Emidio Pepe is among the most singular, uncompromising and culturally significant wine producers in Italy, farming his small estate in Torano Nuovo in the Teramo hills of Abruzzo with a philosophy of absolute minimal intervention that has remained unchanged across three generations of family winemaking since the estate’s founding in 1964. The wines are produced without any additions, fining or filtration, bottled without the use of sulphur dioxide in the traditional manner and sometimes re-fermented naturally in bottle, producing wines of quite extraordinary individual character that differ profoundly from the more commercially oriented Montepulciano d’Abruzzo available at any price level. Emidio Pepe’s wines have attracted a devoted international following among collectors and natural wine enthusiasts who seek the most radical and authentically personal expression of an Italian grape variety and terroir, and his status as a living legend of Italian viticulture has made wines from his cellar genuinely irreplaceable cultural artefacts.

The 2001 vintage in Abruzzo was excellent, producing Montepulciano of outstanding natural concentration and structure, and in the specific context of Emidio Pepe’s philosophy of extended bottle ageing and minimal intervention, a 2001 now represents a wine of over twenty years of development in which the natural character of the grape and the terroir has been given complete freedom to evolve without commercial interference or stabilisation. Pepe’s Montepulciano from the oldest vines is produced from estate fruit grown on the clay and limestone soils of the Torano hills, vinified in concrete and aged in large neutral vessels before extensive bottle ageing at the estate, where bottles are often decanted and recorked before eventual release onto the market to ensure their condition.

A 2001 Emidio Pepe Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is a wine for collectors who approach Italian wine as a cultural and philosophical experience as much as a sensory one: a wine that makes no concessions to commercial convention, that challenges every assumption about how wine should be made and presented, and that in the finest cases delivers an experience of Italian winemaking authenticity available nowhere else in the country.

Garnet with an evolved, unusual and complex nose of dried cherry, iron, earth, leather, natural acidity, dried herbs, tobacco and the distinctive reductive-then-oxidative character of a wine aged without additions for over twenty years. Full-bodied with an unconventional but genuinely fascinating texture, firm natural acidity and a long, earthy, mineral finish of extraordinary individuality. Decant for at least two hours. Drink now through 2030.