And somewhere in the middle of all that pageantry, on Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m., Veronafiere is giving a PowerPoint about Vinitaly.USA. Woo-hoo!
Nobody made them do this. Nobody needed Italian wine on that boat. And yet there it is, wedged between the trophy and the brass, because certain folks at Vinitaly have never been able to resist borrowing somebody else's spotlight when its own isn't bright enough. This time the spotlight belongs to a ship named for a man who sailed aboard a conquistador's vessel to a continent that wasn't his, decided the people he found there were savages who needed converting, and wrote it all down for European readers hungry for the details. Nobody at Veronafiere seems to have clocked the joke. Or maybe they did, and it's the whole point.
Because strip away the diplomatic language and what Vinitaly is actually doing in the American market is conquest, full stop — that's the industry's own word for it, not mine. Every trade press release out of Verona for a decade has talked about "breaking into" the U.S. market, "capturing" share, "winning over" the American palate, "educating" American drinkers who don't yet know what real wine is supposed to taste like. It's the language of subjugation dressed up as commerce: there's a vast, untutored territory out there called the American consumer, and the Italians are coming to civilize its taste buds, plant the flag, bring the natives up to code. Vespucci sailed in and found people he judged to be living outside law, outside religion, outside the moral order he recognized — and rather than ask what their own order might have been, he catalogued them as raw material for a story Europe wanted to hear. Five hundred years later, Vinitaly looks at sixty million American wine drinkers building their own taste, their own market, their own relationship to wine that doesn't actually require Veronafiere's permission — and reads it the same way: an unwitting palate, waiting to be conquered, civilized, reigned over by the superior culture that's arriving by ship to show it how it's done.
That's not a metaphor I'm reaching for. It's the one they handed me by picking this boat.
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Read the actual letters and the joke gets darker, because the source material is so much worse than "explorer, conqueror" lets on. To be precise: Vespucci wasn't a conquistador — he was a Florentine merchant and navigator, an observer, not a general. He didn't swing a sword — but on his first voyage in 1499 he sailed alongside Alonso de Ojeda, a veteran of Columbus's second voyage who did exactly that. Vespucci provided the rhetorical scaffolding that the swords followed: decided the people he found lived outside law and reason, wrote it up in vivid detail, and sent it back to Europe as justification. The propagandist, not the conqueror. He is a more precise parallel for what Vinitaly is up to than a military man would be — they're not soldiers either, just arriving with language, framing the territory, telling a story that makes the European arrival seem necessary, even enlightening.
The two letters that built Vespucci's reputation back in Europe — the 1500 "Letter from Seville," addressed to his patron Lorenzo de' Medici, and the 1503 Mundus Novus — aren't sober navigational logs. They're closer to tabloid copy, and they sold like it. Vespucci describes a society with no king, no government, no private property, where men take as many wives as they please and, in his telling, sons sleep with mothers and brothers with sisters as ordinary practice — offered up not as observation but as proof these people live outside any law at all, which is exactly the kind of proof a man needs if he's going to justify what comes next. He claims wives induce a grotesque swelling in their husbands' genitals using poisonous-animal bites, leaving many of them maimed and "eunuchs" for life. War, in his account, exists for one purpose: capturing the enemy to eat. He describes a man he says personally devoured more than three hundred human bodies, and recalls a month in a village where salted human flesh hung from the rafters between houses the way Europeans hang bacon. The women, he writes, go naked and "very libidinous," and when given the chance with the Christian sailors, threw themselves at them out of excessive lust. It's a portrait built for one purpose: make the continent and its people read as appetite without restraint, a blank and lawless territory that a civilized power is entitled, even obligated, to bring to heel.
That is the man whose name is on the hull. That is the rhetorical move — savage market, civilizing mission, superior culture arriving to set things right — that Veronafiere is unknowingly reenacting every time it talks about conquering America's wine shelves, and the press release doesn't breathe a word of it. It's all "beauty," "identity," "spirit of dialogue among peoples" — the clean version of the namesake, gallant explorer rather than the man whose letters are still assigned in gender-and-conquest seminars precisely because of passages like these. Vinitaly gets to stand on the clean version's deck, talk about "the role of Italian wine in the North American market," and never once notice it's using the actual language and actual ship of a five-hundred-year-old conquest to dress up a trade fair's ambitions for a market that was never theirs to take in the first place.
I don't think anyone in that press office sat down and worked through any of this. That's exactly the problem. It's a reflex, not a strategy: when in doubt, find the biggest flag in the room, stand next to it, and call the result dialogue. Wine doesn't need a warship and it doesn't need conquering anybody. It needs someone willing to tell the truth about where it's actually going in this market, who's actually drinking it, what's actually changing — instead of borrowing a propagandist's hull to say, once again, that Italy has arrived to show America how it's done.
I've spent the last few years writing about what wine means to me now that I'm not in the trade anymore — less reverence, more daily life, less performance, less of the old industry habit of treating every market as territory to be won. Watching Vinitaly book passage on a 250-year-old ship named for a man who mistook a continent for conquerable is performative, in miniature, and it diminishes the legacy of the heroic and gigantic efforts that Italian farmers and winemakers have been making for the last 80 years.
