Region & History

Nearly two hundred grape seeds lay in the tomb of a Piceni chieftain near Matelica. Buried in the seventh century BC, discovered only in modern times, in the necropolis of Villa Clara alongside bronze drinking vessels. The Piceni, a people settled between the Apennines and the Adriatic, had already been growing wine for a good hundred years by then. They sold it on, from wild vines that grew in the region's forests. Of Verdicchio, no one yet knew anything.

The Romans conquered the land in the third century BC and called it Picenum. Centuries later, Pliny the Elder described the vines of this coast, and what he noted sounds like a region that had long since taken to viticulture on a large scale. The Piceni disappeared as an independent people. Their name remained, and lives on today in Ascoli Piceno and in Rosso Piceno, the region's most widely drunk red wine.

The early Middle Ages are almost entirely silent in the historical record. Then, in 1579, the word Verdicchio appears for the first time in a notarial contract from Matelica. A year earlier, the valley had passed from the rule of the Ottoni, the noble family that governed Matelica, to the Papal States. Monks settled in the Vallesina and brought order to vineyards left to run wild by decades of power struggles. Without this cleanup, the name might not have appeared on paper for another century.

Where the variety itself comes from is less clear. Genetically, Verdicchio is identical to Trebbiano di Soave from the Veneto. One theory attributes this to the plague: refugees are said to have brought vine cuttings from the north in the fifteenth century, fleeing the epidemic toward central Italy. The name itself is unspectacular. Verdicchio simply means "the greenish one," after the color of the ripe berry.

In the Middle Ages, a ring of fourteen fortified villages grew up around Jesi, built against the rival city of Ancona and amid the power struggles over Emperor Frederick II. These villages gave Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi its name. Official recognition came late: Verdicchio di Matelica became the first wine in Marche to receive a DOC in 1967, with Jesi following a year later. Both Riserva tiers were promoted to DOCG in 2010.