Trebbiano d’Abruzzo Emidio Pepe 2021

Trebbiano Emidio Pepe 2021 natural wine, Abruzzo, no added sulphites.  Stunning mineral purity and developing complexity, delicious with cheeses or rich poultry dishes. The Trebbiano from Emidio Pepe is still a baby.  It is beautifully rich, though it also shows the yeasty youthful fruit of a young Pepe white which you know is going to develop into complexity in years to come. Natural production and generally no use of sulphur. This Iconic winery always makes beguiling wines that are a real experience to drink. The 2021 is still taught, very, very fresh, linear and mineral.  There is a delightful precision and salinity to the wine and this marks a departure from the more cidery, rustic, richer styles of previous years.  Whether this is a function of the vintage or a slight change in wine making from Chiara Pepe, we are not yet sure.  Nevertheless, the wine is superb and fantastically easy to drink.  With age this wine like all the Pepe whites will become a sublime nectar which tastes expensive and is expensive.

The great wines of Emidio Pepe have become iconic on the international market; older vintages sell for high prices and are highly sort after.

You might say 'rightly so' when you consider the labour of love that has gone into every bottle. The organic grapes are handpicked, sorted and every one pressed by foot, a practice that is very rare nowadays but still produces the softest pressing. The must is then fermented with natural yeast in large cement tanks and aged in cement for 2 years, settling naturally without the addition of sulphur. Emidio Pepe wines are then bottled and sent for ageing in the cellar. They store an incredible 40 vintages in their stunning cellar just outside Torano Nuovo in northern Abruzzo not far from the Marche border. When a bottle is sold, it is lovingly decanted into a fresh bottle by hand (hence there is no need for fining nor filtration), Emidio Pepe wines are all corked by hand and then labelled by hand! Only very rarely is any sulphur used in the production of Pepe wines and yet such is the perfection of natural balance that they age for decades.