Not long ago, we offered a 2013 Taurasi from the great Salvatore Molettieri that stayed with me long after the bottle was finished. I even listed it among my Top 10 Wines of 2021 in our recently launched newsletter, and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Taurasi is one of the most historically important wine appellations in Southern Italy, and plenty of legendary vintages have come from there, but up until recently, most of the attention was focused on a single, iconic producer: Mastroberardino. Only in the late 1980s and ’90s did a new generation of producers, including Molettieri, begin to diversify and develop the region into an appellation to be reckoned with.

When I was first getting into wine, a lot of these producers were releasing some of their earliest takes on Taurasi and its intensely flavorful Aglianico grape. Many were massive in structure, which served them well with the critics, who at the time were enamored with power. Nicknamed the “Barolo of the South,” Taurasi was attracting lots of new fans, but unlike Barolo, there wasn’t much aged Taurasi for those new fans to seek out for context. But now we can find library wines like Molettieri’s 2013, which was such a hit we had to see if it was possible to go back to the well. Lo and behold, they did us one better and sent a little mini-vertical for us to try, headlined by this soulful 2012 Riserva. It's simply an epic bottle of Italian wine. What likely started out as an almost impenetrably dense red has evolved into an aromatically complex tangle of fruit, earth, flowers, and spice to rival anything coming out of Barolo. This is when you want to drink Taurasi—in fact, this wine is only just now entering its prime drinking window. There’s still a decade or more left in the tank, and there’s no beating the price for a decade-old wine of this pedigree. The wow factor is strong with this one. Take up to six bottles today and get ready for a show!

[ALSO NOTE: For the most avid Southern Italian wine aficionados, there’s a smaller quantity of the estate’s exquisitely savory 2008 “Vigna Cinque Querce” Taurasi. It takes you even deeper into the intricacies and inimitable character of the Aglianico grape. Grab up to three bottles here.]

Along with his son, Giovanni, Salvatore Molettieri now farms 13 hectares of vineyards in the Campanian village of Montemarano, including the “Cinque Querce” (“five oaks”) vineyard, which reaches to 550 meters of elevation. The cool microclimate and limestone/clay soils allow for a long, slow maturation of the late-ripening Aglianico, the harvest of which can sometimes extend into November, and the Molettieris bottle both a normale (aged 48 months in an assortment of oak casks of different sizes) and a riserva (60 months in wood) from the site. As Aglianico lovers know very well, this is a variety in which everything is turned up to 11: color, flavor, tannin, acid, body. This 2012 likely first went on sale sometime in 2018; it was likely an inky beast back then, but oh, what a difference a few years can make!

Although Sicily’s Mount Etna has lately stolen some of the spotlight, Taurasi is still the premier red wine appellation of the Italian south. It covers a relatively small cluster of hills in the Irpinia region of central Campania—about 50 kilometers east of Naples but, terroir-wise, a world away. Irpinia is the start of the climb into the Campanian Apennines, with vineyard altitudes typically averaging around 400 meters in thickly forested hillside sites (chestnut groves are another key feature of the region). The soils are a mix of calcareous (i.e. limestone) marls and volcanic deposits, and it’s the latter that the great Aglianico-based reds of the south really speak to: There’s a brooding, smoky, deeply mineral structure to Aglianico that can be downright ferocious, more forbidding in some cases than young Barolo wines from Piedmont. One of Aglianico’s distinguishing features is its nearly unrivaled concentration of anthocyanins—the phenolic compounds that intensify color pigmentation and tannin.

This is the kind of Taurasi that earned the region its “Barolo of the south” nickname—a wine that leaves no doubt that its featured grape variety, Aglianico, belongs right alongside Nebbiolo and Sangiovese on Italy’s native-grape mountaintop. But, given that the Taurasi DOCG is still playing catch-up to some of the vaunted red-wine appellations of the north, its price remains within reach. In the glass, this ’12 is a deep ruby-black, with some slight oranging at the rim. Powerful aromas of black raspberry, Morello cherry, pomegranate, leather, tobacco, wild herbs, graphite, cocoa powder, and forest floor carry over to the dense, full-bodied palate. It’s a touch more cedary and spicy—as you might expect—than the 2013, and not quite as massive in scale, lending it some appealing elegance. There are loads of smoky, savory “secondary” aromas billowing out of the glass after the wine takes on air, and the complexity and intrigue only increases the longer it’s open. This is a great time of year to pull a cork on one of these, so decant it (watching for sediment) and serve it in large Bordeaux stems at 60-65 degrees. I’m sharing the same lamb shank recipe I shared with the ’13, in case a Molettieri mini-vertical is imminent at your house. Enjoy!