For a time, Rome rated it even above Falernian. Caecuban grew on the marshy, poplar-shaded lowlands of southern Latium, near Amyclae, and Pliny placed it at the very top of his ranking of wines — full-bodied and heady, a wine for emperors. Horace poured it at his happiest moments.
Its fall is one of the few ancient vineyard deaths we can date: Pliny records that Nero's canal works, cut through the region in the first century AD, ruined the vines, and the name never recovered. Caecuban is thus a rare thing — a named great wine whose rise and extinction are both in the written record — but like all Roman wine, its flavour is beyond recovery.