Winemaker Notes
Very complex wine. Intense, expressive flavors of yellow peach, sage, cedar and cinnamon, marzipan, spices and soil. A deep. long, creamy, mouthfilling texture with refined, silky tannins and a saline character. Finishes with intense energy.
Professional Ratings
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Vinous
The 2020 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Colle Vota is a spice box on the nose, with wilted violets and hints of spiced-orange, white smoke, clove and dried black cherries. It's pleasantly sweet upon entry, with a cool-toned feel and lavender-laced wild berry fruits that gain in tension and complexity as a flinty-mineral concentration forms toward the close. This resonates like liquid velvet, leaving sweet tannins offset by hints of sour citrus, finishing long and potent. The balance within is otherworldly. Rating: 96+
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.