This week in a small town in northern Italy the wine poured like water from the faucets and taps of the residents for a few glorious hours.

Thanks to a failure at a local winery, at least 1,000 liters of ready-to-be bottled Lambrusco wine managed to spill into the water pipes in the northern Italian town of Castelvetro. As per a report from local officials, the winery’s glitch lasted about three hours and affected 20 households, deputy mayor Giorgia Mezzazqui, wrote on Twitter.

On its Facebook page the local government reported that the leak did not pose any health risks and was also not tasty.

According to the winery Catina Settecani, which was responsible for the mistake, the error occurred after a faulty valve in the bottle washing circuit caused the wine to flow into the water lines of the city due to the pressure involved. The error had been “appreciated by many” locals, according to Fabrizio Amorotti, the commercial manager at the winery.

The accident provided the city with a moment of levity in the middle of the outbreak of coronavirus — which struck the hardest northern Italy.

Fabrizio Amorotti, Cantina Settecani’s commercial manager, said that some customers in the areas called us to warn us about it, and report that they were bottling the wine!”

Castelvetro is normally a destination for food and wine enthusiasts from all over the world, right in the heart of the Emilia-Romagna region. However, 80 per cent of tourism structures in the area have had cancellations since the outbreak, said Deputy Mayor Mezzacqui.

Small towns like Castelvetro are “the engine that propels an incredible country, but now we just need support from everybody to live,” she told CNN.

“I was washing some stuff in the kitchen,” Maurizio Agpi told Italian press agency AGI, who lives just across the street from the winery, “I turned off the tap, turned it on again and I saw wine instead of the water: I said ‘Allegria’ (joy) and we toasted.”