WINE MARIANI, a GIFT to the WORLD

Although there would be no need for any help, being the sacred green Coca itself the effective very speaker of its own values and benefits, worthy of praise are some people who were distinguished performers and promoters of its goodness.

Peruvian scholar Hipólito Unanue, already in the 18th century, claimed: In situations of food shortage, especially of sources of protein such as meat, Providence has supplied us with this wonderful Coca plant.

From Italy, where he was born, stands the famous physiologist and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910) who wrote a Treaty on the value of Andean plants, including Coca plant in prime position (1859).

However there is somebody who bravely made the step from theory to practice in promoting Coca: Angelo Mariani, born in 1838 in the island of Corsica, pharmaceutical chemist, in 1863 launched his famous Wine Mariani: he mixed Coca with the delicious taste of the well-known Bordeaux wine and  the resulting amazing new aroma quickly collected unlimited successes, not only in France, but also in England and the United States of America.

Mariani was as well an elegant and well-educated man, who expressed widely in the field of publications, also about Coca, as the pamphlet The Coca and its therapeutic applications, where he considered the time was ready, on the basis of his previous studies, to formalize the processes of productions of his articles with Coca, stating with proper wisdom: Through the combination of three species of coca in our wine, any dose taken will never produce cocaine addiction.

Furthermore he sponsored some very precious publications, dotted with abundant praises in the form of manuscripts, often accompanied by unique literary and artistic works, as a gift by the estimators of his products, including several celebrities of the time, as the musicians Massenet and Gounod, the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, Queen Victoria, the Shah of Persia, General Pétain, actress Sarah Bernhardt, writers and poets, as Emile Zola, Anatole France, Edmond Rostand, Jules Verne, Camille Lemonnier.

In its laboratories of Neuilly in France he produced several products with Coca, including an elixir, a cream, an analgesic dye and a toothpaste, which was shown at the Universal Exposition of Paris (1873); and in Neuilly he received the special blessing by the Pope Leo XIII, along with a gold medal, with the praise for the Wine Mariani never missed in the Vatican by the express will of the Pope.

Beyond the undeniable and deserved success both for sales and for the prestige, remained at high levels even after his death in 1914, Mariani deserves a significant position among those who have spread, seriously and firmly, the values of Andean Coca, certainly never imagining the incredible and conflictive sceneries where the sacred plant would be thrown in the years to come.