BUCKING EVERY TREND AND MODERN CONVENTION, THE WINES OF EMIDIO PEPE REPRESENT ONE OF THE MOST SINGULAR EXPRESSIONS IN WINEMAKING TODAY.’ ANTONIO GALLONI
Emidio Pepe is a true legend in Italian wine – a man who set out in 1964 to make some of the best wines in the world through entirely natural and manual methods, both in the vineyard and in the cellar.
Producing wines of exquisite personality and balance, Emidio Pepe’s winemaking methods always express the nuances of vintage. The family farms 15 hectares of vineyards with some additional hectares of olive trees, all clustered around their cantina (cellar) and home, in the village of Torano Nuovo (the northern-most part of Abruzzo). All the work taking place in the vineyard is organic and now biodynamic, with the grapes hand-harvested.
A peculiarity of Pepe is that he uses exclusively cement tanks, rather than oak barrels. He sees this barrel use as a new, untraditional way to mature wine, leading to unnecessary oak tones in the wine. It is unfiltered and unfined, with sulphites forbidden; when older bottles are decanted into new ones for sale, even this is done by hand alone, refusing to use a funnel for fear of oxidation.
Such pride is taken in the wines here that should the quality of a harvest not be up to their high standards, they sell the grapes elsewhere and miss a vintage. They have plenty to fall back on however, with a stock of each vintage ever produced going back to the 1960s in a cellar containing some 300,000 bottles.
Emidio Pepe is assisted in his work by two of his daughters, Sofia and Daniela, and his granddaughter Chiara. We are very much looking forward to welcoming Chiara to the Club, to guide Members through a Masterclass dinner of these exemplary Italian expressions.
We will enjoy:
Smoked haddock & leek tart
2014 Trebbiano D’Abruzzo, Emidio Pepe
2004 Trebbiano D’Abruzzo, Emidio Pepe
Pan-fried fillet of rabbit, potato puree, olives & oven-dried tomatoes
2010 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Emidio Pepe
2007 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Emidio Pepe
Wild boar ragu, rosemary-infused creamed polenta
2001 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Emidio Pepe
1984 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Emidio Pepe
Pecorino Rosso, Parmesan
2015 Pecorino, Emidio Pepe