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Azienda Agricola Pepe Emidio
Hand-made Montepulciano from Torano Nuovo: destemmed by hand, aged in concrete, never filtered. Earthy, cherry-deep and built for decades. Current vintages start near £60; the 1979 library vintage costs £560.
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Drinkers logging this wine on Vivino mention earthy, leathery notes more than any fruit. Young bottles lead with cherry and plum; give it ten years and the graphite and forest-floor side takes over.
Earth comes before fruit. Drinkers logging the wine on Vivino mention leather, earth and mushroom more than any fruit note, with cherry and plum next. Young bottles are fresher; graphite and dried leaves arrive with about ten years in bottle.
Violet
Cherry
Plum
Tobacco
Forest Floor
Leather
Black pepper
LiquoriceAustere and compact rather than plush. Bright acidity and firm, sculpted tannin carry the fruit: the estate destems every bunch by hand over a net, so bitter stem tannin never reaches the must. There is no oak at all. The wine spends 24 months in the same concrete tanks the family installed in 1964.
Long, savoury and a little wild, closing on liquorice, black pepper and a mineral edge from clay and limestone soils. Torano Nuovo sits where Adriatic air meets cold streams off the Gran Sasso.
A benchmark natural red: 4.3 from nearly two thousand Vivino ratings, with earthy, leathery notes leading the crowd's descriptions. It is a far wilder style than soft supermarket Montepulciano. Try the 2022 or 2023 first, then follow the estate's lead and wait: they hold vintages up to 20 years before release.
Five UK-facing listings cover four vintages. The 2022 and 2023 sit between £60 and £89, the warm 2015 is £156, and Hedonism holds a single bottle of the 1979 at £560. The estate hand-decants and re-corks vintages that old before release.
The scores below describe a £60-plus natural red built for the cellar. It shines with food and rewards patient buyers, but it is a poor fit for everyday drinking or a first bottle of Montepulciano.
Unfiltered, high-acid and concrete-raised; the estate itself holds vintages up to 20 years, and 1974 and 1983 still rank among Italy's great old reds.
High acidity, firm tannin and medium body make it a food red by design; drinker matches lead with beef, veal, pork and pasta.
A famous estate making about 80,000 bottles a year from 20 hectares; a library release like the 1979 turns a dinner into an event.
There is no fair market average for a wine like this, so the score is an editorial call. £60 to £89 buys a reference Italian natural red, five to nine times the £7 to £12 of a standard supermarket Montepulciano d'Abruzzo.
Earthy, austere and sometimes wild: a much harder first Montepulciano than the soft supermarket style most buyers know.
A £60-plus wine that wants a decanter, slow food and attention; the price band alone rules out weeknight duty.
Scoring is rule-based and deterministic. The model and weightings are documented in our Wine Fit Score methodology.
A compact view of what the Montepulciano d'Abruzzo denomination actually requires, and how this bottle sits inside it. Pulled from the official Italian disciplinare.
Pepe's wine follows the season more than most. 2015 was warm and generous, 2022 a drought year that stayed fresh, and 2023 was cut hard by downy mildew across Abruzzo. Vintages older than 20 years are re-checked bottle by bottle before release.
Downy mildew tore through Abruzzo and cut yields drastically, up to 80 percent in the worst spots. Fruit that survived the warm summer came in concentrated; a year that rewarded careful, hands-on growers.
A drought summer, yet the chart finds the wines surprisingly fresh, without the heaviness of hot years like 2017. Young by Pepe's standards: the estate now waits up to 20 years before decanting a vintage.
A warm, generous five-star season across Abruzzo that gave fleshy, approachable wines. A decade on, the leathery, earthy side drinkers report is starting to show over the ripe cherry.
The regional chart calls 1979 superb: complex, deep and savoury. Pepe held it in the cellar for decades. Bottles this old are hand-decanted, topped up and re-corked at the estate, with the check year printed on the cork.
Downy mildew tore through Abruzzo and cut yields drastically, up to 80 percent in the worst spots. Fruit that survived the warm summer came in concentrated; a year that rewarded careful, hands-on growers.
Drink-now / hold guidance reflects general style cues for this wine, not a forecast for a specific bottle. Where vintage-level editorial notes exist, they appear above.
Emidio Pepe made his first vintage at Torano Nuovo in 1964 and the family still works the same way: hands, concrete and time. Three generations on, Sofia Pepe and Chiara De Iulis Pepe make the wine, and the 1974 and 1983 are still counted among Italy's great old reds.
Italian wine law sorts bottles into a pyramid. DOCG sits at the top: tightly drawn boundaries, prescribed grapes, mandatory ageing, government tasting before release. DOC is the same idea with looser thresholds. IGT (Indicazione Geografica Tipica) is broader still, requiring only that 85% of the grapes come from the named territory.
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo is in the DOC tier. That is not a quality verdict, it is a description of how much freedom the producer has at vinification and ageing.
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo falls within Abruzzo, covering Abruzzo: hill vineyards across Chieti, Pescara, Teramo and L'Aquila provinces. The denomination is further divided into 9 sub-zones.
Winery
Torano Nuovo
Made at Azienda Agricola Pepe Emidio, Torano Nuovo. Directions
Two people push each load of grapes across a net so the stems never break, and no machine has touched the wine since 1964. At 20 hectares, labour like this is the biggest cost in the bottle.
The estate now waits up to 20 years before hand-decanting a library vintage for sale. Money sits in resting bottles instead of the bank, and the £560 Hedonism asks for the 1979 is largely that patience.
About 80,000 bottles a year across the whole range, farmed without chemicals even in 2023, when downy mildew cost parts of Abruzzo up to 80 percent of the crop.
The wine ages in the same concrete tanks Emidio installed in 1964. There is no yearly barrel bill, one reason the current vintage stays near £60 rather than £100 and up.
Duty on a 13 percent bottle has been £2.99 since February 2026, and VAT adds a sixth of the shelf price: about £15 of the £70.61 the 2023 costs is tax.
Dishes that go with this wine
This is an austere, high-acid Montepulciano, so it wants fat and slow-cooked meat. The crowd agrees: beef, veal, pork and pasta lead the Vivino matches, and arrosticini are grilled a few miles from the vines.
The wine's bright acidity slices through slow-cooked fat, and its firm tannin needs the protein of braised beef to soften. The crowd's top matches are beef and pasta, and Italian merchants name pasta Bolognese in particular.
Try with: Brasato al Barolo · Spezzatino di pecora · Ragu alla bolognese · More pairings →
Charred, fatty lamb is the wine's home table: arrosticini are grilled a few miles from Pepe's vines at Torano Nuovo. Grill char and lamb fat round off the sculpted tannin the hand-destemmed grapes give.
Try with: Arrosticini · Fiorentina steak · Agnello Cacio e Ova · More pairings →
Tomato sauce and this Montepulciano run on the same bright acidity, so neither tastes sour next to the other. Italian merchants list tomato-based pasta among its classic matches.
Try with: Pasta alla Norma · Lasagna · More pairings →
Salty aged cheese meets the wine's medium body without crushing it, and the fat coats its firm tannin. Aged cheese is one of the pairings Italian merchants name for the 2022.
Try with: Pecorino sardo e pan carasau · Frico · More pairings →
The leather and mushroom notes drinkers report on Vivino sit next to truffle flavours like family. An earthy wine and an earthy plate lift each other.
Try with: Tagliatelle al tartufo di Acqualagna · Tajarin al Tartufo · More pairings →
Chilli heat makes the firm tannin taste harsh and metallic, and raw fish is flattened by the wine's wild, earthy weight. Save it for the table it was made for: slow-cooked meat.
Skip with: Vindaloo · Sichuan hot pot · Sushi · Oysters · Pairing guide →
The estate cellars its wine unfiltered for decades, then hand-decants any vintage older than 20 years into a fresh bottle before sale. The decantation year is printed on the cork, so you can see when your bottle was last checked.
Best in the years above; holds without falling over either side.
A short splash decant softens the first-pour edge and opens the aromatics.
Unfiltered, high-acid and concrete-raised; the estate itself holds vintages up to 20 years, and 1974 and 1983 still rank among Italy's great old reds.
£84.90 is the lowest tracked offer for the current vintage and we have no signal of further discounting.
Read directly from each retailer’s public product page once a day. Last refresh: 13 Sep 2026, 00:06 BST. We do not hold stock and we do not accept payment for placement.
Confidence · HighDrawn from what drinkers consistently report on Vivino and Wine-Searcher, summarised in our own words. A crowd read across many tasters, not a single critic.
Confidence · MediumFrom the official Italian disciplinare for this denomination, cross-checked against the Ministry of Agriculture register.
Confidence · HighOur reading of the price, drawn from the disciplinare, public UK duty rates, and typical landed-cost benchmarks. Not a quote from the producer or a retailer.
Confidence · MediumStyle guidance for this kind of wine at this price point. Treat it as advice, not a forecast for the bottle in your hand.
Confidence · MediumEverything is done by hand, the way the family started in 1964. Grapes are destemmed over a net by two people, ferment on wild yeasts in concrete tanks, and the wine is never filtered. No chemicals are used in the vineyard, even in hard years.
Decades. The estate itself waits up to 20 years before opening a vintage for release, and 1974 and 1983 still rank among Italy's greatest old reds. Recent vintages like 2022 should improve into the late 2030s.
That is the decantation year. Any vintage older than 20 years is opened at the estate, hand-decanted off its sediment, topped up from a second bottle of the same wine and re-corked. The printed date tells you when that check happened.
Yes, and it was natural long before the word existed. The farming uses only copper, sulphur and biodynamic preparations, the ferment is wild, and nothing is fined or filtered. Expect earthy, leathery notes and some bottle-to-bottle variation.
The 2022, about £60, is the friendly entry: a drought year that stayed fresh. The 2015 at £156 is a five-star season with ten years of age. The 1979, £560 at Hedonism, suits a landmark occasion; the estate hand-decants and re-corks vintages that old before release.
Cellar-cool: Italian merchants suggest between 16 and 20C rather than warm room temperature. Give it air: an hour in a decanter for young vintages, and a gentle pour off the sediment for very old bottles.
4 retailers
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo
4 retailers
£12.90
3 retailers
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo
3 retailers
£21.00
2 retailers
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo
2 retailers
£11.90
2 retailers
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo
2 retailers
£15.00
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