Emidio Pepe
The cult of Abruzzo starts here: a family that crushes Montepulciano by foot, ages it in glass-lined concrete, and hand-decants decades-old bottles before release. Here's the house style, which vintage to chase, the one to actually drink, and how you get in.
Somewhere in a cellar in the hills of northern Abruzzo, there are bottles older than the people who'll pour them for you — and before any of them leaves, someone decants it by hand, off the sediment, into fresh glass. That single detail tells you almost everything about Emidio Pepe.
This is the estate that made the wine world take Abruzzo seriously. It sits at Torano Nuovo, up in the Colline Teramane on the cooler, northern edge of Abruzzo, and it has been quietly making some of Italy's most searching Montepulciano and, more improbably, some of its most age-worthy Trebbiano since the 1960s. When people say a region "over-delivers," they usually mean it's cheap. Here they mean something rarer: a corner of Italy long dismissed as a bulk-wine factory, growing a cult producer whose old bottles trade like grand cru.
One family, one stubborn method
The whole story is method held with almost religious conviction. Emidio Pepe founded the estate to do the opposite of what everyone around him was doing — not bigger, faster, cleaner, but slower and by hand. Grapes are de-stemmed by hand. The reds are crushed by foot. Fermentation and ageing happen in glass-lined concrete, never new oak, so nothing lends the wine a flavour the vineyard didn't. The wines go into bottle unfiltered, sediment and all, and then they wait — for years — in a cellar that doubles as a living archive of the estate's own history.
That library is the trick that sets Pepe apart. Because the family holds vast stocks of old vintages, they release wine when it's ready rather than when it's convenient, and they decant each aged bottle by hand before it ships. You can buy a decades-old Montepulciano direct from the people who made it, already mature, already opened up. Almost no one else in Italy works this way.
Most estates sell you a promise about the future. Pepe sells you the past, already delivered — a mature bottle, decanted by the family that made it.
The estate has passed down through the generations, and it's the granddaughters who now drive the winemaking, farming organically and keeping the cellar exactly as demanding as the founder left it. The look and the philosophy haven't drifted. This is continuity as a house style.
The wines
A short, uncompromising range — and each bottle argues a point.
Start with the Cerasuolo if you want the house without the wait. This is Montepulciano made as a deep, cherry-dark rosato, and Pepe treats it as a real wine, not a summer afterthought — savoury, textured, food-ready. It's the earliest-drinking door into the estate.
The Trebbiano d'Abruzzo is the shock. Trebbiano is the grape everyone loves to write off — high-yielding, neutral, the stuff of forgettable carafes. Pepe makes it into something that ages for twenty years and more: waxy, nutty, saline, deepening into honey and dried herbs with time. Taste a mature one and you'll never underestimate the grape again. It's the bottle that converts sceptics.
The Montepulciano d'Abruzzo is the flagship and the reason for the pilgrimage. Dark, brooding, built on firm tannin and dark-cherry-and-earth fruit, it can read tight and severe when young — and then it unspools over decades into something plush, spiced and profound. This is Montepulciano arguing for a seat at Italy's top table, and winning.
The setting
Altitude and cool air do the quiet work. Torano Nuovo sits inland toward the Gran Sasso, where the Apennines pull the temperature down at night — and that swing is why the wines keep their acid, perfume and nerve long enough to age for a generation. This is the Colline Teramane, the hilly northern zone recognised for the region's most serious Montepulciano. The estate is a working farm first, unshowy and family-run, with the cellar and its rows of dusty old vintages at the heart of everything.
Visiting
The family welcomes visitors, but treat the appointment as part of the plan, not an afterthought. This is a working estate up in the hills, not a walk-in cellar door — visits are guided, personal, and built around the cellar and that extraordinary library of back vintages, usually with a seated tasting that steps through the range and, if you're lucky, an older bottle. Book directly through the estate, arrange it well ahead, and confirm the current format before you travel. Abruzzo rewards the detour: this is a quieter, wilder corner of Italy than Tuscany or Piedmont, and the drive up into these hills is half the pleasure.
Can't make the trip? The wines travel better than the road does — and thanks to the estate's habit of releasing mature bottles, buying one is often the most reliable way to meet this house at its best.
What to buy
Let your patience decide. If you want to lay wine down and you've got a decade or more, buy a strong recent Montepulciano d'Abruzzo and leave it alone — it's the estate at full stretch. If you want greatness now, chase one of the estate's own older library releases, already decanted and ready. And for the wine that will genuinely surprise you, the Trebbiano d'Abruzzo is the one to open — proof that the humblest grape in Italy, in the right stubborn hands, can become something you'll remember.
Common questions
Method, mostly, and stubbornness. The reds are de-stemmed by hand and crushed by foot, fermented and raised in glass-lined concrete rather than oak, and bottled unfiltered — so nothing sands the edges off the fruit. Then the wines rest for years in a vast cellar library, and the older bottles are hand-decanted off their sediment into fresh glass before they're released. It's pre-industrial winemaking done on purpose, and it produces Montepulciano and Trebbiano that age for decades when almost everything else from the region is made to drink young.
Yes — the family welcomes visitors at the estate in Torano Nuovo, in the hills of northern Abruzzo, but arrange it ahead rather than turning up. Visits are guided walks through the working cellar and that remarkable library of old vintages, with a seated tasting. It's a family operation, not a slick visitor centre, so book directly through the estate and confirm the current format before you build a day around it.
Depends what you're doing with it. For a wine to open now, the estate's own older releases are the trick — because Pepe holds bottles back and hand-decants them, you can often buy a mature vintage straight from source rather than gambling on your own cellar. If you're laying wine down, buy a strong recent Montepulciano and forget about it for ten or fifteen years. And if you just want to meet the house without ceremony, the Cerasuolo rosato and a young Trebbiano tell you plenty.
It's one of the reference points for the movement, though it predates the label. The farming is organic, the cellar work is low-intervention — foot-crushing, concrete, native ferments, no oak, no filtration — and the wines are made with a purity that natural-wine drinkers revere. But this isn't funky-for-its-own-sake winemaking. Pepe has been doing it this way since the 1960s, long before it was fashionable, and the wines are built to be great and to last, not just to be different.
Glossary
- Montepulciano d'Abruzzo
- Abruzzo's flagship red grape and wine — deep, dark-fruited and structured, not to be confused with Tuscany's town of Montepulciano (whose wine is made from Sangiovese). At Pepe it's the age-worthy centrepiece.
- Trebbiano d'Abruzzo
- A white wine of Abruzzo that can be thin and forgettable in careless hands — and, at estates like Pepe, a profound, long-ageing wine that upends the grape's humble reputation.
- Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo
- A deeply coloured rosato from Montepulciano grapes — 'cherry-red' rather than pale pink — and a serious wine in its own right, not an afterthought.