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To visitors, Pompeii is a fascinating outdoor museum in the form of a dead city.

To Italy's Mastroberardino wine family, Pompeii is alive and productive.

It is late afternoon on a hot, dusty day in July. I am standing in the welcome shade of the Foro Boario, one of five Pompeii vineyards brought back to life by the Mastroberardinos to make a modern version of an ancient wine.

Behind me is Pompeii's remarkably intact amphitheatre. In front is Mount Vesuvius, whose eruption in 79 AD buried the city in volcanic ash and pumice. Pompeii vanished; so did one of the Roman Empire's great winemaking centres.

In 1996, when the Mastroberardinos were asked by local authorities to recreate Pompeii's vineyards and cultivate the grapes as was done two millennia ago, the family had been producing quality wines from local grapes in the Naples area for 10 generations.

To the Superintendency of Pompeii, reviving the vineyards was a way to breathe some life into a decaying archeological site. For the Mastroberardinos, led by president and chief winemaker Piero Mastroberardino, 40, it was a chance to learn more about historic Italian grapes.

Bringing the vineyards back to life also offered a unique marketing opportunity for Mr. Mastroberardino, whose great-great-grand- father Cavalier Angiolo Mastroberardino registered the family vineyard as a commercial venture in 1878.

After years of sleuthing to recreate the exact growing conditions of the ancient grapes, in 2003 the first vintage of 1,721 bottles was auctioned off in a Rome hotel, with some bidders paying close to $1,000 (U.S.) for a case of six.

While no more than 2,000 bottles a year are produced, the Pompeii wine story is featured prominently in all of the Mastroberardinos' marketing material. "Consumers are becoming more and more curious about the native grapes of south Italy," Mr. Mastroberardino says in an e-mail.

For a relatively small business, Mastroberardino has enjoyed considerable international success. About 30 per cent of its 2.4 million bottles of annual production goes to the export market. Canada has been a customer since the 1970s. "We are doing very well there," says Dario Pennino, the vineyard's chief marketing and export manager.

"They love wines like ours," he says of the Canadian market. "They're getting something different. I think Mastroberardino represents a mix of history, tradition and great knowledge of local grapes."

Even the ancient citizens of Pompeii understood the value of marketing. Some of the wine jars found on the site bear what might be the first marketing pun - "Vesuvinum" - the combination of Vesuvius and vinum, the Latin word for wine.

The Naples region (called Campania) was known for its "noble tipple of wine famed throughout the world," author and philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote in Naturalis Historia before his death during the eruption. "Over this area, the gods of wine and grain fought their hardest, or so tradition tells us," he wrote.

Oenologists say the modern palate would consider the ancient wines, which were sweetened with honey and laced with salt water, the worst form of plonk.

In recreating the Pompeii wine, the Mastroberardinos looked to a century of archaeological work on the site. They were able to situate the Foro Boario vineyard in precisely the same location as its predecessor because archaeologists had found a wine-processing cellar on the site. Its remains are still there.

Next to the cellar, where the grapes were pressed, are the "dolii," the clay jars used to ferment wine. The jars were buried to the lip and are in almost perfect condition. "Underground, it was cooler, making it better for fermentation," explains Alessia Canarino, one of Mastroberardino's export department managers.

The selection and placement of the vines required clever detective work. Clues came from recorded history, botany and archeology.

The first step was determining how the vines were planted. Ms. Canarino points to grey objects on the ground that look like flattened stones. They are the tops of clay moulds made of the ancient root clusters.

From the moulds, Mr. Mastroberardino and the botanists determined the vines were placed 1.2 metres from each other - a very dense grid by modern standards. The high density helped to provide shade in Pompeii's exposed vineyards, Ms. Canarino says.

The new vines, and supporting wooden stakes, would be placed in exactly the same pattern. But what type of vine? The botanists turned to the pollen grains and carbonized seeds unearthed by archeologists and tried to match them to existing varieties.

Other clues came from the grapes found in Pompeii's frescoes. In the end, the Mastroberardinos experimented with eight grape varieties that almost certainly grew in the area during Pompeii's heyday. Two varieties proved to be best suited to the hot, rich volcanic soil: columbina purpurea (or modern day piedirosso) and oleagina (olivella or sciascinoso).

The first planting of the two varieties was in 1996. The first vintage came five years later and was aged in oak and in the bottle until 2003. Mr. Mastroberardino named the intense ruby red wine Villa Dei Misteri - Villa of Mysteries, after one of the famous Pompeian houses near the vineyards. It is a mix of 90 per cent piedirosso and 10 per cent sciascinoso. The frieze of the Dionysiac Mysteries found in the villa inspired the bottle's label design.

In 2003, proceeds from the auction of the first vintage were used to finance the restoration of Pompeii's ancient wine cellars. The fewer than 2,000 bottles produced every year since have been distributed through domestic and international wine agents and are available in some restaurants.

Sadly, I did not get a chance to try a Villa Dei Misteri at Mastroberardino's headquarters in the hillside town of Atripalda, about an hour's drive east of Pompeii.

The bottles are rare, costly - the price is about €100 ($145) - and not available for sampling. Wine critics have described it as soft-fruited and somewhat acidic, with an aftertaste of resin.

Mr. Mastroberardino has no plans to boost production of the Pompeian wine. The five vineyards at Pompeii are tiny. The wine is essentially marketed as a novelty, though the family does not claim the grapes used in its production are identical to those used in Pliny's era.

The Mastroberardino vineyard, however, is doing a thriving business in producing other wines from local grapes that are unknown elsewhere in Europe. Nine of the company's approximately two dozen wines come from vineyards certified as DOCG (denominazione di origine controllata e garantita), meaning they meet the Italian wine industry's highest quality standards.

Three of the most popular wines - Radici Riserva, Radici Taurasi and Naturalis Historia - are all made from the old aglianico grape. Mastroberardino's top wines sell for €11 to €20 in Italian wine shops.

Mr. Pennino says the operation is lucky to be around. In the Second World War, the oak casks, he says, were shot up by German soldiers and the bottled wine was looted (a few bottles of wine from the 1920s survive in the family's private cellar).

In 1980, an earthquake severely damaged the winery. Many of the structures, some of which date back to the 1700s, had to be rebuilt.

I end my Mastroberardino visit in Pompeii about an hour before sunset. Ms. Canarino has locked the gates to the vineyards. Tourists are rarely let in because of fear of damage to the vines.

I head along Via dell'Abbondanza - street of abundance - one of ancient Pompeii's main commercial streets. It is lined with shops that once offered everything from fish and fruit to laundry services and (around the corner) prostitutes.

Wine bars were ubiquitous in Roman cities. I pass a largely intact shop with clay pots buried in the counters. A 2,000-year-old wine bar? I am thirsty, tired and in need of non-professional conversation and desperately wish it were open for business.

Mastroberardino is participating in wine-tasting events in Toronto and Montreal in late October.

For details, go to the website of the Italian wine marketing consortium http://www.istitutograndimarchi.it.

Details will also be posted at http://www.mastroberardino.com.

ereguly@globeandmail.com