Few countries have as long and tangled history with wine as Italy, where the wine industry has been flourishing for close to four millennia.
While small-scale winemaking had occurred thousands of years earlier, it was the Punic Wars of the 2nd century BCE that the Romans acquired the winemaking skills of the defeated Carthaginians, who were the masters of the craft in that era.
This was the time that the Roman Empire pioneered large-scale industrial wine production, as well as the art of barrel-making to transport wine to the far corners of the empire.
Jumping ahead a few thousand years to the present day, wine is grown all over modern-day Italy, with each region having its own unique characteristics.
The Abruzzo (pronounced a-brute-zo) region is in west-central Italy, bordered by the Appenine Mountains to the west and the Adriatic Sea to the east.
This rugged terrain largely isolated the Abruzzo region from the rapid changes in winemaking practices in the Roman Empire, and the Abruzzo region retains its fiercely independent nature to this very day.
Despite being a small region covered in mountainous terrain, Abruzzo produces more than 42 million cases of wine per year, making it the fifth most productive wine region in Italy. Hectare by hectare, that makes Abruzzo close to four times as productive as the more famous Tuscany wine region.
Lest you be misled into believing that Abruzzo is an undiscovered diamond in the rough, most of the reason for the high yields are because the winemakers are intentionally going for quantity instead of quality.
To produce a high-quality wine, the grapevines are heavily pruned to ensure that the vines put all their energy into producing a small number of grape clusters. In contrast, the grapevines grown for bulk table wines are barely pruned at all, letting large numbers of less-intensively flavoured grapes develop on the vine.
Here in North America, we will often see bottles labeled as Trebbiano d’Abruzzo or Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, after the two most notable grapes of the region. These are generally bargain-priced wines, but of very consistent quality.
For most of the 20th century, the Abruzzo region has been known for its inexpensively produced bulk wines, most of which were shipped out of the region to be branded as generic table wines.
Fortunately, a new generation of winemakers has been throwing off the shackles of history, opting to aggressively prune their vines in order to produce a higher quality wine. The associated reduction in yields at harvest time means that the price of each bottle will go up, but the savvy winemakers are gambling that it is easier to compete in the mid-market price point than at the bottom.
The new breed of winemakers have been switching from the ancient Roman pergola system of training the vines along high trellises to the more modern French-styled guyot system, where the vine is pruned all the way back to a single spur each winter, leaving a single green cane that is developed for the next season’s harvest.
The pergola system worked well for the ancient Romans, but produced a thin and uninspiring wine, which is why the new generation of Abruzzo winemakers are slowly adopting the French guyot system to concentrate the vine’s efforts into just one or two shoots, which produces more intensely flavoured grapes.
My favourite from the region is the $19 Illuminati Riparosso, made from the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo grape. This is a medium-bodied wine with a jammy nodes and hints of dried fig on the finish, which your humble narrator likes to pair with a traditional pizza or pasta, just to keep everything nice and Italian.
If your normal modus operandi is to wander the aisles of your local booze merchant until you see a wine bottle with a cute critter on the label, you won’t have much luck in the Italian aisle, as the wines will be labeled with the region that they were grown, and will only include the name of the grape if you are really lucky.
So look carefully, or ask the proprietor to point you in the direction of Italian wines from the Abruzzo region, and decide for yourself if the thousands of years of winemaking history has made Abruzzo the wine for your next dinner party!
