Cirò claims the oldest athletic sponsorship in wine. The legend that Calabrian wine crowned returning Olympic champions is the region's founding story, and Cirò stands on the site of ancient Krimisa, the Greek settlement whose wine the story names. Few appellations anywhere can point to their ground and cite antiquity so directly.
The grape is Gaglioppo, and it confounds expectation: from seaside hills above the Ionian it gives pale, dusty, orange-peel reds — southern sun expressed as perfume and grip rather than blackness. A handful of families, Librandi foremost, carried the name through decades of anonymity, and a younger generation now works the same chalk and clay convinced that Calabria's founding story deserves its second act.