Where is Lucania?

In the winter of Covid’s second wave, Carlo Levi’s exile memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli introduced me to a place trapped inside Italy’s central mountains, a rural and poor region still traversed by bandits, witches, fascists, quack doctors, and political prisoners as removed from modern political discourse as they would be inside the walls of a maximum security prison. 

Lucania/Basilicata may be Italy’s most remote and least-understood region, but it also arguably produces the top red wine of the peninsula: Aglianico del Vulture. Not top in terms of what is bottled now. In a short week traversing the crumbling, mostly abandoned towns that still cling to Vulture’s many peaks in spite of 100 years of able-bodied natives following any broken road away to Naples, America, really anywhere but Vulture, I found a few examples of absolute magic: ethereal, timeless, perfect wine. Bottles that made reference to volcanic ash, summer’s unremitting light, constant wind, and the rare elevation that allows for November harvest. Sometimes in the snow! It happened most recently in 2009. But glimpses of Vulture’s potential were rare. Commonplace among the (depressingly, heavily vetted in advance) cellars of my journey were cloying, brûléed, clumsy, dirty Aglianico, wines that no amount of thirst and enthusiasm could compel me to drink. A dispiriting bunch of near-and-total misses from heartwarmingly friendly farmers, people whose wines I absolutely willed to be wonderful. They weren’t. When all the values (ethical and aesthetic) that you support cannot bend perception away from the reality of a charmless glass of red wine, it’s best to speak of the many virtues of the people still toiling this land, and move on. 

The remote and the forgotten are my beloved. I want wine to be from a windswept empty country, and in this regard Lucania delivers. My hotel in Venosa was a cave, or a cellar, or both. To reach the town at night required a drive through the nothing, roads bordered by absolute blackness, the tilled earth of autumn’s end closing in on narrow headlight beams. Gas stations were permanently closed. A gypsum plant was illuminated, its constant lumbering trucks and fluorescent dust framing the silence. A deteriorating road twists upward to Venosa. Much of the town’s core was built in the 18th century. But it feels older. Roads are smooth paving stone, they wind under arches and through narrow residential areas. Cars thread through streets where I can extend my arms and touch crumbling stone walls on both sides. Dogs are omnipresent, silent and sedentary, dirty and plaintive. A giant German Shepherd rules the semi-circle of cafes facing Venosa’s Aragonese castle. Late at night, when the piazza's football-obsessed patrons were gone, he followed me to the corner. Our eyes locked. He was not begging, but communicating. No masters. The life of a roaming southern Italian dog.

A first perfect moment with Aglianico came at the edge of this downtown. In the shadow of the well-illuminated church facing the castle lurks d’Angelo’s, a light, airy, faintly kitschy restaurant half-filled with locals. D’Angelos has the immutable virtue of being open on Monday. A second virtue: the food is excellent. A pureed white bean and chicory starter sent me back a decade, to the first time I visited Puglia and tasted this perfect dish. Smooth and rich, laden with olive oil, bitter from the greens, it made Cantina del Notaio’s Il Rogito Aglianico del Vulture all the more appealing. The wine has a blood-red/black hue: the darkest of rosés. Taking a grape in/famous for immortal tannin to a place of simultaneous structure and refreshment is a master stroke. Many attempts at rosato Aglianico somehow cloy, trading terroir for sickly bubblegum shocking-pink anonymity. Notaio craft the opposite. Before leaving America, I wrote the winery to secure an appointment. Unfortunately for me (auspiciously for them!) Notaio have a national importer. I don’t know who it is, but it ain’t me. So I didn’t meet the people making this exceptional rosato. They generously offered a tour, but I was seeking useful wine, not only following passions.

Orecchiette

Next time you are in Venosa, go to d’Angelo’s. The orecchiette and the cavatelli are outstanding. The latter is rich with a bean/cream puree, the absolute stick-to-your-ribs farmer pasta of legend. Perfect. There are other restaurants in Venosa. Some are perpetually booked, not bad in a town where every third home has a “vendesí” sign attached to the door. Call in advance. L’Incanto has a lovely wine list and ambiance, patrons softly singing along to light jazz standards, some creative courses, space to soak in some very adult-feeling peace of mind.  Maria della Scala is a quirky lunch spot with good pasta and a friendly, attentive chef whose conversation is worth the price of your meal. Watch Prince videos while locals in cowboy hats come-and-go from a mysterious alternate back dining room. Wonder at the empty Jack Daniel’s bottle on the bar. Drink carafes of good-enough (only just) fruity red wine on tap. I’m still an outlier on this technology. I look askance.

Some of the villages of Vulture are prettier than others. I liked Venosa and Rapolla, but every town shared appealing features. Small parks, quiet bars, lazy dogs, locals that seem to linger for entire afternoons. Fertility in the surrounding fields below is plain to see, contrasted with clearly dying communities. The earth is dark brown, olive groves and burnished red autumn vineyards border recently-emptied fields of wheat. Alex David at Carnevale winery said it best. “When I told my friends I was returning to Barile (after a decade in Denmark) they thought I was crazy.” Luckily, his German girlfriend loves the place, too. The duo are trying to rebuild a winery with Alex’s father, who came to this work as part of a mid-life crisis: he had been a nurse. When I visited, they were in the middle of harvest. We drove down a former donkey path to a cellar carved in the hillside just below the town. Dozens of similar caves line one side of Barile. The facing slope was always used for livestock. Locals say it’s too hot on that side, the wines become vinegar. Alex’s dad wants to restore the ancient well that sits between their olive grove and vineyard. In recent years people pitched trash into it, a real shame as Vulture has beautifully fresh spring water. The cellar at Carnevale is already on the mend. Elena is selling the wines in her native Germany and Alex’s adopted Denmark. They have ambition.

Because the people of Barile fiercely resisted outside conquest from Ottomans, Spanish, and Italians, a local language with roots in Albanian persists in the community. High, remote, walled, the place now needs an influx of foreigners, or returning native children like Alex. Without their labor and ideas, progressively more small cellar-caves will empty. Buildings will shutter.

It’s a good time to buy in Basilicata. Outsiders are circling. Among many consolidations, neighboring Campania’s Feudi San Gregorio acquired Barile’s standard-bearer Basilisco estate not too many years back. This may not be bad. By many accounts, the managing winemaker at Basilisco is doing good work. The Fiano I tried from that winery was full-flavored, fresh, faintly bitter (citrus rind) and herbal. A really solid bottle, exceptional with L’Incanto’s baccala.

On a wet harvest morning I visited Cantina Lucana. The place was a literal buzz of activity: on the grape clusters there were so many bees! It’s impossible not to like the feel of this very active, real-work kind of place. Tractors bumbled up the driveway to the destemmer, laden with layers of 20-kilo plastic baskets of Aglianico. Fermentations were starting in massive open-top red vessels (covered in plastic) in the center of the room. Most of Antonio's wines rest in stainless steel tank, though he does possess a row of mid-size barrels. The large room is a small co-op, which explains why Antonio Mast’s wines are not certified organic. The olive oil is certified, and the grapes are farmed organically, but he shares a space with a few not-organic locals, making the paperwork impossible. In the same cantina, all the local agricultural products are on display for sale: pasta, honey, dried tomatoes: so many appealing foods! We tasted the 2021 Fiano and Moscato from tank. Fermentations have recently finished for the estate’s two white wines. The Moscato (12% abv) is lovely: floral, honeyed, dry, and still: refreshing. I take away a series of Aglianico bottlings, to analyze at a later date. One is done in stainless, one is a cuveé from multiple hillsides, several are site-specific, and grown on volcanic soils. All are promising: sturdy, clean, dense. They speak to the work habits of the seriously likable signore Mast. I get the sense he’s seeking something.

Another promising collaboration is occurring at Ripanero, a three-person venture on the road leading into Barile. Mario is in fact the mayor of Barile, unsurprising once you spend an hour in his company. Affable, convincing, conversant in the tenets of natural wine (Ripanero work without sulfur, and use ambient yeast.) The trio (Mario, Maurizio, and Davide) make only 15,000 bottles per year, split between four wines. In their tiny cantina we sat down for a merenda, and a sip of each. The white was sturdy and cidery, the Senzavino “entry-level” red had plenty of red fruit charm and freshness. Logos and Physis are the names of the estate’s two single-site Aglianico bottlings. At first taste I preferred the Physis. It veered very close to the bullseye, a nearly-complete Aglianico. Terroir, good farming, balanced and articulate. On a cool rainy day in late October, tasting local caciocavallo cheese (from heirloom Podolica cattle, a free-grazing breed) and fatty salami, It’s hard not to be wowed by wine like this. Mario is a vegetarian! Now I know two Italian vegetarians. One on each end of the country.

so many samples

It bears repeating. Italy’s regions look really different from one another. A short drive into Puglia (near Cerignola) and the land is flat, the sky is big, the place somehow feels even more empty, except for miles of olive groves. And along the highway to Rome I saw my beloved Pallagrello country again: Dragoní, Caiazzo, Guardia Sanframondi. Beautiful, and fundamentally different. Both regions have mountains for Aglianico, but in Campania the land is greener, the farming patchwork seems more tightly knit. It feels a half step closer to the earth I live on, a context I understand. I loved my time in Basilicata, it filled in first sketches (likely to be erased and re-drawn) of a place that for me only existed in books. Now I know the elusive “top wine of Italy/southern Barolo” is real. I’ve tasted it. I’ll share more details in future missives.

A presto, Jay