Santu Lussurgiu, the Sardinian town with an alcoholic secret

(CNN) — It’s super strong, fennel-flavored, as transparent as water — and in many households across Sardinia it’s still produced illegally.

Filu ‘e ferru, or “iron wire,” is an old drink with a dangerous past and an alcohol concentration of up to 45% that knocks out even those with a high tolerance.

Rosa Maria Scrugli was barely 23 years old when in 1970 she was sent on a work mission to the small town of Santu Lussurgiu, set in the wild Oristano area of western Sardinia amid rocky hills and caves.

For 400 years, this place of barely 2,000 residents has been making a potent filu ‘e ferru locally dubbed “abbardente” — a word deriving from Latin which fittingly means “burning water.”

The mayor — the town’s cobbler — greeted Scrugli at noon with several welcoming shots, but by the time she’d downed the second, she nearly collapsed, falling on top of the mayor who was only a bit tipsy.

“The next thing I knew, someone had dragged me away and I woke up in my hotel room with the worst hangover ever. The mayor also wasn’t feeling too well, but he was used to drinking filu ‘e ferru. It was my first time, and it was a shock,” Scrugli tells CNN.

Santu Lussurgiu is considered the cradle of the oldest Sardinian tradition of “acquavite” — literally “vine water” in Italian, and indicating a premium alcohol distillate.

A secret code

“Acquavite and abbardente are just synonyms for filu ‘e ferru, which is a metaphor, part of a secret code invented at a later stage to refer to acquavite in order to escape police controls,” says Santu Lussurgiu’s only (legal) distiller Carlo Psiche.

It became an “outlaw” drink in the 19th century when Italy’s royal house of Savoy introduced levies on alcohol production, kick-starting an illegal trade that in Santu Lussurgiu continues on a mass scale.

Up until a few decades ago police raids were frequent, farmers had to hide bottles of their filu ‘e ferru either in some secret place at home or underground in their garden, marking the spot with a piece of iron. Hence the name “iron wire.”

In coming up with such a nickname, locals might have also been inspired by the nearby rocky mountain range of volcanic origin called Montiferru — the “iron hill.”

What has always made Santu Lussurgiu’s acquavite exceptional, as opposed to those produced in the rest of Sardinia, is that it is distilled from wine, not marc, a spirit made from the residue of the skins and seeds of…