Cantine Del Notaio

Cantine del Notaio is at Rionero in Vulture, in the province of Potenza, on the slopes of Monte Vulture in Basilicata: an extinct volcano in one of the least-visited corners of southern Italy. Gerardo Giuratrabocchetti founded the estate in 1998 with his wife Marcella. He is an agricultural scientist by training and the seventh generation of a family that has grown vines here, and the vineyards came to him from his grandfather, also called Gerardo. The name of the winery is for his father, who was a notary, and every wine is named after a notarial document: L'Atto the deed, Il Sigillo the seal, La Firma the signature, Il Rogito the conveyance.

From the beginning Giuratrabocchetti worked with Luigi Moio, professor of oenology at the University of Naples, on what Aglianico del Vulture is actually capable of. That is a serious research collaboration rather than a marketing line, and it shows in how deliberate the wines are.

The estate farms about 40 hectares spread across the best-known hillsides of the Vulture, in the villages of Rionero, Barile, Ripacandida, Maschito and Ginestra. Some of the vines are more than a hundred years old. The soils vary, from sand to volcanic debris to clay, but they share a layer of volcanic tufo underneath which holds water through the dry months; the local growers call drawing on it milking the tufo. Combine that with altitude and you get one of the latest harvests in Italy, from the middle of October into the middle of November, and in the case of Il Sigillo into December.

The cellars are the other half of the story. The wine ages in natural caves cut into the tufo rock, dated to 1600, where the temperature looks after itself without machinery.

Aglianico is the point of this estate. It is one of the two or three great red grapes of southern Italy: dark, firmly tannic, high in acidity and slow to come round. Young Aglianico can be austere; given time it becomes something closer to a good Barolo in structure than to anything else in the south. Del Notaio also make white, rosé and classic-method sparkling wines, a Primitivo, grappa and olive oil, but the Aglianico is why the name is known.

L'Atto and Il Sigillo sit at opposite ends of the range. L'Atto is the everyday bottle, made for drinking rather than keeping, and it goes out as Basilicata Rosso IGT rather than under the Aglianico del Vulture DOC. Il Sigillo is the serious one: picked absurdly late, thirty days on skins, at least two years in French oak in the caves and another year in bottle before it is released.

If you have never drunk Aglianico, start with L'Atto. If you already know it, Il Sigillo is one of the better arguments for the region I have found at the price. There is also La Firma, the estate's other top Aglianico, and the sparkling wines, which are made by the traditional method and spend four years on lees in the caves.