Wines
Summary
Emidio Pepe founded his winery in 1964, after working alongside his father and his grandfather, which already back in 1889 where making wine at Casa Pepe. Emidio strongly believed in the great aging potential of Trebbiano and Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, and he dedicated all his energies to those two indigenous grape varietals.
The estate is located in Torano Nuovo In the most Northern part of Abruzzo, between the Adriatic sea and the Gran Sasso Mountain. This area provides the perfect microclimate to allow the vines to grow and produce grapes of outstanding quality. The clay and limestone soil go down for more than several meters, and provides the vines with a specific mineralogy- allowing the wine to have complexity and longevity.
The Pepe family continues to own and operate the estate to this day, and everything from vineyards to the cellar is done by hand. In fact, there is no electricity in the Chai. Since the first harvest they have never changed the winemaking method, still today no machines are used. The juice ferments in small concrete tanks, where spontaneous fermentation will start and go on for 30-35 days. From concrete the wine will go straight into bottle to start his long improvement in bottle.
Before any wine over 10 years old is released the bottles are re-opened and hand decanted, one by one, to remove the sediments and to check the quality of each bottle. While loosing some liquid in this process, the new bottle is quickly topped up with a second bottle of the same vintage and corked. On the cork they print the year of the decantation, so the client knows when this process of quality control has happened.
