The Untamables: Two Hectares, a Tufo Cave & the Sannio's Wildest Wines
In Torrecuso, on the western shoulder of Monte Taburno, Ennio Romano and Mena Iannella farm barely two hectares of old Aglianico, Fiano, Falanghina and Trebbiano — vines that reach fifty, in places ninety, years of age — and make wine in a hand-dug tufo cave beneath their house. No sulphur, no fining, no filtration, no selected yeasts: the wines are zero-zero in the strictest sense, macerated for months on their skins and released in editions of no more than 3,000 bottles a year. What began in 2011 with grapes that once went to the local cooperative has become one of the cult names of the Italian natural wine movement — free-spirited, feral, and impossible to mistake for anything else.
Origin — A Lightning Strike Over the Cooperative's Grapes
Canlibero was born, in the founders' own telling, out of an astral and somewhat devilish alignment of events. Ennio Romano and Mena Iannella both come from grape-growing families in the Sannio Beneventano, the great agricultural basin north of Naples that produces almost half of Campania's wine. Like most smallholders here, Mena's grandfather sold his grapes to the local cooperative — a long tradition of conferring fruit, and of never tasting what it became.
The turning point was a course: Ennio attended an introduction to natural wine taught by Sandro Sangiorgi, one of the movement's most influential teachers, and began to mature the idea of making wine himself. In 2011 the couple stopped selling the family grapes and vinified their first bottles in Mena's grandfather's cellar — an old tufo cave dug by hand beneath the house where they live. The project has stayed deliberately small ever since: just over two hectares, split among small parcels, worked by the two of them.
Their creed is disarmingly complete: wine should nourish the senses, the soul and the body. Everything in the vineyard and the cave is bent to that single sentence — biodynamic farming, wild fermentation, and an absolute refusal of additives. The result, as one importer put it, is wine that is free-spirited, untamable and downright vibrant: complex, never predictable, coherent with the terroir, insanely satisfying.
The Place — Taburno's Western Shoulder
Torrecuso sits on the western slopes of the Taburno massif, in the hills of the Sannio Beneventano — a landscape of limestone and tufaceous soils at around 420 metres, high enough for cool nights, dry enough for healthy skins. The parcels are small and old: Aglianico, Fiano, Falanghina and Trebbiano, with vines reaching fifty — and in some cases ninety — years, including the cherished old Aglianico parcel called Turrumpiso. The farming is organic moving steadily into biodynamics: minimal copper and sulphur, dynamised preparations, everything done by hand.
Turrumpiso — the Old Ones
The estate's emblematic parcel is Turrumpiso, an Aglianico vineyard of around fifty years that gives its name to Canlibero's most sought-after red. Old vines on limestone-tuff give small, concentrated berries — the raw material for a wine macerated long on its skins and bottled without correction of any kind.
Biodynamics, Sannio Style
Ennio and Mena work by organic principles with biodynamic preparations introduced gradually — small doses of copper and sulphur in the field, dynamised composts, hand labour throughout. The point is not certification but vitality: soils that stay alive, grapes that carry the season rather than the spray schedule.
Whites That Act Like Reds
Falanghina and Trebbiano are treated with the same long-maceration logic as the Aglianico: five months on skins for the amber Iastemma, texture and tannin in place of easy fruit. In the Sannio, where Falanghina is usually a fresh aperitivo white, Canlibero's versions are a quiet manifesto.
Deliberately Small
The whole estate produces no more than about 3,000 bottles a year. That is not a business plan failing to scale — it is the plan. Two hectares, two people, one cave: small enough that every decision is tasted, and every bottle carries its vintage unsmoothed.
Winemaking — The Cave Decides
In the tufo cave the method is as simple as the farming is strict: spontaneous fermentations on indigenous yeasts, long macerations on the skins in steel tanks and open tubs, no fining, no filtration, no additions — not even sulphur. Whites like Iastemma spend months on their skins; reds ferment wild and rest until they are ready. Nothing is corrected, nothing is standardised; the wines are bottled when the cave says so.
The range is a small constellation of characterful bottlings: Turrumpiso and Erre from Aglianico; Iastemma, the amber Trebbiano–Falanghina macerated five months on skins; Shiro and V for Vittorio among the whites; Pink Freud, the Aglianico rosato whose name tells you the couple does not take itself solemnly even as it takes the work completely seriously. There are experiments, one-offs, renamed cuvees — the range shifts with the years because the wines are allowed to.
What unifies them is energy. Tasters reach for the same words — wild, feral, electric, untamable. These are wines that let themselves be discovered sip by sip: not immediate, not polished, but gritty, mouthwatering and complex, the Sannio's limestone-and-tufo signature carried into the glass without an interpreter.
The Wines — A Few Thousand Bottles of Lightning
A small, shifting range of zero-zero wines — Aglianico reds from old vines, amber whites macerated for months, a rosato with a wink in its name — none fined, filtered or sulphured, each released only when the cave has finished with it.
Turrumpiso
Old-vine Aglianico — IGT Aglianico BeneventanoThe flagship red: Aglianico from a parcel of roughly fifty-year-old vines, fermented wild and macerated long on the skins, bottled unfiltered and unsulphured. Dark, tannic in the noble sense, savoury and long — the Sannio's great red grape stripped of every cosmetic.
Iastemma
Trebbiano & Falanghina — skin-contact whiteThe wine that made tasters sit up: a five-month skin maceration, fermented in open tubs and bottled without sulphites, clarification or filtration. Amber, slightly turbid, orange peel and white flowers over anise and honey, sapid and long — a white that drinks like a meditation.
Pink Freud
Aglianico — Campania Rosato IGTThe wink in the range: Aglianico turned rosato, wild-fermented and unsulphured like everything else in the cave. Crunchy, savoury, deliberately unserious in name and deadly serious in method — the bottle that converts sceptics at fairs.
V for Vittorio & Shiro
Trebbiano, Falanghina, Fiano — whitesThe smaller white bottlings — Trebbiano and Falanghina in V for Vittorio, Fiano and friends in Shiro — made in the same nothing-added idiom, in quantities that rarely travel far. Together with Erre, Raspone, Mephisto and Bonacreanza they form a cellar of one-offs and near-one-offs that followers chase vintage by vintage.
Legacy — The Sannio, Unfiltered at Last
Canlibero's first legacy is proof of concept for an entire province. The Sannio Beneventano is Campania's biggest vineyard, and for generations its fruit disappeared into cooperative vats. Ennio and Mena showed that two hectares of those same hillsides, left alone, could produce wines chased by natural-wine bars from Copenhagen to Tokyo — and that a grandfather's conferring vineyard could become a cult estate without changing hands, only philosophy.
The second legacy is rigour. In a category prone to vagueness, Canlibero's zero-zero discipline — nothing added, nothing taken away, ever — set a benchmark that younger Sannio producers now measure themselves against. The couple's wines taught the market that Campanian natural wine was not a softer, sunnier version of the genre but one of its most uncompromising dialects.
The third is continuity: the cave under the house, the cooperative grapes reclaimed, the old Turrumpiso vines still in production. Nothing here was imported — no consultant, no capital, no model. The untamables simply stayed home and let the place speak. Campania's natural wine movement is unthinkable without them.