Cantina Giardino

The pesticide industrialization of Italian agriculture in the 1960s and 70s did not only damage soil and the people who worked it. It drove entire indigenous grape varieties toward extinction, because they were unsuited to high-yield conventional farming and so were torn out in favour of more obliging international plantings. Cantina Giardino is both a wine producer and an act of cultural restoration.

Working in Campania with old-vine Fiano, Greco, Coda di Volpe and Aglianico — much of it recovered from growers who had never stopped farming the old way — the cellar ferments with native yeast, ages in old wood and amphora, and adds essentially nothing. The wines are alive, idiosyncratic, and unmistakably of their place.

This is a story no mainstream wine platform has the vocabulary to tell: that clean farming here is not a lifestyle choice but the thread by which a region's genetic heritage survives at all. Free Bacchus exists to make that legible to the people who would value it.