Emidio Pepe make terroir wines. Wines that are a love letter to their estate, their geography, their vintage. Chiara took over from her grandfather in 2020 and having put a lot of energy into the vineyards, she is starting to feel that energy come back to her. The estate is in Abruzzo, at the narrowest point squeezed between the mountains and the ocean.

As global warming has got stuck in, summers have got warmer and warmer, and ripening has got earlier and earlier. For a lot of winemakers, the answer to this unposed question is to harvest earlier. Not for Chiara. She believes “all unripe grapes taste the same”. A simple theory with big ramifications. So she has been looking at other ways to give the fruit longer to ripen. “Shade is the best tool we have for vinification in the future”. At Emidio Pepe this means cover crops to protect soils and trees to protect the vines’ canopies.

This big thinking driving tiny details is everywhere. Every single decision has to back itself. Through the whole winemaking process, oxygen is tightly controlled and kept to a minimum. By making the wine super reductively, Chiara can then introduce oxygen by choice, and with total control. The wine rests for winter in glass-lined concrete. This happens outside for the winter so the wines have the view while keeping temperatures cool and consistent. The final detail, that really says everything, is that every bottle is decanted, by hand, before release.

Chiara believes it is a winemaker’s responsibility to release the wines only when they are really ready. She has deemed these wines ready for you, and I wholeheartedly agree.