Cacc’e mmitte di Lucera DOC

The best name in Italian wine, and one of the strangest reds. Cacc’e mmitte is Foggiano dialect for “take out and put in”, and it describes a working practice rather than a taste: as soon as the fermenting must was drawn off the shared press, the next grower’s grapes went straight in.

The Terroir The registered file places the zone between three landforms that shape it: the mountain frame of the Daunia, the northern Bari Murgia and the slopes of the Gargano, which it says strongly determine and influence the climate. The exposure of the vineyards and the ventilated environment, it adds, give the grapes particular characters found in the typicity of the wines. This is the Tavoliere, the great plain of northern Puglia, with Lucera on a rise at its western edge where the Apennines begin.

The Blend This is what makes it worth knowing. Cacc’e mmitte is a red made with a substantial proportion of white grapes: Nero di Troia — Uva di Troia, in the file’s wording — leads, with Montepulciano, Sangiovese and Malvasia Nera among the reds, and then Bombino Bianco, Trebbiano and Malvasia Bianca co-fermented in at up to roughly a third of the blend. It is a field blend written into law, and it produces a red that is lighter, higher in acid and more perfumed than anything else in Puglia.

The Communal Press The name preserves an economic fact. Small growers around Lucera could not each own a press, so one was shared and run continuously through the vintage — hence the hurry, hence the co-fermentation of whatever was picked that day, hence a wine designed to be drunk young because it was never made to keep. Very few denominations are named after a piece of logistics.

The Critical Take Cacc’e mmitte has almost vanished, and it is worth saving. Production is minute and the wine has no market: a medium-bodied, sour-cherry-and-herb red from a region that sells power and sweetness, with a name no export buyer can pronounce or spell. Drunk on its own terms it is excellent — genuinely refreshing, fine-tannined and about 12 or 13 degrees, which is remarkable for the latitude. The white component is the reason.

Lucera The town is the other reason to come. Frederick II settled twenty thousand Sicilian Muslims here in the 1220s, creating a Saracen colony inside the Papal orbit that lasted eighty years until it was destroyed in 1300. His enormous castle, and the Roman amphitheatre below it, still stand above the vineyards.

At the Table Dauno cooking: orecchiette with turnip tops, lamb, troccoli, roast peppers, and caciocavallo podolico. Serve at 15–16°C, cooler than a Puglian red usually asks.

Benchmark Producers Alberto Longo and Paolo Petrilli, both at Lucera.