Casauria DOCG

The most convincing argument that Montepulciano d’Abruzzo can be a serious wine rather than a reliable one. Casauria occupies the Pescara river valley in the province of Pescara, around the communes of Tocco da Casauria, Bolognano and Popoli, and takes its name from the Abbey of San Clemente a Casauria, founded in 871 and one of the great Romanesque buildings of central Italy. It spent years as a named sub-zone of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo before being recognised in its own right.

The Terroir The valley is a corridor between two mountain masses — the Maiella to the south and the Gran Sasso to the north — and the wines are shaped by what that does to the air. Cold currents fall off both massifs at night through the ripening season, producing a diurnal range unusual this far south and holding acidity in a variety that loses it easily. Soils are calcareous clay and gravel on terraces above the river, poorer and stonier than the deep clays of the Abruzzese plain. Vineyards sit around 200–400 metres.

Grape Varieties Montepulciano, the same variety as the wider Montepulciano d’Abruzzo DOC and unrelated to the Tuscan town of Montepulciano, whose wine is Sangiovese. Montepulciano is late-ripening, thick-skinned, deeply pigmented and naturally high in both tannin and colour; in warm flat sites it reaches sugar long before its tannins are ready, which is the root of the region’s reputation for soft, jammy reds. Casauria is where that problem is solved by geography.

The Critical Take The Casauria wines are darker, firmer and considerably more structured than Montepulciano d’Abruzzo generally, with black fruit, dried herb and a genuine mineral bite rather than the sweet plumminess the grape usually gives. They need time: young bottles are tight and tannic, and the best of them are still improving at ten to fifteen years. The zone is tiny and the number of estates working it seriously is smaller still, which is both its charm and the reason nobody outside Italy has heard of it.

At the Table Abruzzese cooking, which is meat-led and direct: arrosticini, roast lamb, wild boar, sausage, and the aged pecorino of the interior. The structure also makes it one of the better southern Italian reds for game. Decant a young bottle an hour ahead and serve at 17–18°C.

Benchmark Producers Valle Reale, the estate most identified with the zone, alongside a small group of neighbouring growers.