San Ginesio DOC

Nine communes in the Macerata hills below the Sibillini, and one of the few places in Italy that makes a serious sparkling wine from a red grape without turning it pink.

The Terroir The registered file keeps it brief and puts the weight on continuity: vine cultivation here has a millenary history, going back to the time of the Roman empire. Human presence, it says, conditioned the choices of variety, growing and vinification, which evolved over time, like the sparkling-wine techniques of the native variety. The ground is the standard Marche pattern — clay and sandstone ridges between river valleys, at 300 to 600 metres, with cold air coming off the Sibillini at night.

Vernaccia Nera The grape is the point. It is a black variety, unrelated to the white grapes that share its name, and it is grown in commercial quantity in this small corner of the Marche and essentially nowhere else. The spumante requires a minimum of 85 per cent of it and may be made dry or sweet; the still red requires at least 50 per cent Sangiovese, with it, Ciliegiolo, Merlot and the Cabernets making up a further third.

A Red Sparkling Wine The sparkling version is dark, foaming and scented of blackberry and violet, and it is the local celebration wine. Made dry it is genuinely good and completely unfamiliar; made sweet it is a dessert wine that behaves like a Brachetto with more grip. The neighbouring Vernaccia di Serrapetrona holds the DOCG for the style, which is why San Ginesio is barely known even inside the province.

The Critical Take This is a small denomination in the shadow of a larger one making the same wine from the same grape, and there is no getting around it. What San Ginesio has is the still red, which Serrapetrona does not focus on: Sangiovese with a third of the black grape is a genuinely distinctive blend, giving a mid-weight red with sour cherry and a peppery, faintly bitter edge that neither grape manages alone. Production is tiny and there are very few bottlers.

The Sibillini The mountains behind the zone are the highest in the Marche and the reason the nights are cold. They are also why so little is planted: the 2016 earthquakes that struck this exact stretch of the Apennines emptied villages that were already emptying, and the agricultural recovery has been slow.

At the Table Marchigiano cooking: vincisgrassi, ciauscolo, roast lamb, and pecorino. The sweet sparkling version belongs with dry biscuits and chestnuts. Red at 16–17°C, spumante at 10–12°C.

Benchmark Producers Terre di San Ginesio at Ripe San Ginesio, working here since 2005.