The Wines of Campania: Tom Hyland Gives an Overlooked Region Its Due

Photo ©Tom Hyland 2026

 

Tom Hyland has spent the better part of five decades chasing Italian wine, and approaching 100 trips into the country to do it, so it's a little surprising it's taken this long for him to give Campania a book of its own. The Wines of Campania (Palmetto Publishing, 2026) fixes that, and it does it the way you'd want a region this misunderstood to be handled: on the ground, province by province, producer by producer.

Campania has a branding problem, and Hyland says so plainly in his introduction. Mention Tuscany or Piedmont to a casual wine drinker and they'll come up with Chianti Classico or Barolo without blinking. Mention Campania and you mostly get pizza, Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast. The wines — Taurasi, Fiano di Avellino, Greco di Tufo, and a long list of things most Americans have never heard of, like Piedirosso, Falerno del Massico and Coda di Volpe — get lost behind the tourism. Hyland's whole project here is to put the wine back in front.

The book is organized by province — Caserta, Benevento, Avellino/Irpinia, Napoli, Salerno, and the islands of Ischia and Capri — with a producer profile for nearly every winery worth knowing in each. This is where the book earns its keep. Hyland doesn't summarize producers from a press kit; he sits with them, and the text is stitched through with long stretches of direct quotation from winemakers, enologists and consultants talking through their own vineyards, their own choices, their own disagreements. The chapter working through the long-running Greco versus Fiano rivalry is a good example — he lets the producers argue it out rather than settling it for them. Same with the history of Taurasi, where Mastroberardino's decades-long role in keeping the wine relevant gets the space it deserves, alongside newer producers like Luigi Tecce who've chosen to bottle outside the DOCG altogether.

Photo ©Tom Hyland 2026

 

There's a chapter on Campanian food that's more than the usual pairing-notes filler — pizza history (Neapolitan versus the black pizza of Tramonti), mozzarella di bufala, regional dishes tied to specific ingredients like the Montoro onion — built the same way as the wine chapters, through chefs and producers talking in their own words. The appendices are useful working reference: a rundown of the region's DOC/DOCG/IGT structure, a list of 101 top Campanian wines, and 50 restaurant recommendations across the region.

Hyland is also the photographer here — he was named Wine Photographer of the Year in the Places category at the 2020 World Food Photography Awards — and the book leans on that work rather than stock vineyard shots. Gabriele Gorelli MW writes the foreword, and gets at something true about the book: Hyland is an "unassuming narrator who operates without assumptions," staying out of the way and letting the region's winemakers do the talking.

If you've spent any time with Campanian wine you already know it rewards this kind of patience. If you haven't, this is as thorough an introduction as exists in English — reference book and travelogue at once, built by someone who's clearly logged the miles to write it honestly.

The Wines of Campania by Tom Hyland. Palmetto Publishing, 2026.The book can be purchased online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

 

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