Contrada Salandra - Campania, Italy

INSIDE THE CAMPANIAN VOLCANO: A NAPLES SINGULARITY

(giuseppe fortunato @ pozzuoli, near naples)

For wine - Italy is compellingly interesting, no?

We've been criss-crossing ("incrociano") the big peninsula for years. Our recent Campanian travel (three trips in sixteen months) along with help from our Import partners has yielded a half dozen new-to-Oregon-producer's wines to explore.

Hopefully you have had tastes of the wines from San Giovanni (brand new vintage arrives Tuesday), Azienda Reale, I Caccigialli (new wines at year end) and Luigi Maffini. Or perhaps you have an order in for the Amalfi wines and olive oil from Raffaele Palma? Tasters have agreed each set of wines is unique. All are from Campania, yet each terroir is very different.

The passionately dedicated Giuseppe Fortunato's tiny Contrada Salandra winery is as unique. The three wines he produces are pleasurably divine.

("filthy rich" topsoil over top of lots of lava)

With soil of lava born, vines are nourished by divergent nutrients and produce distinguished wines accordingly. Our new wines from Contrada Salandra come from just outside the town of Pozzuoli (see map below), a suburb of Naples. Ages ago, Pozzuoli was the center of a gigantic underwater volcano which umbrelled Naples and surrounding areas some 35 miles in diameter. Today much of the volcano is still underwater! This famed zone - the Phlegraean Fields - is today a National Park. This is the place the Romans called the "the home of fire". Throughout the zone, topsoils are amazingly rich from sitting atop a base of igneous rock flavoring the wines with their unique and compelling nature.

CONTRADA SALANDRA

Giuseppe Fortunato makes some of the finest wines in Campania from his property he bought in 1979. He works organically and sincerely, and he treats his few small patches of vines as if they are part of him. Like the remarkable Samuele Heydi in the Cinque Terre (his new wines arrive next week), Giuseppe makes the most of the kinship and benefits bees co-opt with the grapevines in his small micro-climate. Giuseppe, like Samuele, prolifically believes in bees and offers them affordable housing - it's all part of his communing with his land, and, yes, the impact on the wines is positive and clear.

Giuseppe produces a mere 1700 cases a year. (Yep, that's it! By comparison, our friends at A-Z produce 60,000 per year.) Using only indigenous grapes, Contrada Salandra bottles three wines: a white from Falanghina, and two reds from Piedirosso, Campania's archetype grape. Giuseppe, who works organically, farms only ungrafted vines (the soil is not amenable to phylloxera). This is a vital factor helping raise the quality and purity of his wines. He uses no wood at all at his tiny winery, though, he does have a splendid, strong table made of wood he uses to label each of his bottles by hand in house.