Emidio Pepe is 60! This celebrated winery from the Abruzzo region in Italy has been on a celebratory tour to tell customers and journalists more about what makes them tick. And leading this tour is the dynamic Chiara Pepe (above), who is just 29 years old but is now running the family business. ‘We want to share our vision for the present and the future,’ says Chiara: ‘what we are working on today and what we are planning for the future.’

Although the family company began making wine in 1899, the current era began in 1964 when Emidio Pepe, Chiara’s grandfather, took over in 1964. ‘He started with a small parcel in front of the house,’ she says. ‘Grandfather was very good at grafting so on the parcels that he had the pleasure of taking on, he was grafting them on site. This is a very old technique of planting vineyards: nurseries weren’t there so farmers had to do the work on their own. This allowed us to have an incredible mixture of genetics of Montepulciano, which has been interesting to dig deeper into. Every time we under this old pergola close to harvest time we were seeing that all the leaves were just a little different, and the bunches were a bit different. Then we’d send material for DNA testing and it would come back as Montepulciano. Grandfather, back in the day, had been following different parcels of Montepulciano, he took samples from them and then grafted them onto his vineyards.’

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