1626–today · Four centuries of sources
From a Genoese tavern noted by Cervantes to verses by D’Annunzio: how a local story became an international tale, one document at a time.
Updated 24 July 2026 · Montefiascone Wine Fair editorial teamQuick answer
According to popular tradition, in 1111 the German bishop Johannes Defuk was travelling with Emperor Henry V towards Rome. His servant Martino rode ahead, tasted the wine at each inn, and marked the doors of the best ones with the word “Est” (Latin for “it is”, meaning good wine was to be found). In Montefiascone the wine was so remarkable that Martino repeated the mark three times: Est! Est!! Est!!! Defuk, the story goes, then drank so much of it that he died in 1113, and was buried in the church of San Flaviano under an epitaph written by his own servant. Wine historians today consider the story a legend rather than a documented fact. What can be verified is how this story was told, rewritten and spread over the centuries through books, newspapers and poems, from the early 1600s to today. This page traces that path, citing the original sources gathered in Quinto Ficari’s public-domain compilation, Est Est Est (2020).
The oldest trace
The earliest written reference to Montefiascone wine has nothing to do with the Defuk legend: it is a small detail in a story by Miguel de Cervantes.
In 1634 an Italian translation of Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares describes a Genoese tavern where Montefiascone wine is among the drinks on offer. It shows that the wine’s reputation predated the legend that would later explain it: the story of the wine-loving bishop would only appear a century later, giving a name to a fame that already existed.
The 1600s and 1700s
In 1743 the English poet Vincent Bourne mentions Montefiascone wine as a drink worthy of guests, and in 1779 Francesco Redi tells of a “gentleman from beyond the Alps” who died from drinking too much of it, naming him “Joannes de Fuccharis” in Latin. It is the first time the protagonist receives a specific identity — one that would keep changing over the following decades: German, then count, then linked to the Fugger banking family of Augsburg.
The 1800s
In the nineteenth century the story multiplies and travels. In 1806 Dr. Johnson includes it in an English collection of epitaphs; in 1824 the German poet Wilhelm Müller writes a long ballad about it; in 1841 the London magazine The New Monthly Magazine publishes a comic version. In the same years the tale appears in the New York Mirror (1833) and the Australian Perth Gazette (1835): a century before the internet, the story of a bishop who drank himself to death in Montefiascone was already circulating across three continents.
Famous names
Between the late 1800s and early 1900s, the story enters the literary canon: Gabriele D’Annunzio recalls it in Il trionfo della morte (1896), Antonio Fogazzaro in Piccolo mondo antico (1896), and it even appears in Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs and in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s prose writings. From a local story to a reference shared by some of the best-known names in European and American literature.
Legend, not history
None of these texts document a verified historical fact: instead, they show how a story was rewritten and made more memorable over time. For the history of the designation and the territory, verifiable in official records, the reference page remains History and wine.
Sources. The quotations on this page are drawn from the chronological collection of historical and literary sources compiled by Quinto Ficari, Est Est Est (2020), a public-domain work available on Internet Archive. Identities and details vary from source to source, confirming the legendary nature of the story.
The wine today