Veritas for Pietro Mastroberardino, contentedly swirling his ruby red wine in its glass, comes in 1,721 bottles of Villa dei Misteri, the precious yield of an extrarodinary archaelogical experiment in excavated old Pompeii.

In a walled vineyard in the shadow of Pompeii's splendid amphitheatre, Mastroberardino has produced a wine which is "very intense and with a nice fruity bouquet" from the original vines grown within the walls of the ancient city.

Like everything and everyone else here, they were buried under a deluge of ash and lava when Mount Vesuvius famously erupted in 79 AD.

Now, decades of painstaking archaelogical investigation combined with modern viticulture techniques have literally begun to bear fruit.

"We used different techniques but the same technology, and for the nose and the mouth this has the same result," said the winemaker.

Perhaps not quite.

The ancient imbibers who kept Pompeii's more than 200 wine bars busy often diluted their favourite tipple with sea water to make it more drinkable. To drink it neat invited comparison with barbarians.

This wine's subtle peppery tang on the pallet is a reflection of modern tastes.

"Very round and soft on the pallet," said the winemaker after a sip and contemplative grimace.

Enough to tempt modern day Internet bidders, he hopes. For the first time in two millennia, Pompeii's wine will go on sale by public auction at a gala dinner in Rome next Tuesday in a way unthought of even by Pliny.

Proceeds will go towards restoring Pompeii's wine cellars, still visible in the one-hectare vineyard.

Mastroberardino's family company, which has made wine in Campania for centuries, was chosen by the Italian government in 1996 to grow experimental wines using traces of Pompeii's old vines resurrected by archaelogy.

"The eruption buried everything but yet it was a 'soft' burial because the volcanic ash preserved the forms of the objects it covered," he said.

The joint project with the Pompeii's Soprintendenza Archaelogica resulted in 2001 in the first vintage of Villa dei Misteri, named after the ruby-red colour of the frescoes in one of the excavated palaces.

For archaelogists like Pompeii expert Pietro Gioivanni Guzzo, much can be learned about ancient Romans through their drinking habits.

"The ancients are not only recreated for us through objects in museums, but they lived and died in the complexity of their interests," said Guzzo, who admits to an aversion to wine.

The resurrected wine, which Mastroberardino prefers to call an "evolution", like its ancestor is grown on the stakes of local chesnut trees. It is a blend of two local varieties, Piedirosso and Sciascinoso, also known as Olivella for its oval-shaped appearance.

"Strangely enough, after 2,000 years the most refined and sophisticated winemaking techniques continue to be based on the same principle, that of temperature control, making use of cold temperatures."

The experiments even showed that global warming had taken a grip on viticulture.

Some of the original grape varieties which grew here can no longer be used "because they exploded before full maturity, because the earth had warmed up since then, so we couldn't use them."

Mastroberardino hasn't forgotten the contribution of Pliny, who until now was probably among the last to taste the produce of Pompeii's vineyards.

"If there was one source for our inspiration, I would have to say it would be Pliny the Elder," he told AFP.

Pliny's classic work Naturalis Historia, in which he explored the history of wine and viticulture, provided the blueprint for the project, along with Pompeii's surviving frescoes and petrified vine roots.

SPACE.WIRE