It’s Sunday morning in Barile, a light rain is falling, and as is usually the case on a Sunday in Italy, the streets are deserted. Barile is a melancholy sort of place to begin with, a lonely outcropping on Monte Vulture in northern Basilicata, and the weather isn’t helping: From a distance the buildings seem to huddle together against the elements, mud creeping up their whitewashed flanks like tooth decay.
The only action at this hour is on the edge of town—literally an edge, as Barile is perched over a deep gorge—amid a network of caves (gròtte) dug into the volcanic hillside. Fronted with stonework and outfitted with metal doors, the caves are connected by access roads that zig-zag up the slope. Men on tractors haul cartloads of grapes along the muddy paths, while others buzz around their gròtte, dragging hoses, washing buckets, smoking cigarettes. The sweet-and-sour smell of fermenting wine hangs thick in the air.
Most of these people are small farmers who sell grapes to commercial wineries but keep a portion of their production for themselves, using the gròtte as mini-wineries. Barile is the heart of the Aglianico del Vulture DOC zone, so there’s plenty of homemade aglianico around. But there’s also a big call for off-dry moscato frizzante, a classic farmer’s wine from one of the most widely planted grapes in Italy.
It’s early September, too early to harvest reds, so the focus is on moscato. In the darkness of their little caves, men and women shovel the big-berried grapes into rickety presses, shooing away bees and glancing warily at passersby. None of them has much to say until a gregarious, red-faced old-timer named Franco, whose wool cap has a hole so big it’s more like a headband, invites us inside.
After a morning of not only making wine but sampling the already-made stuff, Franco and his friend, Vittorio, are a little worse for the wear. The arrival of guests gives them both a giddy burst of energy. Vittorio fetches a green bottle from the shadows, while Franco ceremoniously returns to his old basket press, his fingers as fat and pink as sausages while he pumps the handle. The crushed grapes ooze through the wooden slats, and a torrent of juice shoots out the bottom and collects in a big plastic tub. As rudimentary as the whole operation looks, however, Franco is no amateur: After a few pulls on the press, he dips a hydrometer (a device that measures sugar content) into the must, announcing with the confidence of a lab technician that the wine will be about 12 percent alcohol.
With a loud pop, Vittorio shoots a cork across the cave, washes out some crusty-looking glasses with a hose, and fills them to the brim. The wine has some brownish debris floating in it, but otherwise it’s pretty good: lightly fizzy, appley, not too sweet. “You won’t find this in any store,” says Franco, clearly relishing his role as master of ceremonies. He invites a few more people into the gròtta, and soon there’s a full-fledged wine tasting going on, everyone stamping their feet in the raw chill, downing glasses of moscato like water. It’s ten in the morning.
Of course, home winemaking is hardly unusual in Italy, but nowhere is there a local culture quite like this. The gròtte of Barile were originally homes, excavated by Albanian refugees in the fifteenth century; in time they evolved into wine cellars (or, occasionally, garages), each of which is treated like a family heirloom. There are more than two hundred gròtte in Barile alone, and many others pockmarking the hillsides in neighboring villages, most of them home to some form of family wine production. In fact, Barile hosts a harvest festival every October, at which Franco and his neighbors sample one another’s creations.
In some respects, these images are a dime a dozen—gnarled old farmhands, quaint hill towns, harvest festivals—but there’s something extra-authentic about Barile. Whether because of the isolation of the area or its enduring poverty, Barile feels like a rural village from another time. Throughout nearly all of Italy it seems as though tourists have discovered everything, but the towns around Monte Vulture remain untrampled. Although there are some noteworthy archeological sites in the area, there aren’t many touristy reasons to come to Basilicata. But then, that may be the best reason of all.
There is at least one good reason to come to Basilicata: Aglianico del Vulture. It’s one of the great red wines of southern Italy, less famous than the aglianico-based Taurasi of neighboring Campania, but considered by many to be better.
Unfortunately, the small size of Basilicata and its wine industry has relegated Aglianico del Vulture to cult wine status—not cult wine in the sense of a boutique bottling of cabernet whose first vintage was three years ago, but cult wine in the sense of a historic local gem hunted down by real devotees.
Basilicata and aglianico have become synonymous, thanks not only to the quality of Aglianico del Vulture but to the lack of other wines to talk about; Aglianico del Vulture is one of only two DOCs in the region. While moscato and malvasia are widely grown in Basilicata, the sparkling and sweet wines made from them are either vini da contadini (farmers’ wines) or products for the local market. Paternoster, one of the two top commercial producers in Basilicata, bottles several white wines, but none are exported to the United States; D’Angelo, the other big name in the area, exports a white wine based on chardonnay and pinot bianco, but only in small quantities. On the whole, you’re not likely to find much if any white wine from Basilicata in an American shop, and this is probably for the better.
Aglianico, however, is another story. The most significant concentration of vineyards is on the eastern face of Monte Vulture, a forty-three-hundred-foot spent volcano that looms over towns including Rionero, Barile, and Melfi. Covered in vines and chestnut groves at its midrange elevations, Monte Vulture seems to inject a brooding power into the grapes grown on it. A glass of young aglianico is dark and feral, like the wolves that still roam the hills in these parts, greeting you with a low, tannic growl.
“These are not wines to drink young,” says Vito Paternoster, who runs the Paternoster family winery in Barile. The deeply colored aglianico grape is a tannic variety, thanks to its small berries and thick skin. But, as Paternoster explains, aglianico becomes supercharged in Monte Vulture’s soil and climate. “We have a very unique combination here: On one hand, our vineyards are at relatively high altitudes”—eighteen hundred feet and up in Barile—“with steep grades, so we get good day-to-night temperature variations and good drainage. This helps preserve acidity. On the other hand, we have the intense sunlight of the south. This gives the power.”
Donato D’Angelo, whose muscular, barrique-aged “Canneto” aglianico is probably the best-known wine from Basilicata, adds that while volcanic soils are rich in potassium (a critical vine nutrient), the key factor influencing wine in the Vulture is altitude. “Despite the fact that we’re in the deep south, this is a cool climate,” he says. “In fact, we probably have one of the latest harvests in Italy. We don’t usually start with aglianico before October 20, and it’s often much later.” The longer growing season allows for more concentration and complexity of flavor to develop in the grapes, and it shows in the wines. At its best, an Aglianico del Vulture is not only dense and powerful but exotically aromatic, much in the same way that Piedmont’s Barolo melds power with perfume.
As with the nebbiolo of Barolo, questions remain as to where aglianico came from. The neighboring Campanians have effectively claimed it as their own—thanks to Naples, they’ve always been the center of power in the south. But there is strong evidence that humble old Basilicata was aglianico’s original breeding ground. As with so much Italian viticultural history, the story is entertainingly imprecise.
There are now three theories of the origins of aglianico (see also the chapter on Campania). Two of the three hypotheses presume that the grape was brought by the Greeks in the form of seed, and that aglianico is a mutation of the word hellenic, or ellenico in Italian. The two Greek hypotheses diverge when it comes to aglianico’s point of entry. One theory is that it came in through Metaponto (Metapontion), the one major Greek colony on Basilicata’s tiny slice of Ionian coast, then migrated north through the Vulture, on to nearby Irpinia (the hills of Avellino, home of Taurasi), then farther north and east in Campania. The other suggests that the grape was brought first to Campania, possibly the Monte Massico area north of Naples, where it became the red Falernum (the modern-day Falerno del Massico), a wine highly prized by the Romans.
More recently, the conventional wisdom on aglianico has been challenged. Enology professor Attilio Scienza of the University of Milan is among those who believe that aglianico was a wild vine indigenous to the Italian peninsula, domesticated by native tribes as early as the Bronze Age and only later discovered and named by the Greeks. He says the name is derived not from ellenico but from the Greek word eilanikos, which translates roughly as a “vine that grows up trees.” Regardless of which theory you believe, one thing about aglianico is certain: Aside from nebbiolo and sangiovese, there’s no native Italian grape more capable of making powerful, interesting red wines.
Whereas the various Campanian aglianico DOCs (including Taurasi) allow for some blending of other grape varieties, Aglianico del Vulture is the grape on its own, with nothing to soften its tannic blow (or so the DOC and its producers say). The only problem is that there’s not that much of it. Basilicata is one of Italy’s smallest, least populous regions, and its reputation as a poor and inhospitable place still looms: It is essentially a clump of Apennines, and only 8 percent of the region’s land is classified as plains. And while there have been economic improvements in recent years—a large Fiat factory in Lavello, near the Puglian border, is a recent industrial triumph—the wine industry has remained largely unchanged since the 1920s, when Paternoster and D’Angelo opened for business.
But there have been signs of new life. Winemaker and economics professor Francesco Sasso, who for years ran his family’s large cantina in Rionero, sold out several years ago to a group of partners and focused his attentions on a smaller estate, Eubea, which produces some excellent aglianico under the Eubea–Covo dei Briganti label. Gerardo Giuratrabocchetti, a sheep and wheat farmer from Maschito, debuted his Cantine del Notaio brand in 1998 and quickly found a market for his limited-production, barrique-aged aglianico wines in the United States. Ditto for Michele Cutolo, a local doctor who makes his small-production Basilisco wines from family plots near Rionero. The D’Angelo family has also branched out, marketing a value-priced line of aglianico-based wines from its Tenuta del Portale in Vulcano. Another noteworthy new name is Elena Fucci, who is making some very sexy aglianicos from old family vines.
On a larger scale, a construction firm called Gruppo Pietrafessa has become a significant player in Vulture with its Tenuta Le Querce estate in Barile. And on the high plains of Venosa, near the Puglian border, perhaps the most significant new investment in Basilicata is taking shape. In October 2000, the massive Gruppo Italiano Vini (GIV), Italy’s largest wine company, took control of a large vineyard property once owned by the Swiss conglomerate Winefood. The estate, called Terra degli Svevi, produces a brawny, spicy Aglianico del Vulture called “Re Manfredi.”
“In the past, most of the producers in Basilicata just sent wine anonymously to the north,” says Vito Paternoster. “Now we’ve got a real reputation for aglianico, and maybe more people will be encouraged to do something on their own.”
Looking at the current scene, it almost goes without saying that Aglianico del Vulture is one of the new generation of collectible wines from Italy. While your friends are battling it out for rare (and often incredibly expensive) Barolo and Brunello, you might consider checking out Paternoster’s rare but relatively inexpensive “Rotondo” aglianico, D’Angelo’s “Canneto” and “Vigna Caselle,” or Notaio’s “La Firma” Aglianico del Vulture. All of them are assertively aromatic, packed with black-berry fruit and wrapped in wooly blankets of tannin that will preserve them for years. If you care about the wine, not the show, Basilicata is a place to consider. Get there before everyone else.
PROVINCES: Matera (MT), Potenza (PZ)
CAPITAL: Potenza
KEY WINE TOWNS: Barile, Rionero in Vulture
TOTAL VINEYARD AREA*: 7,708 hectares, or 19,046 acres. Rank: 17th
TOTAL WINE PRODUCTION*: 473,000 hectoliters, or 12,496,660 gallons (17th); 27% white, 73% red
DOC WINE PRODUCED*: 3.2% (19th)
SPECIALTY FOODS: Luganica sausage; peperoncini (both dried and vinegar-cured); Amaro Lucano (a bitter digestivo produced in Metaponto).
*2000 figures. Rankings out of twenty regions total (Trentino–Alto Adige counted as one). Source: Istituto Statistica Mercati Agro-Alimentari (ISMEA), Rome.
MALVASIA: Malvasia and Moscato are widely planted in Basilicata, but there is no DOC for them. Generally, wines made from these grapes are simple vini da tavola sold locally.
AGLIANICO: this dark, thick-skinned variety was thought to have been brought to Italy by the Greeks, its name derived from the term hellenico or ellenico (“Greek”). Others believe it was a native wild vine.
As a general rule, Aglianico del Vulture producers age their wines much longer than the minimum one year required by DOC regulations, but even wines with three or four years on them are still likely to have a strong tannic bite. Top years: ’82, ’85, ’88, ’90, ’92, ’93, ’95, ’97, ’98, ’99, ’01, ’04.
Like its neighbors Puglia and Calabria, Basilicata is somewhat off the beaten track for tourists. But as with any region of Italy, there are little country restaurants that amaze you with the freshness of their ingredients and the abundance of their menus. Within Basilicata’s wine country, the one town of some touristic interest is Melfi, which was the first capital of the Normans when they ruled the Italian south. On the edge of town is one of the best restaurants you’ll ever eat in: Novecento (0972-23-74-70), where you can load up on lucanica sausage and burrata (a mozzarella filled with raw curd that spills out like an egg yolk when you cut it open).
Paternoster Aglianico del Vulture, $
D’Angelo Aglianico del Vulture, $
Should you be tasting recent vintages of these wines, as you probably will, be ready for some ferrous, almost mouth-drying tannins. They’re black and they bite, but they offer great aromatic complexity: lighter, higher-toned scents of violets and cherries mingle with telltale Aglianico notes of road tar, tobacco leaves, and coffee. These wines combine sweet and savory flavors much as nebbiolo does in Barolo and Barbaresco. When they’re young, tame them with a hunk of sausage, a steak, or some pecorino cheese.
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