Winemaker Notes
Purple-tinted dark ruby red. An elegant, profoundly aromatic and powerful wine. Red cherries, smoky dark fruit highlighted by spices. Rose, violet and licorice flavors. The wine is vibrant, fresh and invitingly smooth.
Professional Ratings
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Vinous
Intense, the 2020 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Archivio seduces with its pungent aromatic display, blending cedar shavings with balsamic spices, cooling smoke, plum sauce and grilled herbs. Soothingly round and supple, this floods the palate with ripe wild berry fruits and hints of blood orange. A web of fine-grained tannins mounts toward the close. It finishes with staining length and structure, leaving sour cherry and inner sage to linger on and on. Rating: 94+
Montepulciano is the second most planted red variety in Italy after Sangiovese, though it is achieves its highest potential in the region of Abruzzo. Consistently enticing and enjoyable, Montepulciano enjoys great popularity throughout central and southern Italy as well. A tiny bit grows with success in California, Argentina and Australia. Somm Secret—Montepulciano is also the name of a village in Tuscany where, confusingly, they don’t grow the Montepulciano grape at all! Sangiovese shines in yet another Tuscan village, here making the reputable wine called Vino Nobile di Montepulciano.
A warm, Mediterranean vine-growing paradise, in Abruzzo, the distance from mountains to seaside is relatively short. The Apenniness, which run through the center of Italy, rise up on its western side while the Adriatic Sea defines its eastern border.
Wine composition tends to two varieties: Abruzzo’s red grape, Montepulciano and its white, Trebbiano. Montepulciano d’Abruzzo can come in a quaffable, rustic and fruity style that generally drinks best young. It is also capable of making a more serious style, where oak aging tames its purely wild fruit.
Trebbiano in Abruzzo also comes in a couple of varieties. Trebbiano Toscana makes a simple and fruity white. However when meticulously tended, the specific Trebbiano d’Abruzzo-based white wines can be complex and long-lived.
In the region’s efforts to focus on better sites and lower yields, vine acreage has decreased in recent years while quality has increased.