Aglianico (pronounced [aʎˈʎaːniko], roughly "ahl-YAH-nee-koe") is a black grape grown in the Basilicata and Campania regions of Italy. The vine originated in Greece and was brought to the south of Italy by Greek settlers. The name may be a corruption of Vitis hellenica, Latin for "Greek vine". Another etymology derives the name Aglianico from a corruption of Apulianicum, the Latin adjective which indicates the whole of southern Italy in the Roman age. In early Roman times, it was the principal grape of the famous Falernian wine which was the Roman equivalent of a First Growth wine today.

The vine was believed to have first been cultivated in Greece by the Phoceans from an ancestral vine that ampelographers have not yet identified. From Greece it was brought to Italy by settlers to Cumae near modern day Pozzuoli, and from there spread to various points in the regions of Campania and Basilicata. While it is still grown in Italy, the original Greek plantings seem to have disappeared. In Ancient Rome the grape was the principal component of the world's earliest First Growth wine, Falernian. Along with a white grape known as Greco (today grown as Greco di Tufo), the grape was commented on by Pliny the Elder, the maker of some of the highest-ranked wines in Roman times.

Gary Vaynerchuk (born November 14, 1975, in Babruysk, U.S.S.R. [presently Belarus]) is a video blogger, co-owner and director of operations of a wine retail store, and an author and public speaker on the subjects of social media, brand building and e-commerce. Vaynerchuk immigrated to the U.S. in 1978, and after graduating from Mount Ida College in Newton, MA, transformed his father's Springfield, NJ liquor store into a large scale retail wine store named Wine Library, and in 2006 started the video blog Wine Library TV, a daily internet webcast on the subject of wine, which launched his career of internet celebrity.

He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal,GQ, and Time, appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and Ellen. Vaynerchuk has been described as "the first wine guru of the YouTube era", "the wine world's new superstar", and by Rob Newsom, a Washington State wine maker, "outside of Robert Parker, probably the most influential wine critic in the United States". In the July 2009 Decanter publication of "The Power List" ranking of the wine industry's individuals of influence, Vaynerchuk placed at number 40, citing that he "represents the power of blogging".