Contents

1. A Recipe from San Gimignano: Sole with Saffron

2. Vernaccia di San Gimignano

3. The Saffron of San Gimignano

RECIPE: SOLE WITH SAFFRON, A LA SAN GIMIGNANO

I've given this dish its name, not because I have eaten it in San Gimignano (although a similar dish is popular there and throughout Tuscany) but because I have adapted the recipe to include both of the local products featured in this newsletter. This is an easy and delicious dish, and it doesn't take much time to prepare. We hope you enjoy it.

• 2 large filets of sole, cleaned and cut in half
• 1/2 pound of mushrooms, sliced
• 1 small onion, diced
• 1 shallot, chopped
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1 cup Vernaccia di San Gimignano, or other dry white wine
• pinch of saffron
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• olive oil

Begin by sauteing the mushrooms, onion and shallot in a small amount of olive oil. When the vegetables are nicely wilted, add the wine and cook over medium-low heat for 15 or twenty minutes, or until the liquid is reduced by half. Season with salt and pepper.

Arrange the sole filets in a greased oven proof pan with a lid, and season them with salt and pepper. Pour the wine and mushroom sauce over the sole, and bake, covered, in a 375 degree oven for 15 minutes. Remove the lid.

Mix the cream and saffron until the mixture is homogeneously shaded yellow, and pour this over the fish. Bake for 5 to 10 more minutes, until the liquids are bubbling.

This dish is especially nice served with boiled potatoes or a simple rice that will soak up the delicious sauce. Add a green salad for color and texture contrast, and you have an easy meal, redolent of the heart of Tuscany. Of course, serve the Vernaccia to drink!

VERNACCIA DI SAN GIMIGNANO

Tuscany produces 40 wines that have been awarded the DOC, or Designation of Origin, but only 6 of those have been given the highly coveted DOCG, or Controlled and Guaranteed Origin. Among these lofty gems is the Vernaccia di San Gimignano, a straw colored, dry white, prized as an aperitif and accompaniment for antipasto and fish.

The San Gimignano DOC now includes a broad range of high quality wines, ranging throughout the Tuscan spectrum, but it was the Vernaccia di San Gimignano that was the very first wine in Italy t o receive the DOC mark when the system came into being in 1966.

The Vernaccia grapes grow in the hills around San Gimignano. A very narrow set of conditions allow the grape to flourish. They require good exposure on hilly vineyards at altitudes that do not exceed 500 meters above sea level. The grapes must be grown in soil that is a mixture of sandy clay and sand.

It is believed that the Vernaccia vines have been cultivated around San Gimignano since the thirteenth century. The most highly coveted of the wines made from these grapes are produced by traditional methods. The resulting products are a golden straw color, and their taste is rich and full-bodied, with just the slightest bitter edge. Vernaccia grapes are also used for wines made in the more modern style, and the resulting efforts are lighter in color and crisper in taste.

There is some confusion about the origin of the word Vernaccia . The Latin word venaculus means a place or locale, and some believe that word is the origin of Vernaccia. There are also those that say the name is derived from the Ligurian town of Vernazza, of the Cinque Terre. Many wine experts support this theory of the name, saying the variety of grape originated around Vernazza, and was first brought into Tuscany at San Gimignano.

Not only has Vernaccia di San Gimignano been made since the thirteenth century, it has also been popular and appreciated since that time. Pope Martin IV (1281-1285) is said to have favored a dish made from eels cooked in Vernaccia, and when Isabella, the daughter of the King of Naples, married in 1487, the groom's noble family ordered a copious quantity of the wine to be served at the wedding. When the Vernaccia di San Gimignano became the first wine in Italy to be awarded the DOC, the honor was the crowning achievement in a history of accolades.

LO ZAFFERANO: THE SAFFRON OF SAN GIMIGNANO

When I first visited San Gimignano many years ago, I was told that died silks were the product that made the town rich, and that the many medieval towers of the town were often used to stretch poles that held the drying silk. I have since heard other theories that explain the towers, but history tells us that it was saffron that built the towers of San Gimignano. Hundreds of documents exist that show us that saffron was intensively cultivated at San Gimignano throughout the Middle Ages. We also know that saffron was a rare and expensive commodity, one that great fortunes could be built upon.

In Tuscany, saffron was first grown at San Gimignano. This product was so rare and valuable that in the early thirteenth century, saffron was often used as security for loans. In fact, some lenders preferred saffron to gold, jewels, or land! In the middle of that century, the King of Sicily came to the defense of San Gimignano in a war with Volterra. The leaders of the then city-state rewarded him for his efforts with a bag containing one hundreds pounds of saffron. In the Middle Ages, taxes and duties on the exportation and trade of saffron were San Gimignano's major source of revenue. The 72 towers of the town were built over three centuries by men who grew rich through cultivating and trading saffron.

Their good fortune, however, was not meant to last. By the late Middle Ages, with the increase of seafaring trade, saffron began to be imported to Italy from the lands of the Middle East. Iran and Palestine were sending their saffron to Italy, and the once unrivaled production of San Gimignano began to recede, becoming little more than a dim memory or bit of folklore passed about by old men in the ancient squares of San Gimignano.

Saffron threads, as we know them by the time they reach the consumer, are the carefully picked and dried stamens of the lovely purple flower, the croco sativo , or, in English, the crocus. Due to the efforts of one man, Bruno Bertelli, a young bus driver from San Gimignano, the town is once again producing some of the highest grade saffron in the world.

Bertelli had heard the tales of saffron and the glory days of San Gimignano, and in 1990 he was inspired to plant the bulbs of the croco sativo around the walls of the town. Amazingly, he knew nothing at all about growing saffron, but he suspected that the old tales held something valuable. He was right. The dry, hilly lands around San Gimignano were the perfect environment for saffron. According to Bertelli, the saffron yield in San Gimignano is the highest in Europe. Fifteen farms that hug the vineyards that produce Vernaccia now have plots designated for saffron production, and they produce more saffron per hectare than any other spot on the continent.

The saffron production of San Gimignano is carefully regulated. No chemicals are used at any time in the cultivating and drying of the crocus stamens. The resulting product is extremely pure and highly sought because of the careful methods used in its production.

The crocuses are planted in August, and they are ready to be harvested in October, when a brilliant blanket of their purple-to-blue petals covers the hills around San Gimignano. Boys from the area conduct the harvest, carefully collecting the fragile flowers. The stamens of the flowers are removed, with infinite care, in a workroom on an old farm where saffron has flourished for decades, unbeknownst to most local residents, just beyond the town.

Once the stamen are carefully harvested, the next step, requiring even more care, is to dry them. The fires used are of ilex wood. They warm the single workroom used in San Gimignano for this purpose to a temperature that must never exceed 40 degrees Celsius. The drying takes only twenty minutes, and then the stamens are put into tiny envelopes, each holding only one tenth of a gram of the precious saffron threads. In the year 2000, the entire saffron production of San Gimignano was just three and a half kilos.

Bruno Bertelli and his friends and associates, the growers of saffron in San Gimignano, have formed the Associazione "IL CROCO" to promote and regulate saffron production here. With help from the University of Florence and the Province of Tuscany, they have successfully reintroduced Lo Zafferano to their town. Saffron has taken its place beside wine and olive oil as one of the riches of the earth surrounding the medieval town of a thousand towers.