Rosso Piceno Aurora, Franco Aurora DOC 2023

Rosso Piceno Aurora,  Franco Aurora, organic wine, 100% Montepulciano, medium bodied, fruit packed and structured red, delicious natural style. Franco Aurora’s basic Rosso Piceno is encouragingly slightly cloudy in appearance. Particularly as you get nearer the bottom of the bottle. Beautifully ripe and lush fruit character oozes out on nose and palate but with no confected flavours or funkiness. We drank it slightly chilled on a very warm day with some fresh almonds and it went very well. But this is one of those superbly adaptable red wines, on a cold day in winter. It will match a hearty stew, on a late summer’s evening, it will do as an ‘Apero’ with some salami, olives and the like. I often think a wine says a lot about this one, and this wine is just as laid back as Franco!!

Franco Auroras place is at the end of a dirt track which goes past Ciu Ciu (over a million bottles a year) and arrives at a small 15 hectare farm dried out by the sun and with swooping vineyards which fall away off the hillside to the beautiful valley below.

All the vineyards are organic and Franco is starting to employ some biodynamic principles as well. The wine making has also always been non-interventionist since Franco started the estate in the mid 80s. Wild yeasts he says are the key to quality and his minimises sulphur addition too. The wines have great freshness, even the humble Falerio which has some older vine Pecorino in it is a delicious wine, a touch funky and so much better than the rest of the Falerio in the region. Franco himself is a committed natural wine maker and artisan, not intending to produce any more than his current 50000 bottles (across 7 different cuvee) even though he says he could sell his production twice over. Try these wines, they are superb.