Luigi Maffini· Castellabate, Cilento

Cilento is wild, coastal Campania, and almost no one is making serious wine there, which is exactly why Luigi Maffini caught my attention. He planted in 1996 at Castellabate, twelve hectares of Fiano and Aglianico on clay-limestone and marine sediment, some of it nearly at sea level.

The Kratos Fiano is the wine that announces the place. The vineyards sit at around eighty metres above the Tyrrhenian, and the sea air is there in the glass, saline, Mediterranean, with the cut you want from southern white wine. It is a different register of Fiano from the cooler, volcanic hills inland.

Maffini works with restraint: a touch of new oak, light filtration, nothing that buries the fruit. For a region most buyers cannot place on a map, these are wines of genuine identity.