Emidio Pepe, Abruzzo (Italy)

Emidio Pepe with his granddaughter Chiara

Torano Nuovo, Abruzzo (Italy)
Emidio Pepe is a quite rare example of a man who developped his vineyard management and winemaking philosophy alone, beginning in 1964 with one single hectare near the nice village of Torano Nuovo. The estate which has now a surface of 15 hectares is considered on the the best of the region. Emidio Pepe's father and grandfather had been winegrowers there but like elsewhere in Europe they would sell their production to the négoce and not bottle wine themselves.
When Emidio Pepe started his own wine business in 1964 he understood quickly back then that quality paired with a very traditionnal approach both in the vineyard and the cellar. Doing so, he fought against the tide and seduction of modernity that was the only respected norm at the time and was pushing winegrowers to repeated investments in machinery and other fancy cellar equipment. He also disregarded wood and kept vinifying in neutral cement vats, ignoring another trend that was hard to resist : the push for oak, which many Italian wineries followed to accomodate the export demand in the United States even when there was no root for this type of vinification in their respective regions. Emidio Pepe, who was derided by the trade in these early years, ended up winning big, because quality always pays at the end no matter what the opportunists may think, and today as the winery is celebrating its 50th anniversary, you can feel the accomplishment reached through hard work and uncompromising work ethic.
The Pepe family as a whole takes part to this success story, including Chiara (Emidio's granddaughter) who is the best Ambassador of the winery. Emidio's daughter Sofia (pic on right) is now in charge of the winemaking and her sister Daniela also works in the winery, administration side. The third sister Stefania opened her own winery in the vicinity and she spoke also during this special weekend. I visited the winery as a guest for the 50th anniversary of the winery and can testify that this is really a family thing with all the energy and fun that Italians are famous for.

Montepulciano D'Abruzzo grapes

The Abruzzo is a very beautiful region which has remained preserved from the post-war industrialization. The landscape is similar to the one in Beaujolais, quite hilly and dotted with beautiful villages but there's a plus : an incredible view on a mountain chain with snow-capped peaks, the highest being Gran Sasso. The region has no industry but lots of pure water, the route on the Autostrade from Fiumicino/Rome (where I had the priviledge to be welcomed in person) to the Abruzzo is astonishingly short (especially when you drive at 140-150 km/hour like we did much of the way) and the trip through the mountains if short was full of gorgeous views.

I am grateful to this anonymous picker who left this small cluster of Montepulciano so that I could have a glimpse of the emblematic grape varietal of the region. But there are several types of Montepulciano and this one is the local Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. the local grape varietal has come a long way from the time it was considered minor and doomed to produce light and uninteresting wines.
When Emidio Pepe embarked on this quality work in the mid 1960s' it was considered vain by the trade and the wine-educated people because the Montepulciano wine produced in the region was considered unfit for quality and ageing. the yields had been kept extremely high for years and the wine lacked substance, it was supposed to be cheap, to be drank young and that's all. The region was looked down as a region producing jug wine but it had a great potential that Emidio Pepe was soon to expose.

I attended a conference during this press trip at Emidio Pepe and several people with deep knowledge of the story of the winery spoke including Marcello Martelli, the first journalist to have uncovered the wines of Emidio Pepe, Antonio Paolini, Sandro Sangiorgi who wrote "Manteniamoci Giovani, Vita e vino di Emidio Pepe". I'm not fluent in Italian but our small group of foreign attendees were given headphones and had live translation of the lecture. Some of what I write here can be credited to the Italian writers named above.

Emilio's granfather and grand-grandfather produced wine but after WW2 it was not easy to make a living just by selling wine, this was cheap wine sold in bulk most of the time (and then bottled in jugs). Emidio undestood that something special had to be done and at the beginning he tried to be a farmer at the forefront of innovation, he bought a versatile & multitask tractor, attended the growers union and got interested in good farming practices, but at one point he understood that keeping updated on technology and stuff was vain, you had always to reinvest in newer techniques, running after an elusive future just to sell grapes or bulk wine. After visiting Holland he understood that he had to make his own wine and bottle it [possibly because he saw the retain prices there, I'm not sure]. When he told a neighbor about his self-bottling plans the guy told him he was building a castle of cards and he rooted in his project, saying he'd build a castle of bottles...
Pic on right : ancient church structure and paintings in the basement of the cattedrale Santa Maria in PLatea (in Campli, a small town nearby).

The pergola (tendone) training

This is the 1st hectare of Emidio Pepe, he planted this Montepulciano d'Abruzzo in 1964 and he chose this local pergola traing for several reasons, like the good photosyntesis for the grapes thanks to a large foliage surface and the optimal shade protection in summer for the grapes which may explain the softer tannins in his wines.

Emidio Pepe says that in the early years after he started his winery he went to Vinitaly in Verona (Vinitaly is as old as his winery, we're now in the 19th edition) and at the wine fair he found brochures saying that Montepulciano was to be consumed young, and he decided to prove these opinions wrong by making himself very different wines, he knew that this wine was very special and could age well, all it needed was to work differently than the mainstream wineries of that time : he had reduced the yields, he tilled the ground and did long élevage, partly because he wouldn't find buyers in the area as Montepulciano was labelled a cheap wine including by the local market.

In the 1970s' the Abruzzo region organized a trip to New York for the wineries of the region to be promoted in the Italian-friendly city but he wasn't invited to join, so a few months later he went there by himself, not even speaking English. Emidio says that this was quite an adventure, he had brought a few samples. I try to imagine the thrill of Emidio walking up and down Manhattan... He went to an Italian restaurant to get help and he the man told him about a contact in Boston, where he went, but his initial $ 400 had quickly melted to 200 so he changed for simpler hotels and thus managed to stay longer with the remaining money. His first Montepulciano on a restaurant wine list in New York was to be at Felidia, a restaurant that was being opened by a young Italian woman named Lidia Bastianich. This was just the beginning of the fame of Emidio Pepe wines and New York was to be the prime market for the winery. At one point Emidio said that he was grateful to the United States and New York for having been the first to appreciate his wines and he is very proud that his hard work has been rewarded.
Pic on left : angels playing on the wall of the Scala Santa in Campli, stairs that you must climb on your knees to get yourself purified (there are only 2 or 3 such monuments in Italy). These are the stairs to go down, the other stairs have larger, more dramatic paintings.
Study (English translated from Italian) about the qualities of pergola versus trellis in the Abruzzo.

Chiara & Emidio under the pergola

I asked Emidio how he could start all this alone, resisting the pressure of the community and other farmers by keeping his objective of tilling the ground, using no sulfites in the wine and lilmiting the yields on his traditional pergola-trained vineyard. He says that no matter other people would say his goal was to work traditionally, not grow bigger like other growers did. He wanted to make a good wine using the ancient winemaking ways.

During the conference I heard Antonio Paolini says something intertesting : he said that while Italians were supposed to have brought wine and vineyards to the rest of the world along their history, things had changed over the years and in the 1980s' while there were of course good producers in Italy, people still were not fully aware of the richness they could have exploited if they worked better in particular in the vineyard, and that's what Emidio did ealier than others. Today it's well proven that using no chemical fertilizers, no herbicides, no systemic products and insteal tilling or plowing the ground is a pre-requirement to make good wine. I understand that back in the 70s' and 80s' most growers were fascinated by the magic new tools they were having access to, beginning with herbicides and fertilizers, which sort of guaranteed easy work, high yields and at the end (such was their mindset), easy money. The region of Abruzzo seemed stuck for ever in the role of jug-wine producer and Emidio understood that this was not inescapable and that it could change. Antonio also said that wine in this region was like figs in Salento : the region overflowed with figs and it was like it had no value therte, to the point that it was disregarded by locals
In this other video I asked about his tractor use and the impact of more rains in Europe (I guessed they had more rain here too these last few years). Chiara answers (she knows very well the situation herself) that in certain vineyards like this one Emidio prefers not to use heavy macinery like tractors in order not to compact the ground. Speaking of the weather she says that summer gets warmer , pushing them to lilmit the new plantings of Trebbiano (the local white varietal) and they favored the pergola system over the trellising because with the pergola the grapes get shade. The problem is that planting vines in pergola is tricky and that you don't find easily the workers able to do it.
Speaking of the rains they got lots of it for example just before the harvest. The pergola (tendone) helps in the matter of rain and humidity especially if the foliage is kept in check because there's a better aeration on the grapes (part of this I guess, being because the grapes stand very high above the ground and also there's no obstacle for the air to flow laterally under the canopy).
The grape varietals grown on the estate are Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Trebbiano and a small surface of Pecorino. The rosé wine on the right is a Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo 2013 and it is made from Montepulciano. This nice cuvée which I'd put in the Tavel family by the taste is sold in Italy only for now.

Emidio Pepe in the vat room

What puts Emidio Pepe apart is also his fidelity to the wine-friendly cement vats, you'll have no oak in his wines. That's another trend that Emidio resisted, the overuse of new oak. All around him during those years, some sort of new-worldization swept part of Europe like Bordeaux, part of Italy and Spain : the new barrels were introduced in areas where it had no documented history with the goal to please the export markets, beginning by the United States. Alice Feiring points to the issue in her book "The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization", she said that she saw the wines she used to love in Rioja, Tuscany and Piedmont devastated by the invasion of those New World, toasty flavors. The easy-to-catch aromas of new oak was pleasing the consumers worldwide and many until-then-authentic wineries changed their ways to boost their sales, but Emidio didn't, and I guess that given of the overnight riches that were created in those years (the 1980s'- 1990s') it took an iron will and an strong independant mindset to sail his route with such firmness. Now, someone said during the conference it's all the way around, it has become trendy in Italy to go back to cement vats and this, in good part because the wines Emidio produced along the years.

But while his unfiltered, unfined, SO2-free, unoaked natural wines were beginning to be appreciated in New York, at home this was another story, it was still to be an uphill battle for some time. Once a local journalist (I think it was a local TV channel) criticized his wines saying they were too expensive and not worth the expense. In an other setback with the local market, Emidio went to Il Goccetto which was among the first wine shop to open in Rome (this was after 1983 as the shop opened that year) and he was said bluntly that his wine smelled like dirty socks.... I understand why Emidio is grateful to New York and the United States, he would probably have failed if he had relied only on the national market in those early years.
You can see on the picture above the first generation of cement vats on the right (with a 22-hectoliter volume each), the ones on left being later additions made as his winery grew. They have different volumes in these newer cement vats, mostly 20, 25 and 50 hectoliters.

Newer cement vats The cement vats initially (starting in the mid-1960s') hadn't any lining inside but 25 years later Emidio opted to put a protection on the inside wall for several reasons, the inside surface was beginning to be damaged, he did also the move to prevent an excessive oxygenation, as he found out there's more breathing in cement than in wood. This was also easier to get clean because the tartaric sediments were at times tricky to get rid of. Recently on the newer cement vats like the ones above Sofia kept the rough cement as is, not adding a lining, and she'll see how it behaves before deciding. My idea is that modern cements have a thinner, tighter texture and grain, which makes the enamel coating unnecessary.
the wine will stay in those tanks without any moving or racking until the bottling time.
Everything is made by hand in this winery beginning with the picking.
the vertical presses in front are the ones used for the Trebbiano (the white). Sofia Pepe I don't remember if this was said by Emidio Pepe himself or by one of the journalists, but Emidio was granted by having only daughters (three), which could have been seen as a problem when you run a winery and rely on a son to take charge of the work when you retire. But actually this was a chance because given the will and strong views of Emidio it's very likely that there would have been confilcts between son and father. With daughters things always go smoothly especially in the father-daughter relationship and Sofia who is now in charge of the winemaking didn't experience arguments with her father about the job. Daniela (pictured on left with Sofia during the celebration for the 50th anniversary of the winery), another daughter, is in charge of the administration job from what I understand, and with Chiara on Ambassador charge this makes in the end a very feminine estate. Stefania, the other daughter opened her own winery in the area, it is also organic but somehow different in style from what I understood.

You can see on this picture several of the tools that they use : the square thing in the background on left is used to crush the white grapes (Trebbiano), the juice falling beneath.
The rectangular thing on which Sofia leans is the manual destemmer for the red : people move the clusters back and forth on the top so that the grapes separate from the stems and fall in the wooden container beneath. This is not a fermenter : when full, it will be lifted with a forklift and the grapes will be moved by hand with buckets into the cement fermenters through the large opening on the top, the maceration will take place there. The fermentation will start by itself with the wild yeast on the skins. They'll do light punch-downs twice a day but neve pumping-over in order to avoid excessive extraction and tannins. The punch-down helps keep the cap wet. tHe fermentation being made with indigenous yeast, the temperature is never very high because these yeast work more gently and smoothly, it's 24-25 ° C (75,2-77 °F) for the red and 22-23 ° C (71,6-73,4 °F) for the Trebbiano. But just in case they check the temperature at mid-depth in the grape mass to see how it's going. The cement vats (these new tanks are 10-cm thick) have also a good temperature inertia, which helps.
The maceration of the Montepulciano will last 15-20 days depending of the vintage and then they'll press and put back the free-run juice and the press juice right in the same cement vat for two years without any move. Sometimes they rinse the vats before putting back the juice but verty often they don't, it depends of how this smells. All these cement vats are made in Italy, there are two manufacturers in Italy today.

Interview with Sofia

The pursuit of quality makes that on certain years they don't make wine, says Chiara : if the vintage or tha grape quality is not fit, they'll sell the grapes to another farmer or winery and just pâss. The reason is that they want to never use additives and in certain circumstances if you want to make wine in spite of adverse condtion you would be obliged to. they never adjust the season and the wine, for example in 1999 they decided not to make wine to stick by their work ethic and no-additives philosophy.

The picture on top shows where they store the wine for bottle élevage, as this winery not only has long vat élevage but foremost an even-longer bottle élevage which I think could be a healthy inspiration for many wineries. Overall, Chiara says that they stock 50 % of the production in every vintage here in this cellar for a long élevage. When the vintage is exceptional and they feel there's a greater potential for aging they may put here 80 % of the vintage.
They keep all the vintages here, even the early ones (1960s' & 1970s') that are sold out and of which they keep a few dozen bottles as tasting samples for special occasions. They have a total of around 300 000 bottles here, stretched on more than 35 vintages, quite a nice cellar indeed... On the picture on right, the bottles at the far right are of the iconic 1964 vintage.
The wine that is stored here for long aging will be transfered (decanted) carefully bottle by bottle into new bottles with the definitive cork before reaching the market. The operation allows to get rid of the sediments (the wine being not filtered) without filtering or fining. So, the bottles you see here will not be the same ones when you buy the wine, and there'll be a new cork too, and it's all done by hand, no bottling line here. Again, given the quality of what I have tasted here there could be inspiration for wineries which I suspect ruin the potential of their wine not only by filtering but by a modern, fast bottling unit. The new cork will bear an inscription saying when the decantation (the change of bottle) took place. For example, Chiara says, when you'll open in a few months a 2011 you'll read on the cork "decanted in 2014". They don't even use a funnel to decant the wine from bottle to bottle because it would mean lots of oxygen, so they just put the tow bottles against each other and do the decanting this way. Amazing care... Speaking of the whole élevage time for an average cuvée it's indeed very long, like 8 years, with some vintages getting shorter time like the 2003. To take an example, the 2002 is released on the market only now, in 2014... They kept tasting and they decided that today it was the right time to begin release it.
Speaking of the wine which is not given this extended bottle élevage (the 20 % to 50 % of the production) it still gets a three year élevage overall (not bad for an early release...) and it's mostly the wine made from young vineyards and this wine is only released in Italy, it's not exported.
Eric Asimov's piece on Valentini, another high-value abruzzo winery.

Trebbiano vertical tasting

The following day we attended the vertical tasting of the Montepulciano, there were a few dozens of guests and we were treated with now-rare bottles that Emidio opens only in very rare occasions, and Chiara told me at one point that even for her it was very rare, she tasted certain vintages for the first time that day. let's remind that the varietal wine we were tasting that day was supposed not so long ago to be totally unfit for ageing.

Our small group of anglos (if I count myself among them for writing in English) got the priviledge to have a vertical tasting of the Trebbiano, the white wine of the winery. Let's remind that there is mostly only two cuvées at Emidio Pepe : the red, made of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo and the white, made with Trebbiano. You can see the attentive tasters around the table, among them Alice Feiring, Levi Dalton, Steve Wildy, Lisa Shara Hall, the importers Ernest & Mark from Portovino, Aaron Ascough and a couple of others I miss the name of, good company as you can see.

__ Pecorino 2010 before the Trebbiano, this is another, new white wine they're producing, it's made from a 10-year old vineyard (Pecorino varietal), making one hectare today. They're doing an experiment here too because nobody tried to age the Pecorino and they want to make a try. relatively marked color but no skin contact, but 20110 was vzery warm and they picked a bit over-ripe, that's why this color says Chiara. No tasting note here, I was adjusting I guess.

__ Trebbiano 2010, nose of white flowers, honey, with lemon edge. Mouth : very elegant and aerial. This was a beautiful vintage says Fiona with Chiara translating, lots of rain in 2010 but also lots of sun, for the red, it was one of the best vintages they produced, she adds. The red will age very well.
I'll re-taste this wine after the vertical : creamy nose, mouth : intense, with almost some tickling on the tip of the tongue, but it's just the energy of the wine. Let's remind (my thought here) that the vineyard is farmed along biodynamics and there's often more energy in the resulting wines.

__ Trebbiano 2009. Nice bitterness edge with something more austere in the mouth, I feel a more serious substance. Nice wine. Sofia says that there was a lack of sun in 2009, there was lots of rain and it brought this acidity and freshness, she says.

__ Trebbiano 2006. Also a rainy year says Sofia. I feel more a evoluted wine. Mouth : Nice power feel with elegance. Nice wine indeed. In my second sip I felt some petrol notes. They put aside many bottles of this vintage as well as of the 2004 because they think it will yield still better results after a couple more years of laying down.

__ Trebbiano 2004. Color : a bit darker (but still no wood in these wines). Aromas of unindentified minerals, maybe also a family of aroma that I think is what we call empyreumatic, very lovely wine. Nice bitterness too. Also a rainy season, Sofia says that actually this varietal loves rain, it always gives a nice structure and acidity in those adverse conditions. She says that in the warm vintages like 05 & 03 you get a nice roundness but not such a good acidity, this said, they're still enjoyable she adds, just that you need to have them with different food. She underlines also the fact that their living wines change after a few minutes in the glass and show different aromatic facets. I confirm this for their whites as with the reds, and I think the biodynamy plus the total absence of SO2 (for the reds) plays a good part. She credits the natural fermentation with the multiple families of wild yeast for the complexity and aroma diversity.

__ Trebbiano 2002. Color : more on the lemon side. What a nose ! vivid and, indeed lemon style. Mouth : superb, very enjoyable, with exotic fruits notes and a nice texture wrapped in acidity. Length. Aromas of berlingots, some sort of candy. No spitting here, the other were nice but this one stands well above. It was too acid in the beginning Sofia says but with aging it evolved beautifully, she adds that the vintage was very difficult, rainy and cold in this region. I'll say kudos to them for having done the right élevage time for this wine, we owe it certainly this superb expression in 2014.

__ Trebbiano 1995. Dark-glass bottle. Warm vintage for a change, all year long. Mouth : here I begin to feel that years have passed, the bitterness is more mature, like a beautiful older person. Another sip several minutes later : Nose of ripe fruit, nice austere mouth, very elegant. Emidio chose a dark bottle for this vintage, the same he uses for tyhe Montepulciano because he felt it could age well and had to be shielded from the light.
None of these Trebbianos got to be decanted, they rezmained in their original bottles. Malolactic is let unfold freely, they don't keep it in check, they anyway don't release the wine before 5 or 6 years and rthe wine will go through its malolactic sometime in this élevage window. Asked if in these circumstances there may be CO2 showing up, she says yes but it disappears after a while.

Pouring the 1964

The next day we had another treat, this the vertical tasting of the Montepulciano, which was considered a few decades ago if you remember as a minor wine that couldn't age, because conventional wineries of that time didn't farm and vinify the proper way.

A few dozen guests took place to this exceptional tasting beginning with the 1964 vintage, the first of the winery, and there was a conference in the same time with different people speaking like Marcello Martelli, the first journalist to have uncovered the wines of Emidio Pepe, Antonio Paolini (another wine writer), Sandro Sangiorgi author of "Manteniamoci Giovani, Vita e vino di Emidio Pepe", Alice Colantonio who also had her part in the book, Stefano who is from what I understood the gate keeper of the cellar (you can't go around him to get a bottle), and of course we heard Sofia and Emidio Pepe and Daniela as well. During the tasting Emidio sat discreetly in the back looking at the guests tasting his old vintages (you can see him in one of the videos below).

As we were having a cocktail with food outside on the terrace, the large tasting room was being prepared and as I walked briefly inside to see what they were doing I took this innocent picture (randomly, actually) of a sommelier filling glasses, which I realized only later was precisely about the first pours of the historic 1964 vintage (the glass for the 1964 was posisioned front/far left). The staff had carafed this old vintage and were filling with respect and attention the glasses of the guests. When we were called all the glasses had been poured with their respective vintage.

The bottles of the verticale

The glasses order was as such : front row from left to right : 1964 - 1975 - 1979 - 1983 - 1985
back row from left to right : 1990 - 1993 - 1998 - 2001 - 2010
We were to taste from the oldest back to the youngest wine. They insist that this wine is alive and there are differences also from bottle to bottle, they not guarantee we taste the same wines even though the respective vintages are authentic. Another important detail : the bottles we tasted have not been reconditioned in neweer bottles and new cork, we tasted the original version straight from the cellar (the cork pictured on the side above comes from another, more recent vintage tasted elsewhere).
We could see the bottles lined on the counter in the back of the room, the labels have been added for the tasting and many bottles were still dusty from their cellar years. They have only a few bottles left of several of these vintages and Sofia says that they refrain from opening them.

The Montepulciano vertical tasting

All our small group of foreigners (except Ernest and Mark wha are fluent in Italian) had headphones and two translators were relaying to keep us fed with the English version of what was said by the various speakers. We were all taking notes, in particular during the tasting part.
I took also notes of my impression in later sips long after the initial tasting as we were coming back to the different wines.

__ Montepulciano 1964. Mouth : delicate and yet intense.
Back to the wine long time after : incredible nose for a 50-year old vintage, with smoky notes. Mouth : I've tasted much younger wines that were well past their peak, this one stands well its age.
__ Montepulciano 1975. Nose : complexity, underwood notes. The nose is restrained, you feel there's something waiting behind the discretion. Mouth : striking acidity wrapped in silkiness. Good length. Very nice wine.
Back to it, later : what a nose ! opened fully, chocolate notes. Mouth : almost more evoluted than the 64. Still so good after a long time in the glass, nothing to add.
__ Montepulciano 1979. Nose : closed, not showing. Mouth : more sweetness here, wrapped in a saline feel.
Back after some time : What a beautiful tannic coating. Onctuous, just delicious !
__ Montepulciano 1983. I love the nose of this one, it's gentle, with noted of faded roses at the end of a warm day. Mouth : powerful, coats the palate with concentration, there's a sweet side, obviously glycerol.
Back after a while : Impressive nose. The mouth is deliciously delicate, I kind of improve its rating...
__ Montepulciano 1985. Nose : burnt wood, eucalyptus, laurel dry leaves or similar. Mouth : such a classy wine ! A great, great work here. and what a length. Asks for more of it, I can't stop.
Back after some time : This wine is definitely a step higher in pleasure. Great job.
__ Montepulciano 1990. Nose : reduction. Mouth : kind of weird for the 1st sip, I'll put that in the empyreumatic notes. very evoluted with still a good acidity edge.
We learn that this wine comes a long way, it was impossible to appraoch for a long time, staying closed, and finally, they say, it opened fully 2 years ago and changed for the better.
__ Montepulciano 1993. Nose : Smells underwood, mushroooms leather. Mouth : another great one ! Shows its age but with class. 3rd sip minutes later : lost something along the years.
__ Montepulciano 1998. Nose : very discreet, silent at this stage. Minutes later : high on dry leaves (eucalyptus, laurel and so on). Menthol notes maybe too as well as vanilla. This is one of the best noses I got here. Mouth : very beautiful substance, very delicate, exquisite.
__ Montepulciano 2001. Nose : closed Mouth : more simple, I feel. Nice tannic coating & chew though. Liquorice.
__ Montepulciano 2010. Nose, silent, not detectable. Swirl the glass and it begins to open, but I can't name what I smell, too faint.

__ Montepulciano 1995, an 11th glass that they pour to us as an unexpected treat. The wine is so intense in the mouth ! We all say bravo ! saline feel. One of the speakers, Sandro Sangiorgi if I remember, has a problem with this vintage, he always considered the wine too jammy and he says that he stands by his opinion. At my second sip there's indeed some orange-jam notes but that's not what I consider jammy, in the sense that with the acidity, the bitterness and this saline feel, the wine isn't overwhelmed by a jammy impression. Very nice wine.
__ Trebiano 1995, on top of that we're poured another sample, this old vintage white. Bitterness, quite an austere wine somehow, but beautifully austere. We're said that the Trebbiano stays in concrete vats all the time until bottling, no racking, no move of any kind. I kind of feel some SO2 in this wine, I think they put a bit for the whites.
All these wines are unfiltered and I think that with the fact they've been vinified without SO2 it explains why they behave so beautifully after all these years. Emidio Pepe says that racking and filtering are taking away lots of good things from the wine, it's like a well-dressed man who first would take off his coat, then his shirt and at the end you get a wine which lost all what made it worth. Sofia said at one point that she saw Emidio being very upset when they had to move wine into a stainless-steel vat because of shortage of storage vats, he said that removing the wine from its fermentation ambiance, yeat and lees, this was anathema to him, it was like separating the wine from its roots.

An Italian family

For the 50th anniversary of Emidio's winery, a big party was organized with many guests and family (and good live music). Chiara says that they're not doing this sort of thing often, this is the first of its kind but they had to celebrate the winery and Emidio's achievements.(the band in this video is Mo' Better Band). Later in the night people danced to the rhythm of the Dixie Hogs, another excellent Italian band (their facebook page).
Emidio keeps a hand at everything, helping prune the vineyard and other things, I even saw him by chance as he was walking alone into the chicken coop to give grains to the hens and geese in there. My only regret for this report is that I forgot to ask him go see his tractors in the tool barn, he has 5 of them and I'm sure I'd learnt interesting things about his habits and ways in the soil management.
Video where you can see the destemming and foot stomping job, although the commenting here is less interesting, like this comment like "there aren't many wineries doing foot stomping" or about the juice not being at risk to be spoiled because the boots are cleaned...;-)

Emidio Pepe Via Chiesi 10 64010 Torano Nuovo phone +39 0861 856493 info [at] emidiopepe [dot] com www.emidiopepe.com Bed & Breakfast (agriturismo) Emidio Pepe on Twitter Emidio Pepe Facebook page Video about this 50th anniversary (in Italian) Portovino page on Emidio Pepe

Comments

[Manuel Chiarlo]

“Giovani Manteniamoci” or, better, “Manteniamoci Giovani” is the title of the book, writenn by Sangiorgi, and not the author name! In Italian means “keep ourselves young”.

[Bert]

Thank you Manuel for the correction, I was feeling something was strange on the cover of the book, I understand better now. I have to improve my Italian...

[Owen (ReverendRiesling)]

God, I love being a winemaker. This is one of the most beautiful wineterroirs posts yet. Emidio Pepe, his family and his winery evoke the romance of wine and winemaking as much as anyone. Montepulciano D'Abruzzo at its best can grab you and stop you in your tracks. We have a couple of bottles of Emidio Pepe waiting for the right moment.

[Jack]

Wish I'd been there with you.

[Raf]

Thank you very much to talk about my region and Pepe wines; however I just want to tell you in this small region how you can see quite environmental friendly there some others amazing natural producers I hope someone bring you to see some others wineries and you short stay in Abruzzo. Good job