Abruzzo

Fifty bears, a lake that was removed, and one of Italy’s great white wines

Abruzzo is often called the greenest region in Europe. Around a third of it is protected: three national parks, one regional park, and 38 nature reserves. There are wolves in it, golden eagles, and the Marsican brown bear, of which roughly fifty survive in the world. All fifty live here, which makes Abruzzo one of the few places on earth able to claim an entire species as a local resident.

It also has one of Italy’s most planted red grapes, one of its most underestimated whites, and a rosé with an appellation of its own.

Montepulciano

The name confuses people, and reasonably so.

Montepulciano is a red grape, grown mainly in Abruzzo, which makes Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Montepulciano is also a hill town in Tuscany, which gives its name to Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, a wine made from Sangiovese and containing no Montepulciano at all. Four syllables, two entirely separate things, four hundred kilometres apart.

Professor Attilio Scienza, one of the leading authorities on Italian ampelography, has traced the grape’s parentage in the opposite direction entirely: across the Adriatic, to a Dalmatian mother and a grandmother named for the scent of roses. Whatever else Montepulciano is, it is not Tuscan.

By most counts it is Italy’s second most planted red after Sangiovese. Roughly one bottle in five made in Abruzzo carries a DOC. Most of the rest has historically left in bulk, going north to Tuscany, Piedmont and the Veneto, where Montepulciano’s colour and body were used to firm up thinner wines in difficult years. The practice was legal, ordinary, and is generally blamed for holding the region’s reputation back for half a century.

A good deal of Italian wine has been improved by Abruzzo without ever mentioning the fact.

Most vineyards here are trained on the tendone, the overhead pergola: high, wide, and shading the fruit from a sun. It suits the climate and it produces a great deal. The regional DOC still asks for only 2,500 vines per hectare as a result. The newer, smaller appellations require 4,000, which is about as clear a statement of ambition as a rulebook can make.

Given those lower yields, Montepulciano is a lovely red: deep, thickly textured, savoury, tannic enough to need a few years, dark enough to look almost black in the glass. The best go into large casks rather than barriques, which lets the fruit through instead of dressing it up.

The established DOCG is Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Colline Teramane, in the hills below the Gran Sasso. The two I would look for are smaller: Villamagna and Ortona, almost entirely Montepulciano and held to tighter rules. Neither travels much, which is precisely why they are worth chasing.

Trebbiano d’Abruzzo

Three genuinely different grapes may go into this appellation: Trebbiano Abruzzese, Trebbiano Toscano and Bombino Bianco. Not clones or biotypes, but three separate varieties. You will rarely work out from the front label which of them you have bought.

The difference is not academic. Trebbiano Toscano is the workhorse of Italian white wine, the variety the French send to Cognac to be distilled: reliable, generous, and not much given to self-expression. Trebbiano Abruzzese is another proposition altogether, and in the right hands it makes one of the most remarkable whites in Italy, wines that arrive tasting almost plain and then spend fifteen or twenty years turning into something extraordinary.

The man who proved it was Emidio Pepe, who died this July at 94, a day after his birthday. He began bottling under his own name in 1964, at Torano Nuovo in the province of Teramo, working about a hectare and a half at a time when nearly everyone around him sold in bulk. He destemmed by hand, pressed by foot, fermented in glass lined concrete, filtered nothing and added no sulphur, decades before any of that had a name or a market, and was certified biodynamic in 2006. The cellar now holds more than 350,000 bottles going back to the sixties, which is less a stock than an argument. His daughters and granddaughters run it.

Then there is Bombino Bianco, the third grape, which has a small Adriatic story of its own. It is Italian, most probably from Puglia, and it crops so generously that growers nicknamed it Pagadebit: the debt payer, because one vintage of it would settle what you owed. At some point it crossed the sea and settled in Dalmatia, where the older Croatian name for it was Puljižinac, meaning roughly “the one from Puglia,” which is admirably direct about the matter. Today Croatians call it Debit, which means exactly the same thing as Pagadebit.

Two languages, several hundred years apart, and complete agreement on the one quality worth naming a grape after. I am Croatian and I hold an Italian wine qualification, which leaves me with no obvious side to take. I have decided the grape belongs to both of us and moved on.

Pecorino

The grape, not the cheese. Both come from the same sheep country, and they share a name because, so the story goes, the sheep used to eat the grapes as they came down through the vineyards from the mountains. Some people are unenthusiastic about this explanation. It is nevertheless the one everybody tells, and I have no intention of being the person who ruins it.

The rescue happened just over the border. In the early 1980s Guido Cocci Grifoni, working in the Marche, tracked down surviving Pecorino vines in the hills near Arquata del Tronto, propagated them, and released the first modern varietal bottling at the end of that decade. In 2000 there were still only 87 hectares planted in the whole of Italy. Fifteen years later there were nearly twenty times as many, and Abruzzo had become one of the grape’s most convincing homes, with Luigi Cataldi Madonna among those who did most to make the case for it here.

The wine justifies the effort: dry, firm, properly mineral, with lemon, sage and rosemary, and a structure that catches out anyone expecting something simple. Tullum, one of the smallest appellations in Italy, was promoted to DOCG in 2019 largely on the strength of what it does with this grape.

Cerasuolo

Cerasuolo is one of very few Italian appellations reserved for it alone, and fewer still to have been carved deliberately out of an existing red DOC.

Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo takes its name from cerasa, cherry, and is made from Montepulciano. It began as a practical matter: juice drawn off the red to concentrate what was left behind, with the pink run off treated as a useful by product. For centuries that is what it was. In 2010 it was given its own DOC, separate from Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, which sounds like paperwork and is in fact the moment it stopped being something left over and became something people set out to make.

It is cherry red rather than pale, with real weight, a savoury edge and just enough tannin to hold it together. It drinks closer to a light red than to most of what is sold as rosé, and it is one of the very few pink wines I would happily open in the middle of winter, which in my experience causes a certain amount of comment at the table.

The mountains

Two thirds of Abruzzo is mountain: the Gran Sasso and the Majella, the highest of the Apennines, close enough to Rome that people arrive expecting hills and find themselves at nearly three thousand metres. Below the peaks lies Campo Imperatore, a treeless plateau on such a scale that it is known locally as Little Tibet. One road crosses it, and it is snowbound half the year.

Almost no wine is made up here. There are sheep, and there have been for a very long time. For centuries the mountain economy ran on transhumance: the sheep walking down to Puglia for the winter and back in spring along ancient droving roads, the same network that shaped Molise next door.

From which comes pecorino, and arrosticini, small skewers of mutton grilled over a long narrow charcoal brazier and eaten by the dozen. They arrive in bundles, they are counted afterwards, and the number is always higher than anyone intended.

The lake that isn’t there

Lake Fucino was once the third largest in Italy. It had no outlet, so it flooded the surrounding towns whenever it felt like it, and draining it became a project that outlasted the empire which started it.

Julius Caesar was asked to deal with it and was assassinated first, which is an unarguable excuse. Claudius took it on next: thirty thousand men, eleven years, and a six kilometre tunnel cut through limestone by hand. At the opening ceremony in 52 AD he staged a mock naval battle on the lake, then pulled the sluices in front of the crowd. The water came through too fast, wrecked the tunnel, and left the lake where it was.

It stayed there for eighteen centuries.

It was finally drained in the 1870s by Alessandro Torlonia, a Roman banker who reopened Claudius’s tunnel and took sixteen thousand hectares of water off the map. Torlonia kept the land.

An emperor did it for glory and a banker did it for property, and only one of them succeeded. The fields you drive through now are the floor of it, and they are among the most fertile in Italy, which was rather the point.

Where to go

Rocca Calascio, a ruined fortress standing alone on a bare ridge at nearly 1,500 metres, among the highest in the Apennines and, from below, one of the more startling sights in central Italy. Walk up in the late afternoon.

Santo Stefano di Sessanio, nearby, a medieval village that had almost emptied before a hotelier bought the abandoned houses and turned the whole place into an albergo diffuso: a hotel spread through a village that is still a village, with neighbours rather than a reception desk.

Tortoreto, on the northern coast, is two towns with one name: a hill town with a 9th century clock tower and a terrace looking out over the whole Adriatic, and four kilometres of beach below it behind a line of Art Nouveau villas. The name comes from tortore, turtledoves, once here in numbers sufficient to name a town after.

And the Costa dei Trabocchi, running from Ortona down to Vasto, named for the wooden fishing platforms on stilts that stand out over the water, built by people who wanted to fish without getting into a boat. The old coastal railway has become the Via Verde, forty kilometres of cycle path between the cliffs and the sea. Several of the trabocchi are restaurants now: you sit on the platform above the water and eat what has just come out of it, which is the sort of thing sold elsewhere as an experience and here has simply always been lunch.

Things that are not wine

In Sulmona, confetti: sugared almonds arranged into flowers and bouquets, made there since at least the fifteenth century and sent to weddings across Italy and well beyond. Sulmona is also Ovid’s birthplace, a fact the town mentions considerably less often than the almonds.

The saffron of L’Aquila has grown on the Navelli plain since the 13th century, has its own DOP, and stands comparison with any saffron in the world. It is produced in such small quantity that finding it outside the region is mostly luck.

And pasta alla chitarra, which is the region’s own. Sheets of egg pasta are pressed through a wooden frame strung with steel wires, cutting them into square edged strands. The guitar is a real object, it lives in the kitchen, and around Teramo it is still the first thing anyone reaches for.

Why go

Go for a week and move around. Two days in the mountains, two on the coast, the rest wherever the road looks promising. Walk up to Rocca Calascio late in the afternoon. Eat on a trabocco. Buy the saffron in the field and the confetti in Sulmona.

And leave room in the car. The famous bottles will find you anywhere; the small appellations mostly won’t leave the region on their own.

Cin Cin!