2017 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Archivio

Cristiana Tiberio's current releases are simply fantastic. They range from the “entry-level” 2022 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, which can outclass many of the region's best wines at a fraction of the price, to the spell-binding 2020 Colle Vota and stimulating 2021 Trebbiano d'Abruzzo Fonte Canale (reviewed in my recent vertical retrospective). In 2023, Tiberio handled the conditions of the vintage very well, turning out a mineral-intense Pecorino and a Trebbiano d'Abruzzo that may be one of the most exciting young renditions of this bottling I’ve yet tasted. However, during my July visit in 2024, Cristiana and Antonio Tiberio were coping with a strange phenomenon. The vines had stopped producing after the pergola vineyards suffered from a combination of extremely dry conditions and cold air mass swept through the region in late April. As a result, canopies were extremely small, and clusters and berries were tiny. Cristiana Tiberio explained that she would not harvest the fruit from her older vines in an attempt to help them maintain their health for the upcoming seasons. The damage is sporadic, but she assured me that no amount of rain could fix the problems at this time. That said, there will be wine from 2024 but in much lower quantities and not from her older vines. While obviously grief-stricken over the situation, Cristiana Tiberio explained, “We have suffered and overcome worse conditions when we first started out.”

Watching the Tiberio family grow along with their wines has been a great experience. All the verticals I attended of their Trebbiano, Pecorino and Trebbiano Abruzzese Fonte Canale, were eye-opening experiences that left me with paradigm shifts regarding how these varieties can age. Over the years, Cristiana Tiberio has been experimenting with different parcels and biotypes in her vineyards, which first resulted in the 2014 Colle Vota, and the inaugural release of the 2017 Archivio. Cristiana Tiberio's all-stainless-steel-refined Montepulciano d’Abruzzo seems to just keep getting better. The 2017 Archivio is the first release to see any wood refinement in the winery (30% of the juice is done in barrique). Given the incredibly difficult and warm vintage the result yielded an amazingly harmonious wine. In 2019, surprisingly, Tiberio was able to turn the 40% loss of fruit into one of the most intense and packed-full-of-potential examples of the house Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, with a Colle Vota and Archivio in the works. As for Fonte Canale, it remains one of the best whites being made in Italy today. In a region that is often backward, still enamored with the overuse of wood, pushing ripeness levels of their Pecorino into the tropical zone, and releasing more substandard Trebbiano, Tiberio is like a beacon. They are easily one of the top three producers in the region.