Winemaker Notes
Deep ruby red. Full, complex, and fine, with notes of tobacco, spices, cherry, berries, and balsamic. An enveloping palate, with elegant and persistent notes of plum, bitter cherry, strawberry jam, black pepper and licorice.
Pair with mature cheeses, truffles, and roasted red meats.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Super-elegant but really tight aglianico here with lightly peppery black fruit, colored with inky and spicy notes. With aeration, you move into the herbal zone, with fresh bay-leaf, chai and light rosemary. The palate is medium-to full-bodied and you feel all the aromas pent-up, ready to burst out. The tension here is palpable and this will need several more years before the firm tannins soften, allowing the wine to open up and flood your palate. Still be patient. Try from 2024.
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Vinous
The 2015 Taurasi Riserva Radici is elegance personified, captivating with a deeply seductive bouquet that blends black cherries, rose petals and cloves with hints of underbrush, smoky minerals and crushed ashen stone. With each tilt of the glass, it seems to grow in both volume and depth. It unleashes waves of silken textures across the palate, carrying notes of savory cherry sauce, balsam herbs and dark, dark chocolate complicated by earth tones, as red inner florals amass toward the close. While youthfully structured, the 2015 Riserva is almost impossible to put down, mixing sweet tannins with hints of tobacco and dark fruits that seem to last for up to a minute. Bury this in the cellar and reap the rewards, as this balanced beauty is a long-distance runner. The Riserva is refined for thirty months in a combination of 60% forty-eight-hectoliter casks and 40% used barriques.
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Decanter
First produced in 1986, Radici Taurasi is sourced from the upper part of the Montemarano vineyard at around 550 metres. A long maceration on the skins is followed by maturation for around 30 months in Slavonian oak barrels and French oak barriques, then a further 40+ months in bottle. More focused, concentrated and intense than Stilema Taurasi 2015, it has a powerful structure for ageing. Bloody and juicy, it reveals concentrated red and black berries on a grippy palate.
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Wine Spectator
A tightly knit and concentrated red, with firm yet creamy tannins supporting a layered range of creamed black cherry, raspberry coulis and chocolate pudding, plus details of iron and graphite, spice box and tobacco. Fresh and supple on the palate, with fine-grained tannins framing the finish. Best from 2025 through 2035. Tasted twice, with consistent notes.
Making its home in the mountainous southern Italy, Aglianico is a bold red variety that is late to ripen and often spends until November on the vine. It thrives in Campania as the exclusive variety in the age-worthy red wine called Taurasi. Aglianico also has great success in the volcanic soils of Basilicata where it makes the robust, Aglianico del Vulture. Somm Secret—The name “Aglianico” bears striking resemblance to Ellenico, the Italian word for "Greek," but no evidence shows it has Greek ancestry. However, it first appeared in Italy around an ancient Greek colony located in present-day Avellino, Campania.
A winemaking renaissance is underfoot in Campania as more and more small, artisan and family-run wineries redefine their style with vineyard improvements and cellar upgrades. The region boasts a cool Mediterranean climate with extreme coastal, as well as high elevation mountain terroirs. It is cooler than one might expect in Campania; the region usually sees some of the last harvest dates in Italy.
Just south of Mount Vesuvio, the volcanic and sandy soils create aromatic and fresh reds based on Piedirosso and whites, made from Coda di Volpe and Falanghina. Both reds and whites go by the name, Lacryma Christi, meaning the "tears of Christ." South of Mount Vesuvio, along the Amalfi Coast, the white varieties of Falanghina and Biancolella make fresh, flirty, mineral-driven whites, and the red Piedirosso and Sciasinoso vines, which cling to steeply terraced coastlines, make snappy and ripe red wines.
Farther inland, as hills become mountains, the limestone soil of Irpinia supports the whites Fiano di Avellino, Falanghina and Greco di Tufo as well as the most-respected red of the south, Aglianico. Here the best and most age-worthy examples come from Taurasi.
Farther north and inland near the city of Benevento, the Taburno region also produces Aglianico of note—called Aglianico del Taburno—on alluvial soils. While not boasting the same heft as Taurasi, these are also reliable components of any cellar.