Discover Sannio one of the best wine region in Campania

The Sannio, that is the province of Benevento, is among the most vine-growing areas of Italy and Castelvenere is the most venerated village in Campania

It is really impressive to scroll through the numbers of the sub-fund. Suffice it to say that in the 2014 vintage, 49% of the wine produced in the whole Campania region came from the province of Benevento.

Phylloxera arrives in Italy in the late 1800s and devastates the northern vineyards; in Campania it will arrive very late and in the first part of the XXI century, in the years between 1912 and 1932, it becomes the first wine-growing region with 220.000 hectares of vineyards for a production of 9 million quintals of grapes for the production of 5.889.480 hl of wine; the average wine production from 1929 to 1933 is 4,523,090 hl!

A big preventive work was done in those years by the famous "itinerant professorships"; first of all, they taught the various techniques of the grafting on American feet to avoid the phylloxera attack. Another big job was to catalog the immense varietal heritage of the Sannio, committing, perhaps, some attribution error; the most famous remains the case of barbera (del Sannio): so it was (re) named a local vine, probably the camaiola, on the basis of ampelographic knowledge.

The varietal richness of Sannio includes, among many others, aglianico, aglianicone, sommarello, piedirosso, sciascinoso, olivella, camaiola (barbera del Sannio), agostinella, falanghina, fox tail, grieco, malvasia, fiano, greek, passola di San Bartolomeo , carminiello, palombina, moscato di Baselice just to name a few.

Traveling in the Sannio you can fill the gaze of endless vineyards interrupted here and there from other crops and homes

On a recent tour I was able to "visit" vineyards where there are over hundred-year-old plants; think about it: when Garibaldi passed through those parts to "unify" Italy, some vines had already been planted and in the production of the same grapes that still today give us a great wine competition.

Birth and development of Falanghina in purity
At the end of the '70s there was a great ferment in the vine growing in the whole of Italy; in the Sannio some vines were selected for experimentation and study and were vinified in purity. The "Falanghina di Bonea" was assigned to Eng. Leonardo Mustilli from Sant'Agata dei Goti: he believed in it a lot and, encouraged by the results, made sure to use it throughout the province of Benevento. Tovinegrowingday there are over 3,000 hectares of vines cultivated in Falanghina in Campania and around 80% are in the province of Benevento.

Birth and development of large cooperatives:
When we think of advanced forms and proven organization, our collective imagination runs towards Trentino Alto Adige to indicate virtuous examples of associationism. Yet, even in our tortured and depressed South-Italy, there are examples of great efficiency. When "politics" does not create development and infrastructure for the business world, then it is a private initiative to make up for it, finding the reasons to join forces and achieve great results. In Sannio there are four important examples of winemaking cooperatives that bring together almost two thousand five hundred winemakers.