Locorotondo DOC

The white wine of the Valle d’Itria, made in Locorotondo and Cisternino and part of Fasano, on the high ground between Bari, Brindisi and Taranto. It is one of the few Puglian denominations that has always been about white wine, in a region the world buys for red.

The Terroir The registered file names the place directly: the delimited zone is called the Valle d’Itria, the valley of the trulli. The rural landscape, it says, is characterised by the typical dry-stone walls that delimit and support the ground on which the vineyards were planted. The determining elements are the variety and a hilly environment with a hot-arid climate, and the vineyards are for the most part small. This is a karst plateau at 400 metres or so, red earth over limestone, and it is meaningfully cooler at night than the Salento below it.

The Formula The file then does something unusual and states the recipe explicitly. Two varieties predominate: Verdeca and Bianco d’Alessano. The first, it says, gives the wine its perfume and its flavour; the second gives it la stoffa e il corpo — the cloth and the body. Together, in the file’s own words, they constitute the formula for producing Locorotondo. Fiano is permitted alongside. The wine is pale straw sometimes tending to green, delicate on the nose, dry and harmonious with a slightly bitter aftertaste, at a minimum 11 per cent.

The Critical Take For most of the twentieth century the Valle d’Itria’s great virtue was that it produced enormous quantities of neutral, high-acid white that travelled north to be blended or turned into vermouth base, and the region was valued for exactly the qualities that make a wine anonymous. That trade collapsed, and what has emerged since is far more interesting: Verdeca picked for flavour rather than volume is a genuinely good grape — green almond, fennel, chalk, and a bitter close that makes it a serious food wine. Locorotondo is cheap, unfashionable, and one of the best-value whites in Italy.

Trulli The dry-stone cones that give the valley its name are the same technology as the vineyard walls: limestone cleared from the fields, stacked without mortar. There are thousands of them, and they exist because the ground had to be cleared before it could be planted. The landscape and the viticulture are the same act.

At the Table Itrian and Murgian cooking: burrata from Andria, raw sea urchins and oysters from Taranto, fave e cicoria, orecchiette with turnip tops, and fried anchovies. Serve at 9–11°C and drink the most recent vintage.

Benchmark Producers I Pàstini, the reference for serious Verdeca, and the Cantina Sociale di Locorotondo, the historic cooperative that carries most of the volume.