2025 Tenuta Tre Gemme Terroir Line Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo

Cerasuolo confuses people. It looks too dark for a rosé and too pale for a red. That's deliberate — cerasa means cherry, and the colour is the point rather than an accident.

Tenuta Tre Gemme is seventy hectares in the hills above Pescara, and it belonged to Rocco Perrucci. Catignano called him Don Rocco. He turned the family land into a proper business in the early 1960s, and the cellar he built still sits at the centre of it. The way his daughters tell it, his vineyards gave work to nearly every family in the village. Almost all of the wine left in bulk, though, so nobody outside Catignano ever knew whose it was. Carla and Anna took the place over in 2018 and rebuilt the cellar through 2020 and 2021. The best of it now goes out under the family name.

This one is made from Montepulciano, the same grape as the region's reds, off twenty-year-old vines at 450 metres above Civitaquana. The whole wine then comes down to one decision. The juice sits on the skins for about twelve hours at six degrees, cold enough to take the colour and the cherry fruit without dragging tannin along with it. Then steel, then bottle.

Drink it cold and drink it with lunch. It handles grilled fish, pizza and salumi without any trouble.