Penisola Sorrentina DOC

The Sorrento peninsula and the Monti Lattari behind it, with three subzones — Lettere, Gragnano and Sorrento. Two of those names belong to lightly sparkling red wines that Naples has drunk with its own food for two centuries, and that almost nobody outside Campania has heard of.

The History The registered file quotes a source directly, which is rare and welcome. Il Gigante, writing in 1845: “The wine of Gragnano, par excellence, gave its name to all the wines of the Neapolitan area, so that it was enough to say Gragnano to mean a wine that was fragrant, limpid, abboccato — a word meaning sweet and of the grape, not artificial.” The file adds that it was probably the Greeks who first planted the vine on the slopes of the Monti Lattari and taught cultivation to the Oscans, the mountains’ ancient inhabitants, on land made fertile by volcanic eruptions.

The Terroir The peninsula runs from Castellammare di Stabia to Punta Campanella and is formed by the Monti Lattari, a limestone spine dropping straight into the sea on both sides. Vesuvian ash lies over the limestone; the vineyards are terraces at 200 to 600 metres, often pergola-trained above lemon groves, with the Bay of Naples on one flank and the Gulf of Salerno on the other.

Grape Varieties Piedirosso and Sciascinoso lead the reds with Aglianico in support; Falanghina, Biancolella and Greco make the whites. The frizzante reds — Gragnano and Lettere — are made from the same red varieties, fermented to leave a little sugar and a soft, natural fizz, and finished at around 11 to 12 degrees.

The Pizza Wine Gragnano is the reason to care about this denomination. It is purple, foaming, faintly sweet, low in alcohol and served cold, and it is the traditional accompaniment to Neapolitan pizza and to the salumi and fried food of the city. Every convention of fine wine says it should not work; with a margherita it is better than any serious bottle you could put beside it. Gragnano is also, separately, the town Italy’s best dried pasta comes from.

The Critical Take Sweet sparkling red is the category the international market has decided against, and Penisola Sorrentina pays for that twice over — it is also made in tiny quantity on terraces that cost a fortune to farm and sit on land worth far more as building plots. The still wines are pleasant and unremarkable. The frizzante reds are genuinely distinctive and should be drunk young, cold and without apology.

At the Table Neapolitan cooking, unambiguously: pizza, salsiccia e friarielli, ragù napoletano, fried pizza, provola affumicata. Serve the frizzante reds at 12–14°C, the whites at 10–12°C.

Benchmark Producers Grotta del Sole, the reference for both Gragnano and Lettere, and Iovine.