Step #17
Stage #17 of Sommelier Wine Box (August 2019, led by sommelier Tommaso Luongo ) was dedicated to the metropolitan wines of Naples .
The choice fell on an interesting topic but not as well known as it should be. Let's start with a surprising fact: Naples is a fascinating city due to its thousand-year-old history and culture but it remains a metropolis that suffers, like other important urban agglomerations, from suffocating demographic pressure and extensive overbuilding. The anthropic presence is prevalent, but despite this the city boasts an enviable record : that of being, after Vienna, the second city in terms of hectares of vineyards in Europe . There are around sixty hectares distributed within the urban boundaries, located between the vineyards of Santo Strato in Posillipo, the Agnano crater, the Camaldoli and Chiaiano hills and the Scudillo area. Areas inserted in a landscape context of incomparable beauty, in which man and nature have found perfect coexistence over the centuries. The second characteristic, which makes these metropolitan vineyards truly unique, is that they have their roots in a territory which, together with its province, is one of the few areas in the world in which ungrafted cultivation is preserved (without the rootstock of the American vine), thanks to the volcanic genesis of the soil. A rarity which, in recent years, is increasingly appreciated because it is able to preserve the purity of the vines and the historical memory of the ancient forms of vitis vinifera cultivation. Here are the wineries we discovered together: Azienda Agnanum , Cantine Federiciane , Cantine Astroni .
