PECORINO SUPERIORE

The Pecorino Superiore of Fontefico is the wine that the estate's owners describe as their favourite — because, as they note with characteristic candour, it has a notoriously badass attitude hard to discipline, yet it gives in the end a superlative wine that has risen to international acknowledgement. This is a confession and a recommendation simultaneously: a grape of difficult character that, in the right hands and the right terroir, produces something genuinely extraordinary.

The Fontefico estate faces the Gulf of Vasto on the Adriatic coast of Abruzzo — a position of constant exposure to the massive wind and breeze of the Adriatic Sea that gives all of the estate's wines their characteristic sapidity and minerality. The vines of the Pecorino Superiore occupy their own dedicated and distant vineyard sector within the estate, protected in their individual identity by the estate's deliberate philosophy of separating each variety to understand it on its own terms before making any production decision.

The biodynamic farming approach that governs the entire Fontefico estate — no synthetic inputs, full respect for natural cycles, minimal intervention in vineyard and cellar — gives the Pecorino grape the specific condition it requires to develop its full and often demanding character without the management interventions that conventional viticulture would apply. The result is a wine of genuine wildness that has been tamed without being domesticated.

International acknowledgements confirm what the wine demonstrates in the glass: Pecorino Superiore from Fontefico is a white of structural ambition and aromatic depth that the Adriatic sea breeze and the biodynamic coastal terroir of the Gulf of Vasto produce uniquely. Artistically labelled, this is a wine whose commitment to individual identity extends from the vineyard to the presentation.

Available through UniqueWines.