Tasting Notes: Piante a Lapio is made from 80-to-100-year-old Fiano planted in Lapio’s high-altitude volcanic soils, it is fermented spontaneously in casks of chestnut and acacia from local forests, and aged in those same vessels for nearly five years with no topping up. Incredibly, it develops a yeast veil just as a Jura wine would, although “Piante a Lapio” is marked notably less by veil-derived elements than a Jura Savagnin. This unorthodox aging regimen manifests itself in a combination of breadth and salinity, but variety-typical notes of lemon confit and jasmine still manage to ring strongly through the wine’s manifold layers.
Estate History: Since his start in the early 2000s, Raffaele Pagano has become a Campanian wine maverick. Producing 18,000 bottles annually with a profound devotion to preserving the land, Raffaele nurtures his extraordinarily old plant material, creating wines of incomparable depth. Raffaele believes in minimal technological interference, using very few sulfur additions and abstaining from filtration, outside yeasts, temperature control, new oak, and avoids chemicals in the vineyards at all costs.
Joaquin encompasses three and a half hectares in Irpinia and Capri. Many of his Fiano and Aglianico vines in Lapio and Paternopoli approach 100 - 200 years of age. He has also co-planted Greco, Falanghina, and Biancolella on Capri off the Amalfi Coast within an 0.8-hectare parcel, where only 20 hectares of vines exist in total. Joaquin was named after the French-Spanish Bourbon dynasty which pioneered Campania’s gastronomic viticultural life in the pre-unification era.
