Falernum was the great prestige wine of the late Roman Republic—arguably the first wine in history sold by vintage, cellared for decades and name-dropped in poetry. Pliny the Elder ranked it among the finest of all wines in his Naturalis Historia. Horace and Martial toasted it in verse. The legendary Opimian vintage of 121 B.C.E. was still being poured, reverentially, a century after harvest. Its price survives on a tavern wall in Pompeii: the painted list in the Thermopolium of Vetutius Placidus offers ordinary wine for one as (a copper coin), better wine for two, and Falernian for four.
Falernum got its name from the Ager Falernus, the moniker the Romans gave to the country in the northwest of Campania, in the Italian province of Caserta. It was a strong wine of up to 15 to 20 per cent alcohol and came in both red but most famously white (amber) kinds, as well as dry, semi-sweet and fully sweet versions (the latter the most highly prized). The grape varieties from which Falernum was made, white Aminea (today, Falanghina) and red Aglianico and Piedirosso, are still among Campania’s most important wine grapes grown today.
While the Falernum of Pliny and Horace may be lost to the ages, a handful of estates today on Monte Massico, a mountainous ridge between the extinct Roccamonfina volcano (about 80 km north of Naples) and the Phlegrean caldera, still trade on the name, as Falerno del Massico DOC Bianco and Rosso, fully dry white and red wines, respectively. The best modern Falerno wines differ from their storied predecessor in one important way, however: they are generally consumed neat, unlike the Romans, who mixed water with their Falernum to reduce the sting of alcohol and, presumably, prolong the party.
Beyond Falernum, Caserta today offers other intriguing and famous ancient wines that can be found practically nowhere else in the world. One of them is also mentioned by Pliny: Trebulanum, after the Roman town of Trebula Balliensis, which stood at what is now the village of Pontelatone. Pontelatone today is the centre of production for a red grape called Casavecchia, and a number of scholars believe Casavecchia is Trebulanum’s descendant. (Casavecchia traces by tradition to one surviving vine beside a ruined casa vecchia, an “old house,” outside Pontelatone.) The link can’t be proven, but the geography is exact, the vine grows essentially nowhere else on earth, and the appellation’s finest producer has quietly named his flagship bottling Trebulanum.
The revival that began in the 1990s remains tiny: a couple of dozen growers account for the world’s entire supply.
John Szabo MS
The King’s Grape
The story of Caserta’s ancient wines then jumps nearly two millennia and lands at court. In 1775, Ferdinand IV of Naples—a king far more engaged by hunting and agronomy than by governing—had his architect Luigi Vanvitelli lay out an extraordinary vineyard on the hill of San Leucio behind the Reggia di Caserta palace: a semicircle of 10 radial rows opening like a fan, each planted to a different variety of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and marked with an engraved travertine stone. The royal architect Ferdinando Patturelli, writing later in 1826, described “a semicircle divided into 10 rays, so as to resemble a fan, from which it has taken and kept its name.” It survives as the Vigna del Ventaglio—a royal research collection assembled a century before ampelography (the identification and classification of grape vines) became a science.
Two of those rays held grapes then called Piedimonte Bianco and Piedimonte Rosso—known in dialect as u pallarell, “the little ball,” for their small, perfectly spherical berries, and today as Pallagrello Bianco and Pallagrello Nero. The vineyard made some 80 barrels a year, the best reserved for the king’s table. Contemporary accounts hold that the Bourbons served pallagrello at state occasions in preference to the fashionable wines of France; Ferdinand raised a commemorative stone to the grape at Piedimonte Matese and restricted access to the vineyards where it grew.
How much further back the pallagrellos go is unprovable, as ancient viticulture always is, but the circumstantial case for 2,000 years here is strong. The vines grow nowhere else, the dialect name predates any written record, and DNA analysis confirms them as distinct, isolated varieties rather than imports—Pallagrello Bianco its own grape, long confused with coda di volpe, and Pallagrello Nero a separate variety again, not the red version of the white.
The Revival
All three of Pallagrello Bianco, Pallagrello Nero and Casavecchia had effectively vanished by the mid-20th century, and the revival that began in the 1990s remains tiny: a couple of dozen growers account for the world’s entire supply.
Pallagrello Bianco
Pallagrello Bianco makes a high-acid, herb-scented white of real precision—lemon pith, grapefruit, anise and fennel, and a cool, almost Riesling-like edge. Massimo Alois of Cantine Alois in Caiazzo, the acknowledged authority on these varieties and source of the finest examples on the market, has spent years studying the grape’s aromatic chemistry with Professor Luigi Moio at the University of Naples. His hillside cru Morrone, on rare limestone at nearly 400 metres, is aged four years before release, and sets the benchmark for the grape. Caiatì is the excellent entry point into his Pallagrello portfolio.
Giovanni Piccirillo of Masseria Piccirillo is, by his own count, the only grower in Caserta making traditional-method sparkling wine from pure Pallagrello Bianco; his Prima Gioia Brut, with three to six years on the lees, argues that the variety’s natural acidity was made for the style.
A footnote on rarity: the only Pallagrello Bianco vineyard in the Western Hemisphere is a Tuscan family’s estate in Sonoma County, California, propagated from Alois’s cuttings.
Pallagrello Nero
Pallagrello Nero is rarer still and lower-yielding, and above all a peppery wine—black pepper from warmer sites, white from cooler ones—savoury, herbal and amaro-edged, closer in spirit to alpine bitters than to any fruit-driven southern red. Andrea Granito at Sclavia farms almost 50-year-old vines on tendone, the old Campanian pergola, on the sandy volcanic flank of Monticelli; his Lucia a Monticelli, named for the daughter who runs the cellar, is the benchmark.
Casavecchia
Casavecchia is the difficult one, and yet the only one of the three with its own appellation: Casavecchia di Pontelatone DOC, created in 2011, covering about five and a half hectares in production. It ripens late, has thick skins, and suffers a chronic flowering defect that leaves clusters half-empty. “More than 50 per cent of the berries dry out and burn,” says Alois, so growers harvest a third of what the regulations allow.
The compensation is a wine of unusual silkiness and longevity that tastes of juniper and menthol rather than fruit. “I don’t think our wines lean towards fruit,” Alois says, in one of the wine world’s great understatements.
His Trebulanum ages at least three years before release, and bottles back to 2001 are still going strongly. Piccirillo’s I Calaia takes a gentler Slavonian-oak route; Sclavia’s Granito is a carbonic-style experiment—violets, juicy fruit, pleasant bitterness—proof that the grape has range still unexplored.
The case for the journey
Obscure as they are, these grapes give origin to among the most historically loaded wines in Italy. Yet almost nobody outside the province has tasted them. You’ll find the wines of Cantine Alois from time to time in Canada, yet Caserta rewards the journey on its own terms, and not just to track down these rare bottles.
The Reggia di Caserta is Vanvitelli’s masterpiece: some 1,200 rooms, a three-kilometre axis of fountains and cascades climbing the hillside, and an English garden commissioned by Queen Maria Carolina. The royal silk mills at San Leucio, beside the old fan vineyard, still weave to 18th-century patterns.
Twenty minutes west, Santa Maria Capua Vetere holds the second-largest amphitheatre of the Roman world and the gladiator school where Spartacus’s revolt began. The hilltop village of Caserta Vecchia is a near-intact medieval survival, and the Bourbon hunting estate of Carditello sits in the buffalo country behind mozzarella di bufala campana DOP.
At the table, Rosanna Marziale’s Michelin-listed Le Colonne in Caserta builds a whole repertoire around the local buffalo mozzarella, desserts included. Ten minutes from the Alois vineyards, in Caiazzo, Franco Pepe’s Pepe in Grani draws pilgrims from three continents and is routinely called the best pizzeria in the world. (Two guest rooms sit above the shop.) Naples is under an hour south, at the centre of a region with 40 one-star, seven two-star and one three-star kitchen in the 2026 Michelin guide.
That should make the case for an adventure.
Recommended wines
Here is the shortlist of wines worth hunting while there, including the Falerno del Massico DOC bottles whose lineage runs straight back to the Ager Falernus.
Falerno del Massico DOC
94 VILLA MATILDE AVALLONE Vigna Camarato 2018, Falerno del Massico DOC Rosso Riserva
Maturing but vibrant, ambitious and concentrated, with high-quality oak and excellent length—100 per cent aglianico from a historic single vineyard on Monte Massico. Best now through 2038.
93 MASSERIA FELICIA Etichetta Bronzo 2017, Falerno del Massico DOC Rosso
Rich, plush and savoury-resinous, with obvious concentration, ripe smooth tannins and plenty of life left. Aglianico and piedirosso, 24 months in French and Slavonian oak. Best now through 2036.
91 MASSERIA FELICIA 2019, Falerno del Massico DOC Rosso
Perfumed and refined, with red and black fruit, resinous scrubby herbs and a generous, warming palate. Aglianico and piedirosso, 18 months in barrique. Drink over the next two to four years.
Casavecchia
92 ALOIS Trebulanum 2021, Casavecchia di Pontelatone DOC Riserva
A pure Casavecchia from volcanic soils, dense, firm and built to last, with dark, desiccated-fruit depth and peppery length. Drink over the next decade.
90 Masseria Piccirillo I Calaia 2024, Terre del Volturno IGT Casavecchia
Deep-coloured and intensely aromatic—ripe black fruit, pepper and dried flowers—pleasantly rustic and authentic, with plenty of upfront pleasure. Pure Casavecchia aged in large Slavonian oak casks.
90 Sclavia Granito 2024, Terre del Volturno Casavecchia IGT
A carbonic-style experiment aged in stainless steel alone: violet-scented, light, juicy and pleasantly bitter, designed to be enjoyed with a light chill—proof of how much range this ancient grape still has to reveal. A terrific pizza wine.
Palagrello Nero
91 Sclavia Lucia a Monticelli 2024, Terre del Volturno IGT Pallagrello Nero
Almost 50-year-old pergola vines on sandy volcanic soil give a savoury, mountain-herb, amaro-edged red with fine grainy tannins—Pallagrello Nero at its most seductive. And 18 months in used tonneaux.
John Szabo is Canada’s first Master Sommelier and one of the best-known Canadian voices in wine. He is a principal critic for WineAlign.com and Curator-in-Chief for the WineAlign Exchange, which offers members a curated case of fine wine quarterly.
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