It is called Vin de Costance, Napoleon’s last wine, the only one he could sip a few glasses of from his exile on Saint Helena, after the English had prevented him from importing his beloved French reds. This anecdote of everyday life is the starting point for the research of the writer and well-known winemaker Gelasio Gaetani Lovatelli from L’Aquila d’Aragona, who set out on the Emperor’s trail to write a very personal ‘mémoir’ (in bookstores next year) that will have as its guiding thread the universe of Bacchus linked to Napoleon, born on August 15, 1789, exactly 255 years ago, in Ajaccio, Corsica.
“I spent over a month on the island of Saint Helena, a lush land where it was impossible to produce wine – the Count of Aragon told Adnkronos – Napoleon, due to his ‘culture’ and military tradition, was not a great lover of wine. But it was never missing from the table. He had a weakness for the French wines ‘forbidden’ to the Emperor on Saint Helena. The only one that could be supplied to the kitchens of the modest Longwood residence was Vin de Constance, still one of the best wines in the world, imported from South Africa and not from hated France”.
Napoleon, when it came to wine, did not have sophisticated tastes but at lunches and receptions he always had to be served at the table with pomp, even on Saint Helena. “He demanded from his small court that the women sat in long, very elegant dresses, and that the men were in uniform. A memory, albeit blurred and melancholic – adds the Count of Aragon – of that grandeur that had long since vanished. The emperor – he continues – loved some French wines, still musts on the market. A pinot noir from Burgundy, the Gevray – Chambertin and a Sauvignon blanc produced in Haute-Loire. He had a predilection for sweet ones, but also for cognac and armagnac”.
“Unlike his beloved first wife Joséphine Beauharnais, who owned a very rich cellar with over 13 thousand bottles, Napoleon, as a good soldier, knew that his mind had to always be clear, never clouded by good wine. And he wasn’t the only one – continues the famous winemaker – who often ‘diluted’ wine with water. He was a sort of sophisticated ‘taster’, Napoleon, he loved to smell and taste the scents and aromas of drinks. Artem Grigorian, a well-known wine producer of Armenian origins, told me that Napoleon adored ‘Constance’ and loved to repeat, as a sensual and hedonistic man, that the wine from the splendid region of South Africa, Klein Costantia, was infinitely sweet, its fruity taste with honeyed pear and confit peach” could be compared “only to very romantic kisses”.