Colli del Trasimeno DOC

The hills around Lake Trasimeno, on the Tuscan border of Umbria, and the home of a grape that has been called the wrong thing for two hundred years.

The Terroir The registered file puts the lake first: the area is characterised climatically by the presence of Lake Trasimeno. It then describes the ground precisely: land given to the vine shows slopes starting from 5 per cent, on alluvial and fluvio-lacustrine deposits, followed by gentle rounded reliefs of greater relief, between 5 and 20 per cent. Trasimeno is shallow — nowhere much more than six metres deep — and it behaves like a large thermal flywheel, holding off frost in spring and cooling the nights in August.

The Tabula Cortonensis The file makes a claim few can match. Already in the Tabula Cortonensis, a document in the Etruscan language found at Cortona, explicit reference is made to quality wine production. The tablet is a bronze legal text of perhaps the third or second century BC, recording a land transaction that involves vineyards — one of the longest Etruscan inscriptions known, and among the very oldest written evidence of viticulture anywhere in Italy.

The Grape That Is Not Gamay The zone’s signature red is labelled Gamay del Trasimeno, and it is not Gamay. Ampelographic and DNA work established it as Grenache — Garnacha, and the same variety Sardinia calls Cannonau — which almost certainly arrived through Spanish or Sardinian routes and acquired a borrowed French name somewhere along the way. Growers have kept the local name because it is what the wine has always been called here, and the disciplinare permits it.

Grape Varieties Besides the Grenache, Sangiovese leads the reds with Merlot, Ciliegiolo and Cabernet alongside; Grechetto carries the whites with Trebbiano, Riesling Italico, the Pinots and Sauvignon permitted. Still, frizzante and quality sparkling wines are all registered.

The Critical Take Trasimeno has spent decades as the place people drive through between Chianti and Montefalco, and it is finally being taken seriously — largely because Grenache grown at 300 metres beside a lake produces something genuinely distinctive: pale, high-toned, red-fruited and peppery, closer to a good Côtes du Rhône village than to anything else in central Italy, with far better acidity than Grenache usually keeps. The whites are pleasant and beside the point.

At the Table Umbrian and lakeside cooking: regina in porchetta and other Trasimeno lake fish, fagiolina del Trasimeno, roast pork, and pecorino. Serve the red at 15–16°C.

Benchmark Producers Madrevite, Duca della Corgna, Pucciarella.