Valentini and Emidio Pepe, whom the wine writer Matt Kramer once called Abruzzo’s “resident eccentric geniuses,” are still making exceptional wines. They both employed highly idiosyncratic and, in the case of Valentini, secretive methods to make complex, long-lived wines.
“Valentini and Pepe were like tillers and anchors of the region,” Mr. Cirelli said.
Valentini, now run by Francesco Valentini, son of Edoardo, who died in 2006, maintains its secretive distance from the hurly-burly of the wine industry. But Emidio Pepe, now 90, met me in November in Torano Nuovo, in the northern reaches of Abruzzo near Le Marche. Mr. Pepe was a forward-thinking, experimental farmer whose first vintage was in 1964. He bought land when he could, generally unplanted, so he could put in genetically diverse, massal selection vines rather than the clones that were popular.
His granddaughter Chiara, 30, has recently taken over management of viticulture and winemaking and continues with the estate’s farsighted approach. The Pepes farm biodynamically, and Ms. Pepe is moving toward eliminating tilling to minimize carbon emissions. Like so many farmers she is battling the effects of climate change, taking steps to prolong ripening and cope with increases in heat, wind and extreme weather.
“We’re fighting the compression that global warming imposes on our growing cycle,” she said.
Ms. Pepe has made some changes in the cellar, too. Since 2020, she’s made single-vineyard wines of two oldest parcels of montepulciano. One, a 2020 Casa Pepe, was closed up tight, far too young to enjoy, evidence of why Pepe wines benefit from long aging.
