The Other Italy

A small invitation to look a little further south than usual

Italy is a generous country when it comes to wine. Twenty regions, each with its own character, its own grapes, its own particular way of doing things.

As an Italian Wine Ambassador, I consider it something of a personal mission to share as much of it as possible, and some of the wines I find most interesting come from the south, from regions that don’t always make it into the conversation.

These four are a good place to start.

Calabria

If you have ever drunk Earl Grey, you have already met Calabria. The region produces around 80% of the world’s bergamot, the citrus that gives the tea its flavour, and has been doing so for centuries without anyone thinking to mention it on the box. This turns out to be something of a habit.

Calabria is the toe of Italy’s boot, mountains, extraordinary coastline, water clear enough to embarrass the Adriatic, and almost no mass tourism. The Greeks arrived here long before anyone thought to call the place Italy and named the locals Oenotri: wine people. When the Greeks name you after wine, you can reasonably assume you were doing something right.

The wine to know is Cirò, made from Gaglioppo, pale garnet, high acidity, and enough aromatic complexity that comparisons to Nebbiolo get made by people who do not make that comparison lightly. Legend has it that Cirò was the wine handed to victorious athletes at the ancient Olympics, back when this stretch of coast was called Krimisa. It may be one of the oldest continuously produced named wines in the world, which makes its absence from most wine lists a genuinely impressive achievement.

Calabria waited a long time for official recognition of this. Cirò Classico was finally elevated to DOCG in 2025, the region’s first, and Italy’s seventy eighth. It applies only to the historic hills around Cirò and Cirò Marina, requires at least 90% Gaglioppo and thirty six months of ageing, and arrives roughly three thousand years after the Greeks first noticed the place. Nobody could accuse the Italian classification system of rushing.

Two producers to look for: Librandi, four generations in Cirò Marina and the region’s most recognised name, and Baroni Capoano, whose family has been making wine here for thirteen centuries, a fact that puts most European wine dynasties in a slightly awkward position. And if you ever come across Greco di Bianco, the rare dessert wine from the region’s southern tip, open it and apologise to nobody.

Basilicata

Basilicata is 80% hills and mountains, has two coastlines it rarely mentions, and is so sparsely populated that film directors keep borrowing it whenever they need somewhere to look ancient and empty. The Passion of the Christ was shot here. So was a James Bond film. So was Wonder Woman.

All three used Matera, whose cave dwellings, the sassi, were described as the shame of Italy in the 1950s, when families were still living in them without running water, alongside their animals. UNESCO listed them in 1993. In 2019, Matera was European Capital of Culture. Very few places manage that particular journey inside one lifetime.

The wine has form for reinvention too. In the 1620s, Basilicata was known for wines described as sweet, fragrant and golden. Today it makes Aglianico del Vulture, grown up to 700 metres on the slopes of an extinct volcano, on dark soil layered with old lava flows. It is one of Italy’s great reds: structured, brooding, built for keeping. The Aglianico del Vulture Superiore DOCG demands a minimum of three years’ ageing, twelve months of it in barrel and twelve in bottle. From sweet and golden to volcanic and severe in four centuries, Basilicata clearly had range all along.

The producer worth knowing is Elena Fucci. In 2000 her family was preparing to sell the six hectares surrounding the house she grew up in, at Contrada Solagna del Titolo, near Barile. Her grandfather Generoso had bought the land in the 1960s; for decades the grapes were sold off and only a little wine kept back for the family. Buyers were circling. Elena, at the last moment, changed her mind and her career, and kept the vineyard.

She has made one wine ever since: Titolo, from vines that have been in that soil for over half a century, some of them planted more than seventy years ago, at 600 metres on the volcano’s best-regarded site. She ties the vines with dried broom fibre rather than wire. Antonio Galloni has rated it 94+. It is the sort of wine that reminds you the map still has blank spaces worth filling in.

Worth knowing too: the Matera DOC produces the region’s only white with designated origin, Matera Greco, delicate and floral, and almost entirely unknown outside Basilicata. For now.

Puglia

Puglia is not a secret. Eight hundred kilometres of coastline, the trulli of Alberobello, olive trees over two thousand years old still turning out olives, and a winemaking history reaching back to at least 2000 BC. Horace was writing admiringly about the wines of Taranto in the first century BC. This is not a region in need of an introduction.

It may, though, deserve a wider one.

Most people know Puglia for Primitivo, rich, warm, generous. Fewer know that Primitivo is genetically identical to California’s Zinfandel, and that both trace back to Croatia, where the grape is called Tribidrag. A Croatian grape that became an Italian icon and then an American one. The wine world has always been better at moving things around than at remembering where they came from.

Primitivo di Manduria is the DOC to look for, and Primitivo di Manduria Dolce Naturale the DOCG, a naturally sweet version with real charm. Both are worth your time.

But Puglia’s more interesting conversation is happening slightly to the side of Primitivo. Bombino Nero, mostly used for the region’s rosati, pale, dry, and considerably more elegant than its name suggests. And Susumaniello, deeply coloured and intense, whose name probably comes from somarello, little donkey: the vine carries an enormous load when young and gradually eases off with age, which is a description I suspect most of us recognise. It is one of the most exciting rediscoveries in the Italian south, and still largely unknown outside the trade, which is precisely why now is the moment to try it.

One last thing about Puglia: it makes roughly a third of all the wine in Italy. For most of its history almost none of it was sold as Puglian. It went north, into other people’s bottles, giving weight and colour to wines that took the credit.

Molise

Molise is three hours from Rome, the second smallest region in Italy and the youngest, created in 1963, when it was separated from Abruzzo. There is a long running national joke that it doesn’t exist at all: il Molise non esiste. The wine world has honoured this joke with remarkable consistency.

The landscape still carries the tratturi, the ancient sheep trails, some of them 111 metres wide, along which flocks were moved between Abruzzo and Puglia for centuries. You can walk them today. Some villages here have a few hundred residents, and the government has been selling houses for one euro to encourage people to arrive. Visit in summer and you may find a medieval hill town more or less to yourself, which is either unnerving or a considerable relief depending on your feelings about other tourists.

The wine is Tintilia, Molise’s only indigenous grape and one of the better recovery stories in Italian wine. After the war its low yields made it commercially pointless and most growers pulled it out. It survived in fragments. Today there are around 110 hectares of it in the world, and 97% of them are here.

Its origins are contested, which in Italy is more or less standard. One theory holds that it arrived under Spanish Bourbon rule, the name suggesting tinto, and DNA work points to a possible relative in the Parraleta of Somontano. Others insist it is entirely local. Either way, Molise has it now.

Tintilia del Molise DOC came in 2011, nearly thirty years after the region’s first appellation, Biferno DOC, named for the river. The wine is full bodied and aromatic, with dark fruit and tannins that age far better than anyone expects, which is, more or less, the story of Molise itself.

In 1982 the wine writer Burton Anderson suggested that Molise’s neglected hillsides might one day make wine of real worth. He was right. He was simply about forty years early.

What these four regions have in common is not obscurity. It is patience.

Small producers, working with grapes almost nobody outside their own province had heard of, kept going through decades when there was very little reason to. Tintilia survived because a handful of growers refused to pull it out. Cirò is still made because families in Cirò Marina carried on making it. Elena Fucci kept six hectares that everyone else was ready to sell.

There are hundreds more like them, in Italy and well beyond it, working a few hectares in regions that rarely make anyone’s list, doing careful and serious work a long way from attention.

That is most of what wine actually is: people who stayed. It seems only fair to drink what they made.

Cin Cin!