Abruzzo

Abruzzo contains the widest gap in Italian wine between what a region can do and what it mostly does. A handful of its producers make reds and whites of thirty-year longevity; the same denominations fill supermarket shelves across Europe at four euros a bottle. Both are legitimately Abruzzo, and the distance between them is the whole story.

The Landscape Sixty-five per cent of the region is mountain, and not modest mountain: the Gran Sasso with Corno Grande, the Majella massif and Monte Amaro are the highest reliefs in the Apennines. None of it grows vines — the climate is wrong and the slopes are clay-limestone. Viticulture lives instead in the 34 per cent that is hill, and in the single per cent of coastal plain. The hills run as a series of terraces stepping down towards the Adriatic, cut west to east by valleys that leave a landscape of small plateaus and slopes facing every direction.

The Ground The geology is Plio-Pleistocene, complex in arrangement but consistent in kind. In the north, towards Marche, the hills are marine sandstones and clays; further south, marine deposits of fossil-rich clay and sand. The best sites rise from the coast towards the foothills, and in the Pescara valley, where the Popoli gorges, the Sulmona plateau and the Peligna valley meet, the soils come from broken-down sandy-clay marine successions in colours from ochre to grey, mixed with conglomerate. Above the gorges, in the basin called the Conca, the ground is the floor of a lake that dried up long ago: sandy, silty, full of coarse material and extremely dry.

Hannibal’s Soldiers The Greek historian Polybius, writing in the second century BC, is the first to praise the wine of these territories — recounting Hannibal’s victory at Cannae and noting that Abruzzese wine restored the soldiers, the wounded and the healthy alike. The region’s viticulture collapsed with the Empire and the invasions that followed it. Only a few religious houses survived, and they were too few to hold the vineyards together; in much of Abruzzo planting simply stopped for centuries.

The Grapes Montepulciano is the region — deeply coloured, soft-tannined, dark-fruited, and capable of far more than its reputation when yields are cut. It has nothing to do with the Tuscan town of Montepulciano, whose wine is Sangiovese. The white is Trebbiano Abruzzese, which is a genuinely distinct and much better variety than the ubiquitous Trebbiano Toscano it is usually confused with, and which in the right hands makes one of Italy’s most improbable long-lived whites. Alongside them, Pecorino has come back from the edge of extinction with real success, and Passerina, Cococciola and Montonico are all being taken seriously again.

The Critical Take Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo is the region’s most distinctive wine and almost nobody treats it as such. It is not a pale afterthought rosé but a deliberately made, deeply coloured cherry-red wine with grip and substance, and it belongs on the shortlist of Italy’s best pink wines. Colline Teramane was the attempt to give Montepulciano a site-specific quality tier, and it half worked. The real advice for a buyer is unromantic: with Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, more than almost any other Italian denomination, the producer matters far more than the appellation, and the difference between four euros and forty is not marketing.

At the Table Arrosticini, small skewers of mutton grilled over charcoal and eaten by the dozen; maccheroni alla chitarra cut on a wire frame; brodetto on the coast; lamb with saffron from Navelli, which is among the best in the world; and pecorino from the high pastures. Montepulciano was built for the grilled meat and Cerasuolo for everything else.

Where to Start A Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo from a serious grower, which will reset expectations. Then a Trebbiano d’Abruzzo from a producer who believes in it, and a Montepulciano with some age.