Taurasi.

The “Barolo” of the South

Taurasi The first in the South to have won the Controlled and Guaranteed Designation of Origin (DOCG), Taurasi wine is fully considered the “Barolo of the South”, and represents the main gastronomic excellence of the Irpinia area.

Where is Taurasi wine produced?

This much-loved Campania wine gets its name from Taurasi, one of the seventeen municipalities in the province of Avellino where it is produced and which was once the territory of the Samnite tribe of the “Taurasini”, as well as the city-state of “Taurasia”. It is precisely on the soft slopes exposed to the south-west of the hills of the province of Avellino, in fact, that the cultivation of Aglianico has spread, a red grape variety that thrives here thanks to a clayey soil enriched over the centuries by ashes and debris coming from Vesuvius. A volcanic soil which, thanks to its innate characteristics, in 1928 slowed down by two years the phylloxera epidemic that had exterminated the European and Northern Italian vineyards.

The history of Aglianico in Italy, however, is much older: it is in fact hypothesized that it was brought from Greece to the territories between Campania and Basilicata around the 7th and 6th centuries. BC, and the famous Latin poet Horace sang about the qualities of the wine produced from this vine as early as the 1st century BC. What type of wine is Taurasi? There are two types of Taurasi DOCG: the red, which is aged for three years of which 12 months in wooden barrels, and the red reserve, which instead needs to wait four years – of which 18 months in wooden barrels – before can be tasted.