Pecorino wine goes well with pecorino cheese.

"Straw yellow color, intense nose with hints of broom, white fruits and ethereal. The palate is fresh, intense, fruity and fullbodied." Tasting notes from the vineyard

"Complex, nutty and herby with lovely pear and peach fruit, a hint of fennel and grapefruit." 2012 International Wine Challenge

This is the wine that we had at our ladies lunch at the Florentino Grill on Saturday. It was another previously unknown wine to us all. The Florentino Grill has a huge wine list and we really didn't know what to choose. So we asked the waiter for advice - we gave him a price $70-80 (their wines began at $60) and a type - something like Suavignon Blanc, but Italian. So he talked us up to $90 and suggested the above. Civitas Pecorino. And yes, pecorino is the grape type. It was really nice. And a lovely label too. And what's more it was biodynamic if you care about these things.

So when I got home I looked it up.

Pecorino grapes were almost extinct. They are native to Le Marche in the north east of Italy - well the area below Venice on a map, until somebody thought to graft them in the 1980s and it is now becoming increasingly popular. Our pecorino came from Abruzzo - from the province where we holidayed a couple of years ago. It is beautiful there. Hilly to mountainous with ancient villages perched here and there in impossible places, and no tourists. But I don't remember seeing many vineyards so I think we can't quite have been in the right area. A little further north perhaps.

Here are a couple of pictures from the vineyard website.

The wine's name - pecorino - has nothing to do with the cheese, other than the fact that they both come from the same root - pecora which means sheep. Pecorino cheese is a sheep's milk cheese. The wine, it is said, is called pecorino because the sheep used to eat the sweetish grapes as they wandered through the vineyards. Another version has it that the grapes look a bit like a sheep's head. Though looking at the picture of the grapes below, I just don't see that. They just look like yellowish grapes.

More than one site I found mentioned a resemblance to sauvignon blanc.

As for our own bottle. That is a bit more tricky. There are three names on the label - Lunaria, Orsogna and Civitas. I have tried really, really hard but cannot quite disentangle the relationships. I thought at first that Lunaria was a big company and that Orsogna was one of its vineyards with Civitas being one of the vineyard's brands. Now I'm not so sure. I now think that Orsogna is a co-operative and maybe the main player, however, if you go to the Orsogna website there is no mention of Civitas. Which is really what confuses me. It's just that lots of wine sellers and review sites seem to imply that Orsogna is the main body here. The Lunaria website on the other hand does have Civitas there and some other brands too. But I have also seen written 'Lunaria by Orsogna'. So go figure. There are no homely little stories of the owners of either of these names. Civitas is just the name they have given to their pecorino wines. Each type of grape seems to have a different name.

I saw mentioned mushrooms, Asian food and fish as suitable partners to the cheese - and yes, pecorino cheese.

And finally one more little fact. The Lunaria logo is of wolves. This is because the company supports the WWF in protecting the native wolves of the region.

"The campaign includes a petition banning the killing of the wolves and a series of actions on anti-poaching, management of stray dogs and dedicated monitoring of the species in the two regions." (Abruzzo and Calabria)

So keep an eye out for Pecorino wine. I don't think Dan Murphy has any as yet. But maybe one day soon. Maybe it's the next big thing.

And just to show how people's taste varies, here is yet another set of tasting notes. Not sure what year of course - the year didn't seem to be on the bottle either. I did notice peach and pear being mentioned quite a bit by them all.

"Think yellow melon, passion fruit, and green figs. You’ll also notice a distinct note of sage leaves (which will tempt home cooks who have an appreciation of accent herbs to finish a dish). The wine manages to maintain a rich body on par with its tactile spine of acidity." Cathy Huyghe - Forbes

POSTSCRIPT

Just as I was closing down the Lunaria website I saw another link labelled The Binding - and look at this lovely picture of locals putting on the labels and the binding around the bottle.