Rosso Piceno Superiore Franco Aurora 2021

Rosso Piceno Superiore Franco Aurora, organic wine, 100% Natural, 100% Montepulciano, lush, rich but very drinkable. This is a nice bottle of red! Rich but very well balanced, the oak is there, toasty and warming but good Montepulciano loves oak and so the integration is excellent. Franco doesn’t use new barrels for this wine, he is not trying to cover his wine, just to express the opulence of the variety and lushness that nature gives him with his Terroir. You can tell I love these wines, I would drink this over a pricy Montepulciano d’Abruzzo any day!

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.