You know when you taste a wine and ‘Hallelujah’ from Handel’s Messiah starts playing somewhere in the background?
It doesn’t happen often, but it definitely did the other day when I sipped Villa Verde Montepulciano d ’Abruzzo for the first time.
It’s an Italian wine from Morrisons, at £6, if you didn’t get all that from the headline.
At the time, I thought Handel’s Messiah must just be my inner backing track, but now I think about it, there was an actual pianist playing a grand piano right next to me the whole time.
That actually makes more sense, I remember he also had a go at Uptown Girl and most of Billy Joel’s back catalogue. He must have been doing requests.
While that may explain my Hallelujah moment, not even Piano Man and his tinkly fingers could shed any light on how you get such great value for money at £6.
See, for anything around £5, you don’t expect a lot from a wine, do you? Fruit, some oak, maybe a couple of stray tannins if you’re lucky and you can usually call it a day after that.
Villa Verde Montepulciano d’Abruzzo kicks that rule of thumb straight to the curb, with a decent amount of complexity it gives sour cherry, dried prune and dried herb flavours like a wine double or even two and a half times the price.
In fact, so shook was I by the wine, that I even spoke to the Morrisons Chief Wine Buyer about it, a dynamo of a woman called Emma Jenkinson. She told me it’s been in the range for a while now, and as someone who prides themselves on being able to sniff out a wine puncher-above-its-weighter a mile away, how has this never been on my radar?
Emma even explained that they were recently looking at refreshing the label but decided not to. Thank Merlin’s beard they didn’t, let’s not tamper with anything classic looking that stands out from the whackier labels on the shelf, shall we? If it ain’t broke, well, nor will you be after buying a bottle.
Speaking of the price, how does £6 happen though? Especially when, along with Chianti, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is probably one of Italy’s most famous wines?
Here’s how. It’s produced by a wine coop called Citri Vini Soc, Abruzzo’s largest winegrowing community made up of around 5,000 family-run vineyards. They are divided up into nine wineries, 6,000 hectares of vineyards, three production lines and over 19 oenologists and agronomists taking care of the wines and vines. It’s production on a vast scale and as we all know, economies of scale keep the price down.
To put things into perspective, they produced 18 million bottles of wine last year.
Doesn’t that impact negatively on the quality though? Nope, not when Citra has been voted among the world’s top 20 wineries by Wine Spectator Magazine. They’re known for producing a lot of wine, to a high standard. One of the grapes Citri specialise in is Montepulciano, not to be confused by the place in Tuscany.
Abruzzo is the region here, located on the eastern side of Italy’s calf muscle on the Adriatic coast. Just as well the wine is 100% Montepulciano then, as it’s known to be Italy’s best bargain red grape that punches deliciously above its weight.
I mean, not always, some of their low-end wines are shockers if I’m honest, but on the plus side, whatever the quality, it is known to be the best pizza pairing partner wine, and why not?
In this case, the wine is a good’un so you can make it a fancy one, something like Pizza Pilgrims or Crisp. Hallelujah indeed.
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