Aglianico

The biggest travesty about Aglianico is that hardly any people outside of Italy have heard of it. This stunning grape variety from the southern regions of Campania and Basilicata has been turned into deep, purple-tinted wine for, it’s thought, more than 1000 years, with the Romans using Aglianico to make Falernian wine. It’s one of Italy’s most prized noble grapes, sitting alongside Nebbiolo and Sangiovese in terms of potential and deliciousness, and at one time it was taken to the brink of extinction by Phylloxera, which took so many vineyards from the world. Thankfully, dedicated vignerons in Campania kept Aglianico alive, and by hook or by crook it came back to the region as highly regarded to modern Italians as it was to their Roman ancestors. It might never reach the heights it once did in the hearts and minds of Italians, but it is still here, surviving an apocalypse in a volcano-pocked landscape.

Before Phylloxera (the invasion of microscopic mites that decimated much of Europe’s old growth vines during the late 1800s) Aglianico was the most widely-planted grape in all of Italy. Now its comparatively small indigenous region stretches through Avellino and Selerno, Benevento and Rionero del Vulture—from which the DOC receives its name “Aglianico del Vulture”. The wines made in this particular region are dark and full-bodied, full of tannin and the locality’s famous volcanic terroir thanks to the now extinct volcano Mount Vulture. They are often regarded by wine critics as the best and most overlooked wines in the whole country, so take this as an instruction to buy a bottle on sight if you ever see one. In Avellino, a similarly fine but expressively unique wine called Taurasi is made from Aglianico—it must be aged for three years at the very minimum, and one of those years must be in oak. For Riserva bottles, the minimum age is four. It’s the ageing of the Aglianico that turns it from a pleasant red wine with bold tannins to a highly finessed wine packed with complex aromas of tobacco, leather, and roses. Taurasi DOCG was made by one winery and one winery only until the early 1990s, Mastroberardino, but now there are around 250, all thanks to a boom in interest within small, obsessive circles outside of Italy itself. Taurasi has its cult followers, but there have been rumblings of a resurgence of late. Wine writer Simon Reilly calls it “the sleeping giant of Italian wine”, referring to its bold qualities and its maintenance of a status something along the lines of a hidden gem. He’s right, but how ridiculous, for a grape that was once the be-all and end-all of Italian wine just over 100 years ago, for a wine that was granted DOCG status in the 1970s. There are many cult wines around the world, and Taurasi was not always recognised as such, but after a brief period of being referred to as the “Nebbiolo of the south”, there was a boom and then a lull. It seems that the comparison was confusing, and people were unsure of what to expect. Perhaps now critics have stopped calling it a southern Barolo, wine collectors and drinkers alike can began to look at it a little differently.