Fiano is Rome's apianum reborn — the bees' grape, so named, the old account runs, because its sweet berries drew the apes, the bees, to the vine. It survived antiquity in the hazelnut hills around Avellino, in Campania's cool interior, and in 2003 the wine of those hills was raised to DOCG.
That it survived at all was a choice. When postwar economics said rip out the old low-yielding whites for volume, Mastroberardino kept Fiano in the ground and on the market almost alone, a stubbornness later joined by a generation of small Irpinian growers. The reward is one of the few Italian whites that genuinely improves for a decade: hazelnut, pear, acacia honey and smoke, deepening year by year.