Jailhouse rock: Italian inmates produce prison wine
A group of inmates on a remote prison island off the coast of Italy have started producing their own wine, making them perhaps the country’s most unlikely vintners.
The prisoners are incarcerated on the tiny island of Gorgona, the farthest flung speck of the Tuscan archipelago. The island has been a penal colony since 1869. The inmates planted a vineyard recently and have now produced 2,700 bottles of white wine, a blend of Vermentino and Ansonica grapes. They will not be allowed to sample it themselves - instead it will go on sale to restaurants and wine bars around Italy, starting next week.
The 50 prisoners on the island, which is covered in Mediterranean scrub, pine trees and holm oak forest, have been given wine-producing tips by the Frescobaldis, one of Italy’s oldest and most respected winemaking families. The aristocratic Tuscan dynasty has been producing wine at their estates for seven centuries and count among their past customers the court of Henry VIII, several popes and the artist Donatello. A Frescobaldi of the 13th century was friends with Dante. The company is the first to take part in a scheme, launched last year, in which businesses are invited to invest in the island and to give prisoners skills and training that will help them get jobs once they are released.
The inmates grow grapes in a corner of the island, which is barely two miles long and lies to the north of Elba, where Napoleon was exiled by the British, and Giglio, where the Costa Concordia capsized last year. The wine, called ‘‘Frescobaldi per Gorgona’’, is sufficiently decent to have been given the official DOC appellation, or Denominazione d’Origine Controllata, the equivalent of France’s Appellation d’Origine Protegee. The wine is ‘‘intense, with a marvellous character,’’ said the marquis, Lamberto Frescobaldi, who has been involved in the project.
Italian prisons are notoriously overcrowded, with some inmates spending up to 22 hours a day in cramped cells.
Conditions on Gorgona are more benign - the jail has capacity for up to 140 inmates but is barely a third full at present. The project was welcomed by Annamaria Cancellieri, the minister for justice, who said it could be replicated at other prisons.
‘‘Initiatives like this have a constructive effect on inmates, allowing them to specialise in an area of work which will be useful to them once they leave prison. We know from statistics that for prisoners who do not find work, the rate of recidivism is 80 per cent.’’
Italy has been harshly criticised by the European Court of Human Rights and other international bodies for the chronic overcrowding of its prisons. Earlier this year the court ordered Italy to fix the ‘‘degrading and inhumane conditions’’ and to pay damages to inmates who had been squeezed into tiny cells. The Council of Europe says that Italian prisons are the third most overcrowded in Europe after Serbia and Greece.
‘‘We need to go ahead with this model because we want to show the world that Italy’s prisons are worthy of a civilised country,’’ the minister said.
Donato Capece, the secretary general of the prison officers’ union, said: ‘‘Any project that uses work to re-educate inmates is good news, because it drastically reduces the level of tension.’’
Many Italian islands have been used as jails in the past, both for political prisoners and common criminals. Most have been closed down, however, and Gorgona is one of the few still in operation.
Aside from winemaking, the prisoners work on a farm with about 400 livestock, producing cheese and olive oil.
The strategically-located island, which lies between Italy and Corsica, has been occupied by the Romans, the Pisan Republic, the Medicis and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Public access to Gorgona is prohibited without special permission and boats are not allowed to moor closer than 1,600ft from the shore.
The Telegraph, London