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Buyer’s Spotlight: Beyond Primitivo

Following a few days tasting southern Italian wines at the Decanter World Wine Awards, I was looking forward to finding out what more Puglia had to offer on a visit to Radici del Sud, a southern Italian wine fair organised by regional expert Nicola Campanile.

My focus was on Puglia, where winemaking land is largely flat and devoted to Primitivo. But hills and winemaking go together like espresso and sugar in Italy. The long seam of karstic limestone that runs down the westerly Murgia hills is responsible for some of Puglia’s most promising wines and here you find the untapped potential of the region.

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In northern Castel del Monte, around the town of Foggia, local producers large and small are enthused about the potential of Nero di Troia, the local variety with the usual pseudo-Greek origin story. As early-ripening Primitivo’s popularity has grown, Nero di Troia’s has waned. Where Primitivo excels at alcohol accumulation, Nero di Troia struggles with tannin structure. But increasingly sensitive winemaking, considerable investment and greater experience with the variety has led producers such as Rivera, whose Puer Apulia is a benchmark for the variety, to champion it as a future star.

But not everyone agrees that indigenous varieties such as Nero di Troia are the way forward for Puglia. Back at home in London, the focus of a recent tasting was the launch of Arso, a thoroughly convincing 100% Cabernet Franc made at Antinori’s Bocca di Lupo estate, also in Castel del Monte, amidst the Nero di Troia vineyards of its neighbours.

Bocca di Lupo champions Cabernet Franc as its flagship, counting on the established pedigree of the grape and the magic touch of Renzo Cotarella to draw attention to fine wine potential in the hills of Puglia. As Vito Palumbo from the estate says, “We wanted to produce a wine that could speak an international language but not with an international style,” and which can “challenge misconceptions and perceived limitations.” Primitivo is notably absent from the range.

Puglia has been content for decades to churn out millions of litres of appassimento red wine, mostly for Germany. Is the future of the region in super-premium Cabernet Franc, high-quality Nero di Troia, or, perhaps, something else entirely? That will depend on whether buyers and consumers are ready to move on from Primitivo. But the signs are that many producers are keen to change the conversation.

• Italian Wine
• Puglia
• Radici del Sud