A family in Irpinia since the eighteenth century and a company registered in 1878.

Mastroberardino is based in Atripalda, a town at the gates of Avellino in Irpinia, the inland hill country of Campania. The company says the family’s first traces in Irpinia appear in the Bourbon land register of the mid-eighteenth century, when it made Atripalda its headquarters, and that its old cellars are still there. It counts ten generations of the family since then.

The business date the company uses is 1878. That year, it says, Angelo Mastroberardino, a Cavaliere of the Order of the Crown of Italy, registered the business with the Avellino chamber of commerce and began exporting the family’s wines, first to Europe. English Wikipedia says he set up a logistics company in Rome to help sell the wines abroad. His son Michele Mastroberardino took them further: the company credits his long journeys with opening markets in North and Latin America.

The middle of the twentieth century was the hard part. The company says phylloxera and then the Second World War damaged the vineyards of Irpinia, and that growers were under pressure to give up the old varieties for more productive, lesser ones. After the war, English Wikipedia says, the business passed to Michele’s sons, Angelo, Antonio and Walter. The company credits Antonio Mastroberardino, a Cavaliere del Lavoro, as the one who held out for native grapes and designed the replanting programme that relaunched viticulture in Irpinia. It says the family was almost alone in defending that heritage until the 1990s.

The family later divided the business. English Wikipedia says a dispute between Antonio and Walter ended with Antonio keeping the Mastroberardino name and winery, while Walter took many of the vineyards and founded the Terredora estate in 1994. Today the company is led by Antonio’s son, Piero Mastroberardino, who has been at the helm since the mid-1990s and is its president, the company says.

Taurasi, Fiano and Greco, three DOCGs on one doorstep.

Mastroberardino’s vineyards are in Irpinia, which the company calls the cradle of three DOCG appellations: Taurasi, Fiano di Avellino and Greco di Tufo. Its estate list names sites across the province, among them Mirabella Eclano, Montemarano, Lapio, Paternopoli, Tufo and Santa Paolina, plus land on Vesuvius. The company presents itself as a defender of native Campanian varieties — Aglianico, Fiano, Greco, Falanghina, Piedirosso and Coda di Volpe — and says its research aims to recover the oldest and best biotypes within each.

Taurasi, made from Aglianico, is the wine most tied to the name. English Wikipedia says the house’s 1968 Taurasi Riserva drew wide attention to the region and the grape, and it credits the house’s Radici Taurasi with a leading role in the revival of southern Italian red wine. The province’s red gained DOCG status in 1993, and the two whites in 2003, Escapement magazine reported in 2017, adding that Mastroberardino had set the standard for the classic style of Taurasi in the post-war period. English Wikipedia lists Lacryma Christi from Vesuvius and Falanghina among the other wines.

The most unusual vineyard is inside an ancient city. In 1996, the Archaeological Superintendency of Pompeii asked Mastroberardino to lead a project to bring vines back to the excavations, DoctorWine reported in February 2024. English Wikipedia says researchers used casts of root cavities in the volcanic soil and studies of grape seeds to choose the varieties, settling on Piedirosso and Sciascinoso, also called Olivella; DoctorWine says Aglianico was added later. The vines are trained on stakes in the Roman manner on about 1.5 hectares inside the archaeological area. The first vintage, 2001, was bottled as the Pompeiano IGT Villa dei Misteri and sold at auction to fund the project, according to DoctorWine and English Wikipedia.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Italian wine houses from Piedmont, Sicily and Campania: Fontanafredda, Marchesi di Barolo, Planeta, Donnafugata, Feudi di San Gregorio, Mastroberardino and Cusumano. Wine houses in general sit at many different points in the trade, from families that still carry a founder’s name to estates that now belong to investors or larger groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a local wine shop to a restaurant list abroad.

A wine house’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, bought vineyards far from where it started or added new labels of its own. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its grapes are grown and its wine is made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family company, a professor-president and Stilèma.

Mastroberardino is still a family company. The firm that makes the wine trades today as Mastroberardino Società Agricola, based in Atripalda. Its president, Piero Mastroberardino, is described by the company as the tenth generation of the family to grow vines, and also as a full professor of business management at university, a novelist, a poet and a painter. Since 2011 he has published two novels, Umano Errare and Giro di Vite, and two collections of poetry, the company says. Since May 2015 he has been president of the Istituto del Vino Italiano di Qualità Grandi Marchi, the company says.

The house’s own language leans on tradition. On its history page the company argues that tradition matters as a bond of coherence and credibility for the decisions taken in each generation. Stilèma, a project the company says began around 2000, is presented by Piero Mastroberardino as a tribute to his father: it starts from clones selected in pre-phylloxera vineyards and aims to recall how Irpinia’s native grapes were made into wine between the late 1950s and the 1980s. The company also sells Ariò, an organic extra virgin olive oil. Visits and stays are run under the Mastroberardino Experience name.

The family story also explains why there are two Mastroberardino-related names in Irpinia. Terredora, founded by Walter Mastroberardino in 1994 according to English Wikipedia, is a separate company; the Mastroberardino name and the Atripalda winery stayed with Antonio’s branch of the family. In the hills above Atripalda at Sorbo Serpico, the younger Feudi di San Gregorio was founded in 1986, and Escapement wrote in 2017 that, before Feudi grew, Mastroberardino was the most important winery in the area.

For a design guide, Mastroberardino shows how an old family name, a registration date and a project inside Pompeii can carry a brand built on grapes that almost disappeared. Compare Feudi di San Gregorio, its younger Irpinia neighbour, and Antinori, the Florentine family wine house. For this guide we use Taurasi garnet, old gold and label parchment with a classical serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mastroberardino’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.