Montepulciano: Panel tasting results

Jason Millar, Sara Bachiorri and Bruno Besa tasted 105 wines with 2 Outstanding and 32 Highly recommended.

Montepulciano: Panel tasting scores

105 wines tasted

Exceptional 0

Outstanding 2

Highly recommended 32

Recommended 60

Commended 8

Fair 2

Poor 2

Entry criteria: producers and UK agents were invited to submit their current-release vintages of Montepulciano red wines, with a minimum retail price of £9.99 or US$12

A staple of pizzerias across the land, Montepulciano is a grape variety that everyone knows but few love. Despite being the second most-planted red grape in Italy, it has struggled to be taken as anything other than good-value ‘house wine’.

This panel tasting focused on Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and showed encouraging signs of progress in recent vintages. It also made it clear that picking a premium Montepulciano can be a lottery, with little evident territorial definition and the range of styles wide.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores from the Montepulciano panel tasting

First, let us say that there is real personality in the Montepulciano variety, with its bold fruit, modest acidity and structuring tannins. The grape’s flavour profile ranges from tangy raspberry and blueberry to ripe dark cherry and fresh blackberry in warmer sites, sometimes interwoven with appealing herbal, spice and liquorice notes. It can support bottle ageing, but all of the judges felt, as Sara Bachiorri stated, that the ‘wines with fruit at the forefront were the best’.

Oak per se was not a problem for the judges: our top-scoring wine spent 18 months in barrique. Oak was only criticised when its use was clumsy and wines did not have the concentration or quality of fruit to properly integrate and absorb the wood. Unfortunately, this was widespread.

In fact, some of the most pleasurable wines had little or no oak. One of our favourites, Tenuta i Fauri’s Ottobre Rosso 2021, didn’t see a single stave, with nine months in concrete and time in bottle before release. Around one third of our Highly Recommended wines were aged without oak, and many more spent only a relatively short period in oak. As Bruno Besa remarked: ‘Montepulciano is versatile enough to take all sorts of winemaking styles, although producers should definitely move away from over-extracted, wood-driven styles.’

There were exciting indications that more innovative winemaking is taking place under a new generation of small growers. Semicarbonic maceration and whole-bunch fermentation were features of some of the higher-scoring wines As Bachiorri remarked: ‘I’d love to see more experimentation to tame the tannins and elevate the bright, wild fruit character of Montepulciano.’

See all the wines from the Montepulciano panel tasting

Having said that, cellar work will only take producers so far. There is more to be done in the vineyards to gain understanding of Montepulciano at the site-specific level – work that has not historically been valued in an area dominated by cooperatives and region-wide blends.

Changes from the 2023 vintage to introduce a Superiore level and consolidate myriad IGTs into one Terre d’Abruzzo classification should help the better wines stand out from the mass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo DOC, which covers the entire region. But currently, with wines from the Riserva DOC classification in this tasting scoring only marginally higher on average than the regular DOC designation, and Colline Teramane DOCG only marginally higher than Riserva, the value proposition for wine drinkers is questionable. Besa was frank: ‘I believe the DOC, DOCG and Riserva designations have little effect on quality or commercial appeal.’

So what to do? Our advice is to seek out the rapidly improving, good-value wines from smaller growers and not to underestimate how enjoyable wines that have been aged with little or no oak can be. In fact, they were among the best.

Montepulciano panel tasting scores

Wines were tasted blind

The judges

Jason Millar is a freelance wine writer, consultant, judge and communicator, with a focus on South Africa and Italy. He was formerly buyer and director at retailer Theatre of Wine, and in 2016 was the top WSET Diploma graduate worldwide.

Sara Bachiorri is in the buying team at merchant WoodWinters. A DWWA judge, she was formerly head sommelier at The Glasshouse in Kew then Chez Bruce in London, followed by a stint at Italian specialist merchant FortyFive10°.

Bruno Besa is founder and managing director of specialist wine importer Astrum Wine Cellars. A DWWA judge, he is originally from Friuli in northeast Italy, and was formerly a sommelier at the Dorchester Collection in London.

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