Wine producing regions of Latium & Campania

Even among the wines of Latium and Campania there was a definite “pecking order” as to quality. For example, the wines of Falernum were ranked below those from Setinum (which was the emperor Augustus' favorite) and Caecubum, but ahead of every other wine of those regions. By the mid-1st century A.D., however, the fine vineyards of Caecubum were no more, destroyed by a ship canal that the emperor Nero had constructed to link Lake Baiae to the port of Ostia (see Pliny, Natural History XIV.64).