Region & History

Long before anyone here spoke of denominations, sheep set the calendar. Every twenty-ninth of September, shepherds drove their flocks down from the summer pastures of the Abruzzo toward Apulia, along broad grassy tracks called Tratturi. Some of these stretched over a hundred meters wide, so that thousands of animals could pass through without trampling the fields alongside. King Alfonso of Aragon regulated the network with fixed rules in 1447, and centuries later UNESCO declared the practice part of humanity's intangible heritage. Vines grew along these paths from the very beginning. Wherever herds rested, farmers stayed, and wherever farmers stayed, they planted.

For centuries, quality here meant one thing above all: quantity. Winegrowers trained their vines high into the air on the pergola abruzzese, a broad leafy canopy raised on posts, under which one could walk upright between the rows. Practical for harvest, but bad for the glass. The more grapes a vine carried, the thinner the color and aroma became in the finished wine. Bulk wine for quick sale was the goal, not character.

Loreto Aprutino, barely thirty kilometers from the Adriatic, showed that things could be done differently. The estate there was founded as early as 1650. But it was only Edoardo Valentini, starting in 1956, who turned it into a name still spoken in the same breath as Italy's greatest wines. He sold little and rarely received visitors. He simply let his Trebbiano and his Montepulciano speak for themselves, right up until his death in 2006. Quality over quantity had long been standard elsewhere — in Abruzzo, he demonstrated it almost single-handedly.

The authorities took longer to understand this. Montepulciano d'Abruzzo became a DOC in 1968, a state-protected designation of origin without much regard for quality, and the hills around Teramo at the foot of the Gran Sasso only got their own subzone, Colline Teramane, in 1995. In 2003 they were promoted to the first DOCG of Abruzzo, Italy's strictest classification, combining control with a guarantee of origin. Cerasuolo, the cherry-red rosé made from the same grape, had to wait even longer, running only as a byproduct of Montepulciano until 2010.

A dispute still surrounds the name today. A Tuscan town is also called Montepulciano. There, however, Sangiovese grows under the name Prugnolo Gentile, and buyers have confused the two wines for generations. It was only in 2021 that Tuscany had to change its label and make the addition Toscana mandatory. In Abruzzo, by contrast, Montepulciano was never a place name, but simply the name of the grape from the very start.