Ian D'Agata: Campania’s New and Recent Releases: Some of Italy’s Potentially Most Interesting, Best Wines

I have been singing, er writing, the praises of Campania’s wines for over twenty years. In fact, my very first article for Stephen Tanzer and his International Wine Cellar back in 2004 when he hired me to write about Italian wines, was a long piece devoted to the wines of Southern Italy. Clearly, Campania was one of the largest sections, if not the largest, of the article. It was a landmark piece: for the first time ever, international wine lovers, collectors, sommeliers and other wine professionals go to read in-depth information about grape varieties they had never really heard or read anything about. Pallagrello Bianco? Coda di Volpe? Forastera? Hardly any of those were household names back then. The few wines from Campania people did know about were those that were imported at the time, the wines that had been generally written about and highly scored by the usual Italian wine guide and British magazine. Greco, Fiano, Taurasi, a series of big wineries that exported to distant lands, and little else. But those were hardly the best wines of the region, and why they were being written up and not others is too complicated for us to discuss here. And yet, the likes of Coda di Volpe, Biancolella and Tintore di Tramonti are some of Campania’s best grape varieties and give some of the country’s most interesting and best, if at times idiosyncratic, wines. Just imagine that my report broke so much new ground that one importer even called Steve up (Tanzer) to complain that I had scored one winery’s Coda di Volpe wine 90 points, but their Falanghina wine only 89, so what in the world could I be thinking? Because already back then, you couldn’t sell anything with less than 90 points; and so you can understand the poor fellow’s predicament, given that he hadn’t thought to import the Coda di Volpe wine. He had stuck with the Falanghina wine that Italian guides were scoring higher and that was somewhat easier to sell for him.

However, even though nobody was writing much about this at the time, Campania, like many other regions of Italy, was replete with many little-known, wonderful grape varieties and wines made in small numbers that deserved to be brought out into the sunlight (and hence to people’s attention), something that until I started writing for international wine publications had never been much the case. But that is exactly what I set out to do with my wine writing: it was with that first article that I began to systematically highlight the quality of grapes and wines from Italy that deserved better and that had it not been for me, nobody, at least at the time, would have bothered to write much about. To an extent, this is still very true today: but happily, this sorry state of affairs has partially changed nowadays, for the better. Italy’s and Campania’s many little wineries and their wines are getting more love thrown their way, and reports on wines other than the usual three or so big Campanian wineries and usual suspects like Fiano, Greco, and Aglianico are being more and more written up. All hail!

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