August 2026 - Mt. Vesuvius

Featuring:

Poggio delle Baccanti

  This month brings us to a long favored region of the Dogwood family: Campania - specifically the Sorrentine Peninsula. Both sides of Gabby’s Italian heritage were from this area (Naples and Salerno) and some of our best travel memories as a couple are from a trip in this region almost a decade ago. Even though we never made it to this month’s feature winery, we can practically envision ourselves in their driveway - feeling the cool sea air blow across the bay, smelling the smoke from many Napoletana Pizzerias across the city, looking up at the lonesome Mt. Vesuvius and taking in its powerful historical significance.

Baccanti is a third generation winery, located directly to the south of Mt Vesuvius and Pompeii. They make a handful of wines in a low intervention style, utilizing organic farming and minimal sulfur additions. They sit within the urban sprawl of Naples; a non descript random building on a narrow street, some stacks of grape picking baskets outside and laundry hanging from the second floor railing. Take a look and explore the neighborhood for yourself because their winery location has serious old-world charm.

The Baccanti wines take on the same non-descript, low-fanfare quality of their location. The wines are solidly made, clean, and showcase fantastic typicity of the grape variety. They are incredibly well priced for what’s in the bottle and are made without any extras - no unnecessary additions and very limited sulfur. In our opinion, these are an absolute hidden gem. Quite literally… because unless you’re driving down some random neighborhood outside of Naples you probably wouldn’t find them.

History, Geography, & Grape Varieties

As you likely know, Italy has the oldest viticultural history in Western Europe. Once cultivation of grape vines (and fermentation into wine) spread from Georgia, through Anatolia, and into Greece, it was brought to Southern Italy via seafaring traders. The oldest findings of domesticated grape seeds were in Campania, dated to 1400-1200 BC. These were suspected to be brought by the bronze-age Mycenaeans on their trade routes. (For the historians or cinephiles - you’re correct - this is roughly when the Odyssey 'takes place'.) Thanks to the Greeks, the grape vine spread through this area of Italy, and eventually - with help of the Romans several hundred years later - made its way up through Northern Italy, to France, and beyond. 

The grape found a natural home in Southern Italy - the high number of volcanoes allow for a large variety of well drained soils while the Apennine mountains promote rain in the early-habitable coastlands. These factors, coupled with the relative warmth and dryness during the growing season, has allowed for low-disease pressure, high quality viticulture through the centuries. The areas around Naples - Camp Flegri to the North/West and Vesuvius to the South/East - are highly volcanic. These areas are both designated wine regions (DOC’s) allowing them a protected status of the grapes grown within their region. In Vesuvius, the focus of this wine club, the red grapes commonly grown are Aglianico and Piedirosso, which make up the blend Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio (the tears of Christ from Vesuvius). The Piedirosso brings a fresh black-pepper, cherry, and acidity quality to the blend while the Aglianico brings blackberries, leather, and structure. You can also find monovarieties of both grapes, one of which is in the club this month. Another important grape in the coastal region is Falanghina (foul-an-ghee-na), which makes for bright, fruity wines with notes of lemon zest, underripe stone fruit, and smoky herbal qualities.

Up the Apennine foothills, near the town of Avellino, one finds the only DOCG’s of the Campania region: Fiano di Avellino, Greco di Tufo, Aglianico del Taburno, and Taurasi. These four appellations are all grape specific, meaning they focus on one variety alone: Fiano, Greco, and Aglianico. Fiano di Avellino tends to showcase more apple and pear, with some flinty minerality and honeyed quality. Greco di Tufo has a fresher, more acid-driven palate, with stone fruits, volcanic minerality and a touch of herbaceousness. Aglianico wines from both regions are structured, ageworthy, and intense; the best iterations can lie down in the cellar for many decades.

According to Ian d’Agata, inarguable authority on Italian wine, Italy is home to over 2000 native varieties. Of those, roughly 400 are commercially made into wine of significant quantities. That number, a fraction of the total, is still higher than the total native grape count of France, Spain, and Greece combined. To write about all of these would comprise a novel (which exists), so we’ll stick with the handful above rather than exhaustively describe the additional 20-30 varieties and fifteen appellations that exist across Campania alone.

Looking towards Mt. Vesuvius from Gragnano, with the Bay of Naples in the background.

Clusters of Aglianco and Greco.

Poggio delle Baccanti, Greco, Campania IGP 2023

This wine is composed of 100% Greco from organic vineyards to the south of Mt. Vesuvius. The grapes are hand harvested and fermented using only the native yeasts on the berries and within the winery. The entire fermentation and aging process is in stainless steel, allowing for a fresh and vibrant white wine. The finished wine is bottled unfined and unfiltered, though through tedious efforts in the cellar it remains clean and clear in the bottle and glass.

Side note on the family of Greco grapes: Across southern Italy, one will find several different “Greco” grapes. These include, but are not limited to, Greco di Tufo, Greco Bianco, Grecanico, and Greco Nero. It is believed this naming convention was a sort of marketing effort starting ~2100 years ago. Just like how many of us idealize foreign wines today (the best wine comes from Italy/France/etc), ancient Italians believed the best wines came from Greece - particularly a sweet, strong wine they called Vino Greco. Rather than importing finished wines (highly impractical back then), they simply planted the seeds of Greek wines, or (more likely) called whatever wines were growing in the area Greco. Their wines gained instant prestige and thus many varieties of “Greco” were born. 

This expression of Greco (the same variety as in Tufo) shows bright citrus and white peach notes, a touch of herbal aromas, and is round with a light bitterness on the finish. A fantastic food wine, it also pairs well with sitting on the porch with the evening breeze and pretending you are in Amalfi.

Poggio delle Baccanti, Aglianico, Sorrentine Peninsula 2025

Similar to the bottle above, this wine is a monovariety Aglianico from the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius. It is organically dry farmed with minimal intervention in the cellar (native yeast, minimal sulfur, unfined/unfiltered). While Aglianico is a bold, structured grape that is easily aged for decades, it can also be made to enjoy young and fresh. In fact, it is a major component of the wine Gragnano - a light, chillable red with a touch of frizzante bubbles that is the de-facto Pizza wine for the city of Naples. (Think of it as Southern Italy’s answer to Lambrusco). So while Aglianco can be this big, bold monster of a wine, it can also be found in one of the most drinkable wines in the country.

A part of this comes down to the terroir. The commune of Gragnano is just a couple miles SW of the Baccanti winery. In this area the days are cooler and the nights warmer due to the coastal influence. Taurasi, in the mountains, has warmer days with colder nights. This less drastic temperature range allows for wines with sugar ripening quicker and skins staying relatively thinner than the mountainous counterparts. The result is slightly less phenolic ripeness and less tannin/structure from the presence of the skins.

The main age-worthiness factors remain - high acidity, dense fruit, and balanced alcohol - however the wine is not too intense to drink young, either. So there you have it - you can either lay this Aglianico down to rest in your basement or cupboard for a few years (it can handle it), or you can fire up the grill, season up some steaks or throw out some pizza dough and go crazy.