As if you needed another reason to visit Italy here’s a new one to add to your bucket list. Drinking wine from an actual fountain…. and it’s free. For some wine lovers a perfect world has fountains serving up not regular H2O but a never-ending stream of wine 24 hours a day. Grab your flights and book your flights, that day is here. A vineyard in the Abruzzo region is now home to a fountain that dispenses locally-made wine to the public for free and 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
This is not a place intended for cheap drunks to hang out and it’s not a fountain like the Trevi Fountain spilling out wine all the time. Think of this as a roadside attraction where religious pilgrims will quench their thirst. It’s located along a popular pilgrimage route, “the Cammino di San Tommaso”. Every year, thousands of Italians and visitors travel about 150 miles east from Rome to visit the city of Ortona. In 1258 AD, the relics of the Apostle Thomas, one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, were brought to Ortona by the sailor Leone Acciaiuoli.
So who do we have to thank for this? And where can I find it?
The “fontana del vino”, Italian for “the fountain of wine”, is located at the Dora Sarchese Vineyard in the town of Caldari di Ortona. Created by the local Dora Sarchese vineyard, the fountain will pour red wine for thousands of tourists and pilgrims who make the journey from Rome to Ortona. It is a joint project between the Dora Sarchese and the organization in charge of maintaining and promoting the Cammino di San Tommaso. Similar attractions have been used before as one time set ups to celebrate events and festivals, but none were accessible non-stop as this will be.
Italy’s most famous wine fountain is probably in the centre of Marino, wine flows during the annual Grape Festival. It is reported that in 2008 a plumbing error re-routed wine to the local residents.
Mayor Adriano Palozzi said at the time: “Due to a technical error, instead of connecting wine to the fountains, we accidentally channeled it into some local homes… Apparently the people living around the square who got the wine coming out of their taps were very surprised, they thought that it might be some kind of present from the local council. It only lasted three minutes, we corrected it straight away.”
Perhaps the gift could be chalked up to divine inspiration?
But, Italy isn’t the only nation in the alcohol delivery system game. The world’s first underground beer pipeline debuted during September 2016 in Bruges, Belgium; it was mainly to replace the traditional way of shipping beer by tanker. It carries beer from one of the city’s biggest brewers to its bottling facility a couple miles away at a rate of 12,000 gallons per hour. As Barney Gumble from the Simpsons would say about his beloved Duff beer, “Just hook it up to my veins……”