According to Greek legends, Aristaeus introduced this cultivation to Sardinia. The hero settled here because of the beauty of the land and he gave his two sons names linked to agriculture and viticulture: Kallikarpos, meaning ‘bearing good fruit’ and Charmos, from the Semitic krmy (winemaker). From mythography to reality. Today, the fact that wine-making on the Island goes back at least as far as the 15th century BC is a certainty: according to archaeologists, botanists and chemists, the oldest wine in the Western Mediterranean area was Sardinian. It was a sort of Cannonau dating back more than three thousand years. The theory became a certainty at the end of 2016, with the analysis of organic residue from a stone press discovered in the Nuragic village of Monte Zara, next to Monastir, a few kilometres from Cagliari. Archaeobotanical studies have unequivocally led us back to the practice of pressing and processing of grapes, particularly red grapes. This is the most ancient press in the Mediterranean, proof of the Nuragic civilization’s considerable expertise in wine-making. The discovery places wine tradition as far back as the Middle Bronze Age, even though the thriving presence of vitis vinifera sylvestris leads us to assume that there was domestication and highly evolved oenology even further back in time.
