Astaple of pizzerias across the land, Montepulciano is a grape variety that everyone knows but few love. Despite being the second most-planted red grape in Italy, it has struggled to be taken as anything other than good-value ‘house wine’.
This panel tasting focused on Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and showed encouraging signs of progress in recent vintages. It also made it clear that picking a premium Montepulciano can be a lottery, with little evident territorial definition and the range of styles wide.
First, let us say that there is real personality in the Montepulciano variety, with its bold fruit, modest acidity and structuring tannins. The grape’s flavour profile ranges from tangy raspberry and blueberry to ripe dark cherry and fresh blackberry in warmer sites, sometimes interwoven with appealing herbal, spice and liquorice notes. It can support bottle ageing, but all of the judges felt, as Sara Bachiorri stated, that the ‘wines with fruit at the forefront were the best’.
Oak per se was not a problem for the judges: our top-scoring wine spent 18 months in barrique. Oak was only criticised when its use was clumsy and wines did not have the concentration or quality of fruit to properly integrate and absorb the wood. Unfortunately, this was widespread.
In fact, some of the most pleasurable wines had little or no oak. One of our favourites, Tenuta i Fauri’s Ottobre Rosso 2021 (see opposite), didn’t see a single stave, with nine months in concrete and time in bottle before release. Around one third of our Highly Recommended wines were aged without oak, and many more spent only a relatively short period in oak. As Bruno Besa remarked: ‘Montepulciano is versatile enough to take all sorts of winemaking styles, although producers should definitely move away from over-extracted, wood-driven styles.’
There were exciting indications that more innovative
