Terre Abruzzesi / Terre d’Abruzzo IGT

The whole of Abruzzo, from the Adriatic to the Apennine watershed. It is the newest denomination in the register, protected in January 2024, and the last one written for this atlas — which is fitting, because its file is the best-argued of all of them.

Four Provinces, Described Separately Every other region-wide label in this atlas offers one paragraph for the lot. This one takes each province in turn and gives it its own geology, rainfall and heat summation. Chieti gets clay hills flanking the alluvial plains of the Foro, Sangro, Sinello and Trigno, giving rise to an undulating landscape, with broad, almost level ridges and gentle rounded slopes, but often interrupted abruptly by steep, even vertical, drops caused by the onset of advanced erosion phenomena — the calanchi. L’Aquila is the stretch where the Apennine chain reaches its maximum width, altitude and compactness, and the vine survives only in the intermontane basins: the Alto Tirino, the Valle Peligna, the Valle Subequana, the Valle Roveto.

The Winkler Index This is the only file in the register that uses one, and it uses it four times. Chieti and Pescara are given 1,700 degree-days in the inner zones rising to 2,300 on the coastal hill; Teramo 1,800 to 2,200; L’Aquila 1,600 to 2,000. The index is the accumulated warmth above ten degrees between April and October, and it is the single most useful number you can give about a vineyard climate, because it says directly what will and will not ripen. The file then does exactly that, naming the early varieties, the mid-season ones and the late.

Grape Varieties Montepulciano for the reds and Trebbiano for the whites, joined since the early 1980s by Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon and by the revived natives Pecorino and Passerina; also Cococciola, Montonico Bianco, Malvasia, Moscato Bianco and Chardonnay. Training is the traditional pergola abruzzese or a simple vertical row.

Polybius, Ovid, and a Dominican Friar The human-factors section is a bibliography, and no other file in this register attempts anything like it. It opens with Polybius on Hannibal in 216 BC, crossing and laying waste the territories of the Praetutii, of Adria, and of the Marrucini and the Frentani on his march to Apulia, through country Polybius recorded as making excellent wine. It then quotes Ovid, born at Sulmona in 43 BC, on his own birthplace: a land fertile in the ear of Ceres, and still more in grape. It cites a Venetian notarial act of August 1200 setting up a trading colleganza between Venice, Ancona, Ortona and Slavonia, with corroboration from the state archive at Dubrovnik. It quotes the Dominican Serafino Razzi, prior at Penne and then at Vasto in the 1570s, on a town shipping so much wine to Venice and across the Adriatic that although they are precious wines, they are nonetheless most of the time at a very good price. And it closes on Mario Soldati’s Vino al Vino of 1977.

What the 1897 Manual Recorded The file also cites Ottavi and Marescalchi’s trade handbook of that year, which put the province of Chieti at 670,000 hectolitres, 56 per cent red and 44 per cent white, and listed the varieties then most planted. Two of them — Solmontina and Svacanina — are no longer grown anywhere. A wine law that records what has been lost, by name, is doing something the genre almost never does.

The Critical Take None of this changes what a region-wide IGT is for. It is the vehicle for volume that the DOCs will not take, and most of what carries this name will be inexpensive Montepulciano sold by the litre. But the document behind it is the most serious in the register: real numbers, four separate climates, named sources, and an honest account of what the region grows and why. It is a strange and welcome way to end a survey of 522 registrations.

At the Table Abruzzese cooking: arrosticini of castrated mutton, maccheroni alla chitarra, brodetto from Vasto and Giulianova, lamb with saffron from Navelli, and aged pecorino cheese. Reds at 16–17°C, whites at 10–12°C.

Benchmark Producers The whole region qualifies, from the Ortona and Vasto growers on the coast to the few holding on in the Peligna basin.