Basilicata

Basilicata makes one wine that matters and makes it superbly. Aglianico del Vulture grows on the flanks of a dead volcano in one of the poorest and emptiest regions in Italy, and it belongs in any honest list of the country’s great reds. Almost nobody outside Italy could name it.

The Landscape Also called Lucania, the region is 47 per cent mountain, 45 per cent hill and 8 per cent flat — the Metaponto plain along the Ionian. It touches the sea twice and barely: a short stretch of Tyrrhenian coast to the south-west and the Ionian to the south-east. The Lucanian Dolomites throw up spectacular rock spires above Castelmezzano at 870 metres and Pietrapertosa at 1,090. Inland the winters are properly continental, cold with snowfall; both coasts are Mediterranean. The hillside soils are clay and prone to landslide and mudslide, which shapes where anyone can plant.

Monte Vulture North of Potenza stands an extinct volcano that stopped erupting more than 100,000 years ago, built from basaltic lava flows alternating with layers of tuff and potassic lavas heavy in minerals. Two volcanic lakes, the Laghi di Monticchio, sit at about 660 metres in its main crater, surrounded by chestnut woods. Aglianico is planted on its east and south-east flanks between 400 and 600 metres, on tuff-covered slopes with a substantial flysch component, and around Rionero, Barile, Ginestra, Rapolla, Ripacandida, Melfi and Venosa there are more than 1,200 hectares given over almost entirely to it — sandstone and calcareous marl, or the broken-down grey pyroclastic tuff. At Barile the cellars are dug directly into that tuff.

The Other Half Towards the Ionian, the Collina Materana divides into three. The coastal plain is the youngest ground. Above it sit marine terraces with deep, well-drained, iron-rich red soils. And the Fossa Bradanica, which makes up most of the Materan hill country from Irsina to Pisticci and from Matera down to Stigliano, is sandy and conglomeratic, coarse at the surface and sandy at depth, very calcareous and highly permeable.

Greek Law Agri-pastoral peoples were here before the Greeks, who established Magna Graecia in the seventh century BC. Heraclea produced the Heraclean Tablets, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and among the most important surviving documents of municipal law in Magna Graecia. Metapontum’s prosperity is still legible in the Tavole Palatine, the remains of a Greek temple to Hera standing in open country.

The Grapes Aglianico is overwhelmingly the region’s grape, and the Vulture expression differs from Campania’s Taurasi in a way that is easy to taste: more mineral, more austere, tighter across the palate, with the volcanic ground contributing something the Irpinian flysch does not. Alongside it are Greco, Fiano, Malvasia and Moscato, and Primitivo appears around Matera. Aglianico here is also made sparkling and off-dry, a local habit that surprises visitors and is worth trying once.

The Critical Take Aglianico del Vulture is the best-value great red in Italy, and it stays that way because the region has no marketing apparatus, no tourism to speak of outside Matera, and a population that has been leaving for a century. The wines need time — the tannins are serious and the acidity is high — and too many are released before they are ready, which is the same fault Campania commits with the same grape. The Superiore and Riserva tiers are where the region makes its case. Buy them on release and forget about them for five years.

At the Table Lucanica sausage, which is old enough to have given Lucania its name rather than the other way round; peperoni cruschi, sweet peppers dried and flash-fried until they shatter; lamb; pecorino di Filiano; and the bread of Matera, which keeps for a week. Aglianico and roast lamb is the regional default and difficult to improve on.

Where to Start An Aglianico del Vulture Superiore with some bottle age. There is no real second step here — this is a region with one great wine, and the sensible approach is to drink several of them.