PRIMA Notes: One of the first times I visited Napoli, I was with Chef Peter and a few others guys from the PRIMA team.  One Sunday afternoon we discovered, at the top of narrow staircase in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, one of the area’s most popular pizza restaurants.  We found a table in the middle of the action and, eventually, a crusty, mustachioed server sauntered over to proffer menus to the table and, to me, a moldering, motheaten wine list written in English.  Wine lists in these kinds of places are notoriously filled with the kinds of wines they think the tourists want, and at ‘special’ tourist prices, of course.  Even the brief perusal I gave it quickly convinced me a bottle of 200 Euro Tignanello was exactly what we didn’t want with our pizzas. While debating cold beer instead, I noted the table next to us.  I think there were eight people seated there representing, I think, at least three generations of Neapolitans and, boy were they having a great time.  Alive with a cacophony of local dialect and laughter, there were half-devoured pizzas scattered all over the table, and lots of wine too: bottles of something red and fizzy that obviously was making all that pizza go down real easy!  Handing him back the wine list, I told Signore Baffi, pointing to our neighbors, “bring us a couple of bottles of what they’re having!” Crestfallen at not being able to sell a bottle of Brunello or Super Tuscan to the tourists, he brought forth two bottles of nicely cooled, 12 Euro bottles of Gragnano for us.  Quickly popped and poured into our tumblers, we knew at last, we’d found the perfect foil for the nicely blistered, extremely flavorful pizzas that were just then arriving from the kitchen.  Gragnano, you see, is the official wine of pizza pie!  Actually the name of the small town located on the inland side of the hills that open to Amalfi Coast on the Sorrento peninsula, Gragnano is an integral part of the city of Napoli.  Besides Gragnano wine, it’s also home to Gragnano pasta, some of the most-prized in all of Italy.  That works!  The wine, usually created as a blend of several local grapes like Piedirosso and Aglianico , is dark red and slightly bubbly with blood red foam.  Packed to the brim with red and black fruits, it finishes dry and smoky.  Some call it the Lambrusco of the South.  Served young and often chilled, its crisp bubbles serve to cut the fattiness of the cheese and oil on your pizza leaving behind that beautiful smoky quality to marry with the blistered smokiness of your pie.  It’s a marriage truly made in Heaven.  Well, Napoli anyway.  The perfect wine for backyard summer fun, those of you with your own pizza ovens, or even those of you who prefer Dominos to make your pies, should have a ready supply of this on hand.  And, as proven under laboratory conditions, your Iovine Gragnano will also go very well with all sorts of backyard fare whether it be your just-coming-into-season Caprese salads or platters of smoked meats and cheese.  Heck!  It’s $19 bucks a bottle if you buy a case too!  If you want to open Tig with your pizza, well, that’s your business, this summer, mine will be with Gragnano!