How Wine Miraculously Flowed Through This Town's Water Taps for a Few Glorious Hours

From Country Living

• A small town in Italy discovered wine, not water, was flowing through its taps, following a bottling incident at a local winery last week.

• Wine ended up in the pipes of the nearby aqueduct and infiltrated nearby homes.

• Residents hurried to bottle up the good stuff before a local waste disposal company took care of the issue.

Vinotherapy sounds like a nice night with a bottle of Burgundy by yourself, but it's actually a real treatment offered at spas, primarily in Italy. The idea is to use the byproducts of wine—like grapes' stems, skins, and seeds, which are high in antioxidants—to supposedly reduce aging, relieve pain, and even stimulate cell growth.

Last week, the residents of Settecani, a small town in a popular wine region in Northern Italy, were treated to some free vinotherapy when they turned on their showers and found a reddish liquid pouring out of the pipes: red wine.

The miracle happened when nearby Settecani Castelvetro Winery experienced an issue with its bottling line and an excess of Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro, a sparkling red wine, seeped through the town's municipal water system.

"Due to a fault in the bottling line, Lambrusco Grasparossa came out of some taps in Settecani," the winery said in an apology posted to Facebook. "Hera (a waste disposal company) intervened following our report and the problem was solved. The incident did not involve hygiene or health risks. We apologise for the inconvenience caused."

The malfunction occurred when one of the cellar's silos, which hold the wine before it's transferred to barrels, broke down. Each silo can hold about 60 gallons (or 300 bottles) of wine, so that's a whole lot of the good stuff in one cellar.

Eventually, the wine traveled through the pipes of a nearby aqueduct, which moves water from its source to its distribution point. Because the wine created a higher pressure than normal, it began to circulate through drinking water pipes in some houses close to the wine cellar.

Although the issue was quickly resolved when a local waste disposal company cleared the pipes, the bottles of wine that the locals hurried to preserve still remain. They'll make for a hell of a vintage.

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