-century fresco that survived the Saracens, the earthquake, and two centuries of indifference, and is now being restored by a team of three who work in silence. We are looking for the winemaker who tells us her grandmother buried bottles of Primitivo during the war and they were still drinking them in 1962.

We are looking, in other words, for the Italy that has not yet been packaged.

For the TINO — The Traveler in Name Only

Not everyone reading this will get on a plane. We know that. Some of you are planning trips five years out. Some of you are reading from a kitchen in Ohio on a Tuesday night, and this is the closest you will get to a Puglian village this year. We built this show for you too.

The vagabond, historically, does not require a passport. Curiosity is the only visa.

Follow along. We leave for Puglia in the autumn.

Jake is a WSET Level III certified wine professional with over 30 years of collecting experience and a longtime student of Italian Catholic art and architecture. Maureen brings a lifelong passion for Italian culture and over two decades of shared wine exploration. Two Vintage Vagabonds publishes weekly dispatches and video episodes documenting The Nexus of Faith and Wine in Italian village life.

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