2018 Ciro Picariello Fiano Irpinia Campania 750 ml

Count us among the ranks of those who are obsessed with Ciro Picariello’s mouthwatering, mineral-infused Fiano Irpinia.

Take the favorite parts of your other dry whites—the waxy, honeyed notes of Loire Chenin Blanc, the vibrating acid spine of Grüner Veltliner—morphed into a volcanic rock expression of the southern Italian coast, and you’ve got a close approximation of this rockstar white, and why it commands such a fervent following.

Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate calls this a “cult winery” and wonderingly notes: “I’m not sure how Ciro Picariello and his winemaking team do it. These are some of the top wines you can find in Campania.” Vinous adds: “Ciro Picariello makes some of Campania’s most-sought after wines.”

We love Ciro’s entire line-up, but for an introduction to Campanian whites, you can’t do better than this 2018, filled with the freshness and perfume of the vintage and touched with the coolness of vineyards perched at 2,100 feet above sea-level. For a flat $20, you can nab the wine it took us years and few trips across the Atlantic to discover.

Our first taste of Ciro Picariello’s Fiano came in a blind tasting at a collector’s home in Lyon. The line-up was mostly concentrated on choice white Burgundies, but we were told that an interesting ringer had been thrown in the mix. Every bottle stunned, but there was one that we—and everyone else—wanted to drink purely for the pleasure after the intellectual exercise of working through ten complex whites.

That bottle was an earlier cuvée of this Fiano, rested a few years in the cellar, attesting to its reputation as one of Italy’s most ageworthy whites. The host had recently returned from a trip to Campania, and her passion for this wine spread like wildfire among our little group of writers, sommeliers, and collectors that evening.

The second time was in Campania, drinking this 2018, and finding ourselves falling for the younger expression just as hard, this time filled with fresh peaches, Meyer lemon, green apple, and limestone. That purity is the product of organic, family-run farming. Ciro runs the estate with his wife Rita and children Bruno and Emma, and grows the grapes for this bottling on a ten-acre vineyard in Summonte planted in 1992. Clay, loam, and sandstone soils help capture the flinty, crushed rock notes that are this wine’s trademark. The high elevation means he can harvest much later than other white varieties, allowing for full, even maturation, as cool nights coax out intensity and a seductive floral profile.

The juice sees not a hint of oak, fermented for 60 days on ambient years followed by five months in stainless steel, ensuring you get an unvarnished expression of this special terroir. Because this region still flies under the radar, you can land a charmer like this one for $20, knowing its real value is probably twice that. Can you blame us for being obsessed?