by Corby Kummer

Wine Therapy

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The views of the inviting green hills around San Patrignano—a village above Rimini, the Adriatic seaside resort made famous by native son Federico Fellini in Amarcord—are as splendid as those from any Italian winery. The tiny republic of San Marino, improbably perched at the top of a cone-shaped mountain, rises in the distance, just three miles away. As if the manicured vineyards weren’t decorative enough, there is the building where the grapes arrive for sorting and crushing. At other wineries, grapes are crushed in a parking lot that doubles as a loading dock during harvest time. At San Patrignano the crushing area is a pavilion, with majestic open ironwork cathedral-like arches on all four sides framing the gorgeous views. The adjacent winery is large and impressive, its bright and frescoed cellar containing a glassed-in tasting room that looks like something out of a James Bond movie. But the pavilion is glorious, giving great dignity to the manual labor involved in raising and picking grapes.

Those grapes are Sangiovese, famous in Tuscan Chianti but also native to the town’s region of Emilia-Romagna, which is known for its rich cuisine (Bologna is the capital). One of the wines for which San Patrignano has become known, Avi, is a pure expression of Sangiovese: it has notes of spice, leather, and tobacco, and a slight smokiness; it is full bodied, making it suitable for drinking with many kinds of pastas and grilled meat or fish. Montepirolo, the winery’s blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc, costs less than many Italian wines of the same quality.

San Patrignano’s supervising winemaker, Riccardo Cotarella, is a cult figure; the wines he has worked on are celebrated so often by Robert M. Parker Jr. that wineries in search of a consultant-magician to lift them to international fame vie for his services. Yet Cotarella has never charged San Patrignano for his winemaking skills.

The big difference between San Patrignano and other wines is not the quality or the price, or even the beautiful views. It’s something hinted at in the legend that appears on the bottle: Wine is pleasure and health. Drink with sobriety. The 1,800 residents of San Patrignano are all recovering drug addicts, who live in what is Italy’s largest treatment community for an average of between three and four years. Cotarella considers himself part of the San Patrignano family—a family that, after twenty-eight years of existence, includes 14,000 graduates.

Winemaking at San Patrignano is a form of rehabilitative therapy, one of numerous trades taught and practiced at the highest level in a country that could fairly be called the world’s artisanal treasury. The pavilion is so grand because during the harvest more than 700 of the residents come together in the joyous shared activity of crushing grapes. And the beauty at every turn—the landscape, the pavilion, the workshops where the ironwork was forged and furniture crafted and upholstery hand-blocked—is part of the therapy too.

San Patrignano is a firmly well-ordered realm. On a recent early-summer evening its head, Andrea Muccioli, took me around the winery (whose pavilion he designed) and several of the workshops. We began in the store, near the entrance—San Patrignano, known to almost every Italian, is open to the public for tours. The hand-crafted furniture, wallpaper, and fabrics on display are impressive for their workmanship, clean design, and comparatively low prices and are available to designers around the world. (Several of the techniques have all but vanished, even in Italy.) When the community was just starting, in the early 1980s, Renzo Mongiardino, an internationally famous decorator, brought in his valued craftsmen to teach San Patrignano residents forgotten skills, such as stenciling and waxing paper to look like parquet; artisans who fear that their knowledge will die with them continue to donate teaching time. (For information about ordering San Patrignano products go to www.sanpatrignano.org.)

The prices are reasonable because the labor is free—as is drug treatment at San Patrignano. The sale of wine, which is a significant revenue producer, and other goods accounts for about half the annual budget of 25 million euros; the rest comes from donations. All the residents (the term used at San Patrignano is ragazzi, which translates as “kids”) learn new trades soon after they begin their stay.

As he showed me around, Muccioli was jocular with the blacksmiths, and in general displayed the big-brother attitude he says he feels toward everyone at San Patrignano. But even as he gave and accepted the hugs and backrubs that nurses and aides at the large health-care clinic pressed on him, his demeanor was somber, watchful, authoritarian. Andrea was fourteen and his younger brother, Giacomo, twelve when they first shared their home with a recovering addict. Their parents, Vincenzo and Antonietta, owned a hotel in Rimini and ran an informal free clinic two nights a week at their weekend farm, practicing alternative medicines such as homeopathy and acupuncture. The couple turned that farm into a residential treatment facility, and over the years they developed vocational training and rules for group living that produced noteworthy results. Today San Patrignano claims that more than 70 percent of its graduates remain drug-free for three years after leaving the community.

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