Exhibiting Regions

Whether you call it Puglia or Apulia, this region is a long story--about 220 miles long, a gleaming sun-drenched coast with the Adriatic Sea on one side and Homer’s wine-dark Ionian on the other, scattered with fishing villages and ancient harbors, and glorious cathedrals with their feet in the sea. Inland, it’s not just a long story but also a flat one, its expansive plateau growing wheat and the region’s impossibly grand olive trees. And did I mention the dry-stone houses called trulli, with their conical roofs and hex signs?

Apulia is a long story, too, of wine in tsunamic quantities—too much wine, actually—spilling from too many co-operatives. Apulia’s wine was a mere commodity. Indeed, Apulia is only Italy’s seventh-largest region but it has its second-largest vineyard and ranks second in production. No one thought enough of his wine to bottle it until 1929; instead it went into tankers and demijohns. Even now the DOC portion of Apulia’s wine is no more than a single-digit percentage.

Declining demand for bulk wine has been shaking the region for some time now, and change is afoot. Young people inheriting family plots are not always content to join the co-operative wineries that have ruled here for so long. They want to make their own wine with their one name on the label. Some well-established growers have dropped out of the co-ops to join them. Co-operatives, here as elsewhere in the wine world, have been changing too. They’re now not so eager to take grapes grown for quantity rather than quality and let the pips fall where they may. They’re raising quality overall or making members’ grapes into individual wines.

Apulia, it seems, has the will, and it also has the climate—steady enough to minimize vintage variation—and the grapes to build on. Sixty percent of the production is red (and there are some characterful rosés, too), Big Three: Uva di Troia, Primitivo and Negroamaro. Not that a little looking won’t find others, such as Susumaniello, Notar Domenico, Aleatico and Ottavianello. Among the whites are more obscurities: Impigno, Verdeca (often stiffened with Chardonnay), Asprinio, Pampanuto and, as with the reds, many more.

Apulia’s Deep South, the Boot’s spiked heel, as it were, is the Salento, long the lonely leader in quality. No more, as improvements flow from La Capitanata’s plain and Faunia’s hills in the north and the central Terra di Bari and Le Murge, with the Trulli District and the Itria Valley.

All in all the forecast is “clearing, with a chance of fame.”

Regional Appellations:

DOC
Aleatico di Puglia
Alezio
Brindisi
Cacc'e mmitte di Lucera
Castel del Monte
Copertino
Galatina
Gioia del Colle
Gravina
Leverano
Lizzano
Locorotondo
Martina or Martina Franca
Matino
Moscato di Trani
Nardò
Orta Nova
Ostuni
Primitivo di Manduria
Rosso Barletta
Rosso Canosa or Canasium
Rosso di Cerignola
Salice Salentino
San Severo
Squinzano

IGT

Daunia
Murgia
Puglia
Salento
Tarantino
Valle d'Itria