Who drinks the wine of the ancient Samnites?  Who sings their songs and moves to their dance?  Who reads their letters, inscribed in lintels and scratched in the doorways of Pompeii?  Who remembers these fierce tribes and Oscan, their lost language?

For much of the 4th century B.C., the Samnites and their allies marched from the Apennine mountains to threaten the peace of the early Roman Republic and savage the Greek colonies along the western shore.  In 290 B.C. they were defeated and the survivors absorbed into the Roman hegemony.  Their descendants live today scattered among the rough, secret passages of Naples and amid the poverty of the Campania hills.  But by tradition, their white wine — known to Livy and Catullus as Falerno — survives each year in the harvest of the falanghina grape.

2008 Beneventano Falanghina Vinosia.  This is a fruity, acidic, full-bodied white wine.  It tastes of melon, peaches, and fresh cut grass. It is not much like the Roman Falerno which was aged to an amber color and became bitter over time.  Today this is a classic sidewalk wine — best with a plate of shrimp, garlic and parsley on a side street in Naples or any neighborhood in Vermont.

You could drink this wine quickly on a warm night and look for a second glass.  On this theme, Catullus should have the last word:  “O, servant boy of the old Falernian wine, pour more bitter cups for me.”  Carmen 27

At Dedalus for $14.75

Tuta — an Oscan word which means “clan” or “tribe” and, in the Latin, means “safe.”