Wine Club: Indigenous Grapes from Campania!

Wine Club time again! An ongoing theme of Wine Club is travel. We love picking places that produce great wine that would also be a blast to visit. This month’s selection certainly fits that bill!

Campania is a gorgeous region of southern Italy on the Mediterranean coast. The famous Amalfi coast beaches lay within it, as do hundreds of vineyards and wine producers. If you’re interested in learning more about this amazing region, check out this post we wrote about it.

For the wines this month, we chose a crisp, lively white with tropical fruit tones, and a rustic red made from an ancient indigenous grape. Campania wines tend to really show a sense of place, so we picked two terroir driven bottles.

For the white, we chose a wonderful example of the grape Falanghina. The warm days and cool nights of the region leave the wine with pronounced flavors and balancing acidity. The producer, La Capranera, takes its name from a type of goat that lives in the hills of the area. Once almost extinct, they are thriving now, much like Campania wines themselves!

For the red, we went with a 100% Casavecchia. This grape likely would have gone extinct were it not for a recent revived interest in indigenous grapes. The name Casavecchia literally means “old house.” Legend has it that it gets this name because someone found a lone vine of it growing in some Roman ruins, and that all the vines growing today are descended from that vine. King Ferdinand IV of the House of Bourbon in Naples apparently loved this grape. The painting of a dog on the label of this wine comes from a detail in a painting in his palace!

The grapes in this wine hail from the province of Caserta, at the foothills of Friento Mount. They grow at an altitude of 200 meters in clay and carbonic soils, and are hand picked in the first and second week of October. The wine itself has flavors and aromas of dried red cherries, plums, herbs and wild spices, with hints of licorice and black tea. Let breathe to allow the tannins to soften up. Serve with char-grilled pork chops and veggies.

The release party will take this Sunday, July 28th, starting at 2pm. See you then!