Montepulciano wine is not from Montepulciano
Montepulciano, the dark, brooding Italian Red wine that’s going great guns in Australia" Adam Walls - Wine Selectors
Last Thursday we went out for an Italian meal with our ex 'daughter-in-law' in Ivanhoe. The restaurant was called Il Borgo. The food was pretty nice but not super, and the hosts were super friendly and informative. But the real thing that shone was the wine - a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. We thought we were being very clever ordering it, because we had been to Montepuliciano and remembered that we had had wines called Montepuliciano in Italy which had been very, very nice. And so I think we had always assumed that they came from Montepuliciano.
Not so. What comes from Montepulciano - one of those romantic Tuscan towns is a wine called Vino Nobile di Montepulciano which is actually a sangiovese. So that's enough about Montepulciano the place - lovely though it was, and the first place outside Rome that we ever visited in Italy. We were won over immediately.
The grape variety montepulciano is a very dark looking grape and it produces a very dark wine. It likes the heat being grown mostly in Abruzzo which is on the other side of Italy from Rome. Although in recent years it has spread to other areas of central and southern Italy - not to the north though. We had a wonderful week in Abruzzo back in 2016, and we probably drank this wine there. Indeed I am sure we did. Because in our ignorance we assumed that the wine called montepulciano that we drank was the same as the wine that we had drunk in Montepulciano. Which is why we chose it because we had liked that. This particular grape loves the sun and is also harvested late in the season and so Australia loves it too. Here it is called simply Montepulciano although sometimes, in true Australian tradition, just Monte. There is now a long list of montepulciano producers in Australia, some of which have won awards in various overseas wine shows.
The proper official name of the Italian version - the DOC is Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. It is the second most planted grape (after sangiovese) in Italy. Obviously there are other wines made from the montepulciano grape but the DOC for the main iteration of it is Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, which we probably didn't really pay much attention to when we were in Abruzzo. We thought it was just the montepulciano grape from Montepulciano but a version locally produced in Abruzzo. The wine can have up to 15% sangiovese in it but the bulk - 85% - must be made from the montepulciano grape. There are some other technical requirements. The rather wonderful diagram at the top of the page, by the way, is from Wine Selectors, which, on the whole, gave the best summary of the wine.
Our delicious bottle is from the Zaccagnini estate just outside the small town of Bolognano near Pescara - sort of central coastal Abruzzo. You can buy it here from Wines Direct for around $18.00 a bottle if you buy a dozen. The phrase 'dal tralcetto' that you see on the label means from the trestle, or wine of the twig. The twig being the tiny twig which is tied on to the bottle - by hand apparently and using twigs from the actual vineyard. The vineyard was established as recently as 1978 but has obviously been a huge success because it now produces 3 million bottles a year from 300 hectares - not just montepulciano of course. And of course, the bottle we had, was from their cheapest range. They also make much classier wines. The winery itself looks pretty modern and expensive. Indeed the whole place looks like a lot of money has been sunk into it. There was not a lot of information on their website about the formation of the company so I don't really know more. And they are into art as well with exhibitions being held there and a lot of art on display.
So there you go - from warm memories of beautiful Montepulciano, Tuscany to a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo in a humble Ivanhoe restaurant. Must look out for some of those Australian Montes.
