Casavecchia di Pontelatone DOC

A denomination built around one grape found growing beside one ruin. Casavecchia di Pontelatone covers a handful of communes in the hills north of Caserta, and its registered file tells the origin story in the language of local legend rather than of ampelography.

The Ruin The file records it plainly: popular history, very widespread among the people of the place, has it that Casavecchia originated from seed, near an ancient ruin of which the perimeter walls still exist today, sited near the old farmstead called “Ciesi”, in the commune of Pontelatone. The name follows from the ruin — casa vecchia, the old house. A vine that seeded itself against a wall, was noticed, and was propagated from there: it is the most specific origin claim in the whole register, and it is presented honestly as what the neighbours say.

The Terroir The file then turns to numbers, and gives more of them than most. The territory lies between the massif of Monte Maggiore and the Monti Tifatini. Mean annual temperature is 15.6°C, with a mean annual minimum of 10.93°C and a mean annual maximum of 20.21°C. Mean annual rainfall is 970 mm, concentrated in autumn, winter and spring — which is to say the summers are dry and the vine has to reach.

Grape Varieties Casavecchia, alone, at a minimum of 85 per cent. It gives a deeply coloured wine, ruby moving to garnet with age, intense and persistent on the nose with a distinctly smoky, balsamic, almost tarry character that nothing else in Campania produces. A riserva is registered.

The Critical Take Casavecchia was down to a few hectares around Pontelatone when a handful of growers took it seriously in the 1990s, and the DOC followed in 2011. The wine is genuinely unusual — big, dark and savoury, with tobacco and dried herb over black fruit, and tannin that needs five years. It is not refined and does not pretend to be. Whether the seedling story is literally true matters less than the fact that the variety exists nowhere else on earth, which DNA profiling has confirmed: it has no close relatives among Campanian grapes.

Two Rescued Grapes The same small group of Casertano growers revived Pallagrello in both its black and white forms alongside Casavecchia — varieties the Bourbons had planted at the Royal Estate of Carditello and which had all but vanished by 1990. Three obscure grapes brought back in one small province in one generation is a genuinely unusual piece of viticultural history.

At the Table Casertano cooking: roast pork and lamb, salsiccia, aged provolone del Monaco, and pasta with hearty meat sauces. Serve at 17–18°C and decant a young bottle.

Benchmark Producers Alois, Terre del Principe, Vestini Campagnano.