Pergola DOC

Five communes in the Cesano valley of the Marche — Pergola, Fratte Rosa, Frontone, Serra Sant’Abbondio and San Lorenzo in Campo — making wine from Aleatico. What makes it unusual is that here the grape is taken seriously as a dry red, which happens almost nowhere else.

The History The registered file dates vine cultivation in the territory to around the year 1200, notes that the production of frizzante and sparkling wines is documented by numerous ancient writings, and records that the passito is a tradition of the territory handed down from generation to generation. It credits human intervention as fundamental to the evolution of both growing and winemaking here — a fair claim for a zone that kept a variety alive for no obvious commercial reason.

The Vernaccia That Wasn’t For generations the grape was grown here under a borrowed name: growers called it a Vernaccia, a word that properly belongs to quite different varieties elsewhere in Italy. Ampelographic work established that it is nothing of the kind — it is a clone of Aleatico, a red member of the Muscat family. The denomination was written around the corrected identity, and one of the valley’s oldest estates still maintains the historic vine. It is a good illustration of how little Italian grape names could be trusted before DNA work.

The Terroir The Cesano rises in the Apennines and runs north-east to the Adriatic; the vineyards sit on its middle reaches on clay and calcareous hills, between roughly 200 and 500 metres, with cool nights coming down the valley off the Catria massif. That altitude is what allows a Muscat-family red to hold acidity and stay perfumed rather than turning jammy.

Grape Varieties Aleatico. The file registers an unusually wide set of expressions from one grape: a still rosso, a rosé, a superiore, a frizzante, a quality sparkling wine and a passito.

The Critical Take Dry Aleatico is a genuine curiosity and, done properly, a delight: pale to medium ruby, scented of rose, wild strawberry and orange peel, light in tannin, drinkable cold. It reads like a Muscat that forgot to be sweet. The passito is the traditional wine and the more serious one. Almost nobody outside the Marche has heard of any of it, and there are perhaps a handful of producers.

Aleatico’s Map The grape survives commercially in four places, and the site now carries three of them: Pergola in the Marche, Gradoli above Lake Bolsena, and Elba, where the passito is a DOCG. Pergola is the outlier, because it is the only one where the wine is normally dry.

At the Table Marchigiano cooking: vincisgrassi, roast rabbit, casciotta d’Urbino, cured meats, and grilled vegetables. Serve the dry red cool, 14–15°C; the passito at 12–14°C.

Benchmark Producers Villa Ligi and Rovelli at Pergola, and Terracruda at Fratte Rosa.