2021 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Vecchie Vigne Branella

Chiara De Iulis Pepe, Emidio Pepe’s granddaughter, head winemaker and viticulturist at the Emidio Pepe winery, continues to make small and thought-out changes to production processes. Respecting her family's history and everything that came before, De Iulis Pepe is determined to continue the legacy of Emidio Pepe without stripping away the magic that her grandfather imparted into all his wines. The new challenges with each vintage inspire her to learn from producers worldwide and better understand how to cope with warming trends, drought and Peronospora. In the coming years, the Pepe family will begin the construction of a new cellar outfitted with temperature-controlled tanks and a cooling room. A sorting table is already functioning, paramount to success in 2023, along with cooler fermentations of white grape varieties. De Iulis Pepe comments, “Global warming is hurting whites more than reds; they don't have the same natural defense to the heat.” As I mentioned last year, De Iulis Pepe is bringing natural shading to new plantings by intermixing and surrounding vines with trees, taking a long-term view about what will be left for future generations. She is serious and open-minded about her craft, which is humbling and a breath of fresh air. As for the wines, each year, they display sheer focus and clarity. During my visits, I taste all the upcoming vintages from tank and bottle, followed by older vintages from the cellar. Chiara De Iulis Pepe explains that she will continue the library program here, placing 16,000 bottles away each year. This is a new day at Emidio Pepe, where both reds and whites are of the highest level.

The Pepe family has the ability to look to the future while paying respect to the past. It would be easy to continue to follow tradition and coast along on the reputation earned over the previous decades. I’ve seen it many times before, however, not at this house and not under the watch of Chiara De Iulis Pepe, Emidio Pepe’s granddaughter, head winemaker and viticulturist. Her open-minded views and willingness to learn, experiment and travel to understand the tried and true techniques of others are seldom practiced by most Italian winemakers. Ultimately, her goals are not set by what happens tomorrow or a year from now but by what will happen in five to twenty years. Because of this, she has delved into biodynamics and biodiversity and thought deeply about how the Pepe family will deal with climate change and maintain the respect that her grandfather earned for them over decades.

For Chiara De Iulis Pepe, her primary concern is how the world will see these changes and the results in the wine. First and foremost, let me assure readers that De Iulis Pepe is not overhauling the style. Instead, she is fine-tuning it by implementing changes in the vineyards that Emidio Pepe might have adopted himself if he was still overseeing the production. What do these changes include? First, a drastic reduction in tilling, down to no-tilling at all, along with the use of cover crops, without mowing, but instead bending them down between the rows. Also, new vineyards are being planted with massal selection, using pergola training, and interplanting vines with trees. De Iulis Pepe explained that the benefits of pergola are shading, but with the changes in climate, she wants to introduce more shading to protect the vines from the morning and afternoon sun. One location, alongside the old vines of the Branella vineyard, was planted surrounded by forty trees, which will be brought up to sixty trees over time. Another site was planted with a row of olive trees intersecting the vineyard. As for the old vines, a new system has been implemented to bring a new shoot up from the base of the older roots, which will slowly grow into a new trunk that maintains the genetic material from the original mother vine and can replace it when the time comes. As for the wines, consumers will now be presented with two old vine selections from each vintage, a Vecchie Vigne Casa Pepe and a Vecchie Vigne Branella. This distinction was not made in the past, even though these two vineyards are drastically different. During this recent visit, I tasted the 2020s, recently bottled 2021s and the 2022s from cement, and I must say, the future is very bright. This is a new day for Emidio Pepe that mixes tradition with progression in a way that I’m very excited about.

For a more in-depth look at Emidio Pepe, check out my article, Decoding Emidio Pepe: 13 Vintages of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Vecchie Vigne, from October 2022.