Apulia (Puglia)

Apulia is the flattest, sunniest and least mountainous region in Italy, and for a century it was Europe’s wine tank — shipping dark, alcoholic red north in bulk to strengthen thinner wines made by people who never credited it. That trade has largely ended. What it left behind is a great deal of old vine material and a region still working out what it wants to be.

The Landscape More than half the territory is flat, 45 per cent is hill and only 5 per cent is mountain; the highest points, in the Monti Dauni above Foggia, do not reach 900 metres. Eight hundred kilometres of coastline face the Adriatic to the north and east and the Ionian to the south. Apart from the Dauni, where summers are cool and winters hard, the climate is thoroughly Mediterranean — hot, dry and relentlessly sunny.

Limestone and No Water Some 80 per cent of Apulia is Mesozoic and Cretaceous limestone, and the consequences run through everything. The Murge plateau is intensely karstic, riddled with underground conduits and caves, and has essentially no rivers: water drains straight down, and boreholes sometimes have to go beyond 800 metres to find any. The name Murgia comes from murex, a sharp limestone rock. In the Salento the white limestone sits barely below the surface under a few centimetres of red earth produced by decalcification, which leaves the topsoil slightly acidic. There are no alluvial deposits anywhere in the region, because there were never any glaciers and there are no volcanoes — a simplicity of geology that is unusual in Italy.

Where Things Grow Primitivo occupies the flatter clay-sand ground over limestone along the Ionian coast near Taranto, traditionally trained as the Apulian alberello with three or four spurs, though trellising is spreading because it can be mechanised. Negroamaro and Malvasia Nera belong to the Salento around Lecce and Brindisi, on the Mesozoic platform and its arid red soils. Up on the high Murge around Alberobello and Gioia del Colle, Verdeca and Bianco d’Alessano make Locorotondo on rocky limestone that keeps the roots cool and damp. Castel del Monte, on limestone and sand, grows Bombino Bianco, Bombino Nero and Uva di Troia; Gravina sits on a marine deposit called the Calarenite di Gravina; and the largest white production is in the far north around San Severo, on clay between the Apennines, the Tavoliere plain and the limestone mass of the Gargano.

Mycenaean Merchants Apulia’s agricultural shape was set early. From the second millennium BC, Mycenaean traders from the Aegean used the long coastline and open plains to build a profitable farming economy, then handed the actual cultivation to local populations and confined themselves to the commerce, running it out of their maritime trading posts. It is a pattern — other people growing, somebody else selling — that recurs uncomfortably often in Apulian history.

The Grapes Primitivo, genetically identical to Zinfandel and named for how early it ripens, is the international calling card. Negroamaro is the Salento’s own, darker in name than in wine, savoury and bitter-edged. Uva di Troia, also called Nero di Troia, is the most structured and slowest of the three. Bombino Nero makes rosé and little else; Susumaniello, nearly extinct thirty years ago, is back. The whites — Verdeca, Bianco d’Alessano, Bombino Bianco, Fiano Minutolo — are grown mostly at altitude in the Valle d’Itria and are a great deal fresher than the region’s reputation suggests.

The Critical Take Primitivo’s global success has been a mixed blessing. A recognisable house style — very ripe, high in alcohol, faintly sweet, heavily oaked — now sells in volume and is made to a formula, and it is crowding out more interesting things. Negroamaro is the better grape and gets a fraction of the attention; Nero di Troia is better still and gets less. The genuine finds are the Valle d’Itria whites, Castel del Monte Bombino Nero, and old bush-trained alberello vineyards, which are being pulled up across the region because a tractor cannot get through them. That is the quiet loss here, and it is not reversible.

At the Table Orecchiette with turnip tops, burrata from Andria, fave e cicoria, lamb and kid roasted with potatoes, raw sea urchins on the coast, taralli, and some of the best olive oil in the world. Negroamaro with the lamb; a chilled Verdeca with anything from the sea.

Where to Start A Salice Salentino from Negroamaro rather than a Primitivo, to meet the region’s real character. Then a Valle d’Itria white, and a Nero di Troia from Castel del Monte.